ERG alum Dr. Malini Ranganathan, Associate Professor at American University, recently took time to speak with us about her new award winning book, Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics and Publics of the Late Capitalist City, and the ways ERG has shaped her work.
Can you tell me about your recent book award?
My latest book Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics and Publics of the Late Capitalist City, coauthored with David Pike and Sapana Doshi, received the Anthony Leeds Book Prize for Critical Urban Anthropology. This award recognizes a book that makes innovative methodological and theoretical contributions to the field of urban anthropology. I am a scholar, broadly speaking, of urban geography, but one who also engages with anthropology and critical development studies literature. I specialize in questions of political ecology and environmental justice, specifically the political economy of land, labor, water, and climate risk in the contemporary city. I also look at how historical racial segregation, caste based segregation, working-class histories, and state and neoliberal political economies shaped the contemporary city. As a geographer, I’m interested both in history as well as the contemporary moment. This interest in geography was fostered by the incredibly interdisciplinary degree that I got from ERG, and by my designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies.
What about this book most excites you?
Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics and Publics of the Late Capitalist City is a book that takes seriously the fact that we’re living in a world that’s growing more unequal, with the global elite increasingly taking control of the political process, especially through land and real estate manipulations. The book is set in the “city of late capitalism,” that is to say the contemporary global city everywhere. The cover of the book features a very iconic but also very nefarious real estate project. It is the golden-hued Trump towers located in Mumbai, which is the finance capital of India, under construction. In the foreground is a 30-year-old working class tenement which is slated for eviction to make way for grounds and parks associated with the Trump towers. The construction of theTrump towers themselves are completely mired in scandals and dubious deals, something that has also been reported on in the press. We put this picture on the cover because it’s emblematic of this moment of late capitalism, where real estate deals are allowed to go through with impunity in global cities, increasing the wealth divide between the haves and the have nots.
But people aren’t taking this lying down. People are actually resisting and trying to fight back, and they’re often using the label “corruption” to talk about land and real estate projects that are happening in global cities like Mumbai and Bangalore in South India, and in Sao Paulo, Lagos, and even New York and London. They’re using this vocabulary of corruption to call attention to wealth hoarding, land grabbing, evictions, and growing economic polarization. And what we argue in the book is that the ways that people are using the word corruption completely flies in the face of conventional (and narrow) definitions of corruption put forward by development finance institutions such as the World Bank or Transparency International. They often locate corruption in bureaucrats or collapse it to bribery. But this is far bigger than that. Often it isn’t bribery that ordinary people are calling attention to, but literally the hoarding of resources that can happen through entirely legal means–with or without briber. For example, slum land, or common land, or land that’s reserved for low income housing, can be suddenly surreptitiously turned over to wealthy commercial real estate interests through legal channels. It might happen through fast track clearances or through some sort of palm greasing.
What’s really fascinating for myself and the co-authors of this book—Sapana Doshi, who is also a Berkeley graduate, and David Pike, who’s my colleague at American University—is the creative deployment of corruption talk. We argue that utilization of the term corruption serves as a political narrative to call out increasing inequality in global cities. We created the book through collaborative ethnographic field work in India in 2018, supported by the Andrew Mellon American Council of Learned Societies Grant. We also drew from novels and films about the post-colonial city. Films are very good at uncovering people’s emotions, characters, and contradictory and layered personalities and their relationships with each other, as well as training a spotlight on the importance of storytelling. And what’s really at the heart of our book is how corruption becomes a very powerful narrative, as I said, to expose land mis-dealings as the major arena for capitalist accumulation.
What difference did ERG make in your research?
ERG attracts and nurtures people with a passion and fire that burns inside of you to really expose, address, and research systemic inequality–whether that is related to land, water, climate, energy, or other resources. Because ERG is a deeply ethically oriented program, I think all of my peers were thinking about power in different ways. Some of them, of course, were looking more at the quantitative aspects of energy, fuels, carbon emissions, and modeling. And some of them, especially my peers who took a lot of classes in Geography and the Department of City and Regional Planning, were interested in social theory and political economy and qualitative methods to think about inequality. That systemic ingrained, historically situated inequality drives us to think about social justice as a means to creating a more ethical, humane, and livable world. That’s the real DNA of ERG: it’s the people who are passionate about that.
