Name: SIS Book Launch: Corruption Plots
Start: 2023-09-27T15:00:00-04:00
End: 2023-09-27T16:30:00-04:00
Location: Abramson Family Founders Room, American University School of International Service

SIS Book Launch: Corruption Plots

American University’s School of International Service (SIS) is a top-10 school of international affairs located in Washington, D.C. Since our founding in 1957, we have answered President Dwight D. Eisenhower's call to prepare students of international affairs to "wage peace." We do so because we believe the world needs leaders who are ready to serve.SIS is guided by 120 full-time faculty. Our world-renowned faculty — leading political scientists, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, demographers, geographers, historians, and experts in international development, global health, communications, energy, and the environment — produce transformational research and prepare more than 3,000 graduate and undergraduate students for global careers in government, nonprofits, and business.Thoughtful and aspirational, with wide-ranging backgrounds and experience, our students take advantage of Washington's wealth of resources and professional opportunities, and our active international network of more than 20,000 alumni. Our graduates are prepared to combine knowledge and practice and to serve the global community as emerging leaders, waging peace and building understanding in our world.

Office of Research, School of International Service, American University

Join us at AU for a discussion of "Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City"

Abramson Family Founders Room, American University School of International Service

<h1>AU SIS invites you to a book discussion for Professor Malini Ranganathan and co-author David L. Pike&#x27;s book</h1><h1></h1><h1><em>Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics from the Late Capitalist City</em></h1><h1></h1><h3>Wednesday, September 27, 2023</h3><h3>3:00 PM – 4:30 PM EST</h3><h3>A﻿bramson Family Founders Room, American University School of International Service</h3><h3></h3><h3></h3><h3>M﻿oderated by:</h3><h3><strong>Lindsey Green-Simms</strong>, Professor and Chair of the Department of Literature,  American University</h3><h3></h3><h3>W﻿ith:</h3><h3>(Co-Author)<strong> D﻿avid L. Pike</strong>, Professor of Literature, American University</h3><h3><strong>Samantha Agarwal</strong>, Postdoctoral Fellow, American University</h3><h3></h3><h2>A﻿bout the book:</h2><p>Corruption Plots illuminates how corruption is fundamental to global storytelling about how states and elites abuse entrusted power in late capitalism. The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic stories from cities around the world, Malini Ranganathan, David L. Pike, and Sapana Doshi pay close attention to the racial, caste, class, and gender locations of the narrators, spaces, and publics imagined to be harmed by corruption.</p><p>Corruption Plots demonstrates how corruption talk is leveraged to make sense of unequal spatial change and used opportunistically by those who are themselves implicated in wrongdoing. Offering a wide-ranging analysis of urban worlds, the authors reveal the ethical, spatial, and political stakes of storytelling and how vital it is to examine the corruption plot in all its contradictions.</p><p></p><p></p><h2>A﻿bout the authors:</h2><p><strong>Malini Ranganathan</strong> is Associate Professor in the School of International Service at American University and a political ecologist and geographer by training. Most broadly, she is a scholar of urban environmental justice interested in the political economy of land, labor, and ecology in the capitalist city. She researches environmental casteism and environmental racism in urban contexts, what she refers to as &quot;environmental unfreedoms.&quot; Specifically, she studies how caste and racial histories shape segregated housing and property relations, water and sanitation access, and flood and climate vulnerability. She works on both India and the U.S. She is currently working on a book, <em>The Urbanization of Caste Power: Land, Labor, and Environmental Justice Politics in Bengaluru</em> which re-examines Bengaluru through the analytic of caste power, tracing the historical and contemporary production of housing, labor, and flooding and other ecological inequities. In 2023, Dr. Ranganathan was recognized with the Harold M. Rose Award for Antiracism Research and Practice from the American Association of Geographers. </p><p><strong>David L. Pike</strong> has taught in American University&#x27;s Department of Literature since 1995. His most recent book is <em>After the End: Cold War Culture and Apocalyptic Imaginations in the 21st Century</em>, forthcoming from Manchester UP. He is the author of <em>Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades</em> (Oxford UP, 2021), <em>Canadian Cinema since the 1980s: At the Heart of the World</em> (U of Toronto P, 2012);  <em>Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture</em>, 1800–2001 (Cornell UP, 2007); <em>Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London</em> 1800–1945 (Cornell UP); <em>Passage through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds</em> (Cornell UP), recipient of the 1997 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities from the Council of Graduate Schools and a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 1997; and articles on medieval literature, modernism, film, neo-Victorianism, subterranea, urban fantasy, global urban culture, slum imaginaries, and Paris and London. </p><p><strong>Sapana Doshi</strong> is Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. She has published on urban and environmental politics in journals such as Antipode; Annals of the American Association of Geographers; International Journal of Urban and Regional Research; and Geopolitics.</p><p></p><h2>A﻿bout the panelists</h2><p><strong>Lindsey Green-Simms</strong>’ teaching and research focuses on film and literature from the Global South, with a particular emphasis on African cultural production. Professor Green-Simms&#x27; most recent book, <em>Queer African Cinemas</em> (Duke University Press, 2022), discusses LGBT African art films and popular melodramas in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Green-Simms argues that these films not only record the fear, anxiety, and vulnerability many queer Africans experience; they highlight how queer African cinematic practices contribute to imagining new hopes and possibilities and highlight potentials for queer life-building and survival. Professor Green-Simms’ first book, <em>Postcolonial Automobility: Cars Cultural in West Africa</em> (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), examines how the contradictions of globalization, modernity, and consumer culture are embedded in the commodity of the automobile. Postcolonial Automobility has been awarded the African Literature Association First Book Prize as well as the American Comparative Literature Association Helen Tartar Book Subvention Award.</p><p><strong>Samantha Agarwal</strong> is a Changemaker Postdoctoral Fellow at American University. Her interests broadly fall within the fields of political economy of race and ethnicity, political sociology, and global sociology. In her recent work, she examines the reproduction of social inequalities and politics based on caste in contemporary India. Her dissertation, supported by fellowships from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Social Science Research Council, and the Johns Hopkins School of Arts and Sciences, asks: Why have India’s formerly “untouchable” castes (Dalits) begun supporting a rightwing ethnonationalist movement led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—a movement disproportionately comprised of upper-caste followers who have traditionally stigmatized Dalits? Her dissertation draws on 200 interviews, nine months of ethnography, an extensive household survey, and archival research in Kerala; in it, she argues that explaining Dalit defection from left to right requires attention to the limits of unidimensional attempts to address multidimensional inequalities. She is currently finishing her PhD in the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University.</p>

Our {communityGuidelinesLink} describe the sort of content we prohibit on Eventbrite. If you suspect an event may be in violation, you can report it to us so we can investigate.

To report other categories of prohibited or illegal content, submit {link}

SIS Book Launch: Corruption Plots

More events from Office of Research, School of International Service, American University

Follow organizers to get events picked for you

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all events in Washington and filter by date, category, and more to find the perfect fit.

SIS Book Launch: Corruption Plots

More events from Office of Research, School of International Service, American University

Follow organizers to get events picked for you

You might also like...

Browse more events with different dates, prices, and formats to find your next great experience.

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all events in Washington and filter by date, category, and more to find the perfect fit.