SIS Professor Malini Ranganathan has been awarded a prestigious fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) to carry out her research project, “A Critical Legal Geography of Caste, Land, and the Commons in Bengaluru,” In India. The fellowship, one of the only ones exclusively for Indian political and cultural studies, is funded by a grant from the U.S. State Dept through the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC)." Many scholars who win this award produce some of the most influential scholarship on the region.

Dr. Ranganathan is a scholar of urban environmental justice who studies the political economy of land, labor, and ecology in the context of capitalist urbanization, primarily in the cities of Bangalore and Washington, D.C. She focuses on environmental casteism and environmental racism, what she refers to as "environmental unfreedoms." She is currently working on two books. The first, The Urbanization of Caste Power: Land, Labor, and Environmental Politics in Bengaluru, re-examines the city of Bengaluru through the analytic of caste-class power, tracing the historical and contemporary production of housing segregation, labor exploitation, and environmental injustices, and the forms of slum, legal, and union activism that have challenged these. The second, The Long Climate Crisis: Global Political Ecologies of Caste, Race, and Migration in the Indian Ocean World, argues that we rethink the climate crisis as a labor crisis wrought by heirarchies of caste, race, and environmental vulnerability.

Dr. Ranganathan is co-author of Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (Cornell Press, 2023, Yoda Press 2024) and is also co-editor of Rethinking Difference in India as Racialization: Caste, Tribe, and Hindu Nationalism in Transnational Perspective. In 2023, Dr Ranganathan was recognized with the Harold M. Rose Award for Antiracism Research and Practice from the American Association of Geographers.