Book: Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City
Dr. Malini Rangathan is an Associate Professor in the School of International Service at AU. With a background in political ecology and geography, she researches urban environmental justice and studies the economic and political drivers of environmental racism and environmental casteism. Particularly, she studies how caste and race have shaped water and sanitation access, climate vulnerability, and segregated housing.
Her research, both on India and the U.S, has been published in countless journals, including Environmental Justice, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Urban Geography. Dr. Rangathan is currently writing The Urbanization of Caste Power: Land, Labor, and Environmental Politics in Bengaluru, and published Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics in the Late Capitalist City (Cornell Press, 2023) earlier this year.
Her aforementioned book, Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics in the Late Capitalist City (Cornell Press, 2023), written alongside David L. Pike, and Sapana Doshi, emphasizes how corruption is fundamental to how states and elites abuse power. The book dives into the dynamics of late capitalist cities, analyzing corruption through narratives, ethics, and public engagement. In doing so, Dr. Rangathan explains how corruption is not simply a matter of economic or political misconduct, but a complex social and moral phenomenon embedded in capitalism. Leveraging ethnography in Mumbai and Bengaluru and various international stories, she offers a wide-ranged exploration of corruption, and how “corruption talk” is used to make sense of unequal spatial change.
You can find the book here: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501768750/corruption-plots/#bookTabs=1
