Malini Ranganathan is Associate Professor in the School of International Service at American University, and a political ecologist and geographer by training. She is a faculty affiliate of three university centers, and is also a fellow at the progressive climate policy think tank, the Climate and Community Institute. Most broadly, she is a scholar of environmental justice, who studies the political economy of land, labor, and ecology in the context of capitalist development. She works primarily on the cities of Bangalore and Washington, D.C., focusing on what she terms "environmental unfreedoms." Specifically, she studies how colonial, caste, and racial histories shape housing and land rights, labor politics, and climate and water inequities. She is currently working on two books. The first, The Urbanization of Caste Power: Land, Labor, and Environmental Politics in Bengaluru, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. It re-examines the city of Bengaluru through the analytic of caste power, tracing the historical and contemporary production of land dispossession, labor exploitation, and environmental casteism. Through activist narratives and translations of a Kannada-language slum magazine, it also discusses the forms of slum, legal, and union resistance that have challenged these. The second is The Climate of Labor Justice: Planetary Ecologies of Racial Capitalism, Caste, and Freedom. Training our attention on southern India and the Indian Ocean World and migratory connections between the two regions, the book argues that we rethink the climate crisis as inseparable from a labor crisis stretching from the colonial to contemporary era. It draws on Asian diasporic labor history to show that idioms of freedom, dignity, and self-respect can shape a left, internationalist pro-labor climate justice movement. She is co-author of Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (Cornell Press, 2023, Yoda Press 2024), winner of the 2024 Anthony Leeds book prize awarded by the Critical Urban Anthropology Association. The book weaves together ethnographic and literary analysis to argue, against the grain, that "corruption talk" serves as a means for various publics to narrate unequal urban development. It is deployed beyond narrow legal definitions to condemn land grabs, ecologically-risky development, and housing evictions perpetrated by crony capitalists, even as it is used opportunistically to deflect blame onto marginalized others. She is also co-editor of Rethinking Difference in India as Racialization: Caste, Tribe, and Hindu Nationalism in Transnational Perspective. Finally, Dr. Ranganathan investigates environmental unfreedoms and climate justice in American cities. Her work on abolitionist climate justice in Washington, D.C. was featured on NPR. She is part of two AU research teams: one that was awarded a National Science Foundation grant for RECIPES, a project that promotes sustainable food systems, and a second investigating Climate Story Gaps in Washington, D.C. For an overview of her transnational approach to research and teaching, stream this podcast. In 2023, Dr Ranganathan was recognized with the Harold M. Rose Award for Antiracism Research and Practice from the American Association of Geographers. In 2020 and 2021 she won the SIS and university-wide awards respectively for Outstanding Contributions to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. In 2022 she won the AU Morton-Bender Prize for achievements at the associate professor level. She won an American Council of Learned Societies-Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant in 2017-2019. Please visit her website to learn more about her research.

Her research is published in EP:D (Society and Space), Environmental Justice, Ethnic and Racial Studies, The Lancet - Global Health, The Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Progress in Human Geography, Environment and Planning: A (Economy and Society), Capitalism Nature Socialism, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Geography, and Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, among other journals. Her scholarship also appears in public venues such as e-Flux Architecture, Society and Space, and Black Perspectives. She serves on the editorial boards of Antipode, The Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and Environment and Planning: D (Society and Space). Previously, Dr Ranganathan was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and has had research positions at TERI in New Delhi, ENDA-Tiers Monde in Dakar, and the Asian Development Bank in Manila. At SIS, Dr Ranganathan teaches SISU 250 (Environmental Sustainability and Global Health), SISU 349 (Global Cities, Justice, and the Environment), and SIS 620 (Environmental Justice).