Professor Isha Ray’s Water and Development class changed my life because it not only gave me a kind of theoretical vocabulary to think about the political economy of resources, but also exposure to field-based knowledge when we read how gender, class, caste, and local politics shape water access. I was also deeply shaped by Professor Dick Norgaard and Professor Gene Rochlin. They co-taught our cohort seminar, introducing us to different topics in the field of environmental thought. All data and social science research tells a story, a particular story in one way; it can hide certain things and it can reveal certain things. You have to be very cognizant of the way academic scholarship conveys particular knowledge. Finally, my doctoral advisor who was in DCRP at the time, Ananya Roy, truly believed in me and helped me to find my voice as a scholar and as an advocate for urban and environmental justice. She also changed my life and I am happy to still be in conversation with her about our mutual interests in racial exclusion and the city.
I am also very grateful for my more quantitative ERG training with John Harte and Dan Kammen, giving me fluency with environmental metrics, “back of the envelope” calculations, and environmental policymaking. I think about how certain stories are told with quantitative data and other stories may not be told, and the way numbers can be used and how they are infused with power. I also took wonderful classes in Geography with Gillian Hart and Michael Watts. For me, this whole array of classes from the social sciences to natural sciences, in and out of ERG, shaped the person I am today.
Why did you choose ERG? What made it unique for you?
It’s the community. It’s a community of very committed peers and faculty who care about each other, who care about the world, and who care about people that might be very far away. ERG consists of folks who have a wide-angle view of the world, whose views aren’t narrowly myopic and focused on a particular methodology or particular discipline. That always deeply moved me and that’s really what makes ERG unique. I think the very fact that people come often with a quantitative or science grounding, but then expand their horizons into social science, political science, social theory, history, geography, anthropology, sociology—that is something really unique about ERG. I’ll always value that expansive education because I think that it’s very original for a graduate program to give you a solid grounding in different ways of knowing, and to value all forms of knowledge and scholarship. ERG also has respect for the communities that people study. It’s that deep concern for the communities they’re studying and the ethical commitment that makes ERG original and makes me very proud to be an alum.
I also loved going camping with my ERG cohort members, seeing the beautiful redwood forests around the Bay Area, biking trips across the Golden Gate Bridge, lots and lots of dinners and meals cooked for each other. These are some of the highlights. I developed such a passion and love for hiking in the Bay Area during my time there. So all that stuff is very close to my heart.
What future projects are in the works?
One of the reasons I co-authored this book is because whether it is elections in Brazil, or big scandals in Lebanon and India, or even the way that political narrative is taking place in the United States, corruption is a big buzzword. There are entire social movements around it in India. Corruption is a term that waxes and wanes in terms of narrative and comes into the news cycle. We have an oligarchical coup happening in the White House, and we have a techno fascist rule with Musk calling the shots and dismantling the government. The irony is that they’re acting on the basis that the United States government is a “deep state” and is spending too much in all of these different ways. They have to somehow, through DOGE, make the government more efficient and cut wasteful spending. There was a whole New York Times article about how the Elon Musk and Donald Trump brigade are trying to root out corruption. What’s so crazy though—and this is what we also get in the book—is that some of those very same political and economic elites that seek to root out corruption are themselves corrupt, and are themselves indicted on corruption charges. Of course, you must have heard that Mayor Eric Adams, who is notoriously corrupt, promised Trump that he’s going to root out illegal immigrants and suddenly his corruption charges were dropped.
We’re witnessing a very sinister time. I call it the uses and abuses of corruption talk because there are uses of it—in India, for instance—that have called out land grabs and slum activists using the right to information petition, which is this transparency mechanism to look at the way land has been negotiated and turned over to private interests. So there are sort of progressive uses of it, and there are very regressive uses of it. In the conclusion of our book, we’re saying we finished the initial draft of corruption plots early in 2020 and completed revisions in September of the same year. During those months, the world turned upside down with the onset of a global pandemic, the explosion of worldwide protest against racist policing and racial inequality, and the intensification of a US presidential election, for which the global stakes could not have been higher. One constant during those chaotic months was the ubiquity of corruption talk. However, the spotlight was not on the global south, but squarely towards the United States. The headline of an April article on the first congressional stimulus bill in the New York magazine read “Trump’s entire coronavirus response is massive political corruption.” We talk about how this language seems to be very much part of political commentary and now even more so than when we wrote the conclusion. The relevance of the book is not going to go away.
Building on this notion that we’re in the moment of late capitalism, I’m really interested in thinking about climate change and labor migration at this time period as well. I received an internal grant called “Hot Labor Summer: Climate and Labor Politics in a Time of Global Right.” It’s about how in a place like India, which is also right wing at this time, it’s not so much climate denialism that you see happening, but rather climate scapegoating, where migrant laborers who are minorities—who are Muslims, who are poor, who are the caste oppressed—will settle in these flood prone areas next to lakes or near stormwater drains, and then when there’s a flood, they’ll get blamed for it, and they’ll get criminalized as having caused the flood because they’re located there. And so this deflects blame from the very kind of powerful real estate forces who are grabbing land, and it blames the poor minorities, and it also very much continues to exploit their labor and their work. And then what did the unions do? What did the activists do? That’s something that I’m looking at right now. I am also completing a book titled “The Urbanization of Caste Power: Land, Labor and Environmental Politics in India”, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
What advice do you have for prospective students? What can they expect?
Trust your unique path. I have an undergraduate degree in chemistry because I received a full tuition scholarship to major in science at Bard College. Then I worked for two years for an environment and development organization in New Delhi. When I started my master’s, I worked on energy and renewable energy for a while. Then I shifted into urban and water politics. So it wasn’t a straight line. And it’s okay if it’s not a straight line, you just have to know that each of these experiences have the potential to accrue into something that makes you a more holistic person. At times it was hard to trust my path. It seemed like other people had a clear sense of where they were going, but I figured it out along the way. And when you look back at your path, it actually all does make sense. I always tell my students who come into my office hours that my path wasn’t a straight line and that’s OK. Today, I feel I am where I want to be, doing the things I want to do–the things that bring me internal joy and a sense of being part of something larger and meaningful, despite the bleak times we are in.
Within the thematic concentration of their major, I also tell them to read widely to gain awareness and a framework for their thoughts and a legitimization to what they’re thinking through. I give them suggestions on great writing, and encourage them to develop reading lists and to cultivate a reading habit outside of their classes. A lot of the reading that I’ve done over the last 20 years is self-taught actually, and that’s essential. I also tell them that their fellow students are a great source of feedback, especially at the graduate level. Look to them as advisors, and sounding boards, and people who can give you peer review on your writing. That was super helpful for me as I was writing my PhD.
Finally, find field experience of some sort, whether it’s volunteering for a community organization or trying to do some sort of collaborative research project or actually doing field-based research. You have to figure out how to do this most ethically and democratically in the least extractive way. Doing fieldwork in rural India at the intersection of gender, poverty and energy before I started at ERG in 2003 was deeply formative. Doing years of ethnographic fieldwork on urban water and housing issues in Bangalore for my doctoral work was essential to develop my voice as an authoritative scholar. More recently, I’ve been working with activist communities and causes. I write grants with human rights lawyers and labor union activists in mind these days, and have discussions with students who are fighting caste discrimination in India, and with students who are fighting right wing repression. I think you have to take your skills and privileges and apply them to make a more emancipatory world to the extent that you can.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Dr. Malini Ranganathan (MS ‘05, PhD ‘10) is an Associate Professor at American University in Washington DC in the Department of Environment Development and Health at the School of International Service. She is also a faculty fellow in the Center for Environment, Community and Equity, the Metropolitan Policy Center, and the Anti-Racist Research and Policy Center at American University. While at ERG, Professor Ranganathan received her Master’s in Challenges and Prospects for Efficient Co-Generation in India’s Co-Operative Sugar Sector, as well as her PhD in Fluid Hegemony: A Political Ecology of Water, Market Rule, and Insurgence at Bangalore’s Frontier.