Faculty Research Fellow
Katharine Rankin (Ph.D. 1999, Cornell University) studies cities and urban planning from a background in Anthropology. She takes a commitment to participatory and community-based ethnographic approaches into the study of state and market formation—through research on infrastructure development, post-conflict and post-disaster governance, commercial gentrification and microfinance. She is author of Cultural Politics of Markets: Economic Liberalization and Social Change in Nepal (Pluto Press and University of Toronto Press 2004) and currently Principal Investigator of a research project titled Infrastructures of Democracy: State Building as Everyday Practice in Nepal’s Agrarian Districts.
Fellowship Project: Corruption and the Situated Logics of Ethical Judgment: Road Building in Nepal as a Zone of Ontological Difference
Infrastructure marks a promise for development and a call for trust—that large capital outlays will yield long-term benefit. Yet in the messy fields of planning and engineering, politics and markets, disaster and violence, all too often infrastructure becomes a zone of suspension, or decay, or even tyranny, yielding experiences of risk, injury, discomfort and injustice. This project focuses on the symptomatic dialectics of corruption. Ethnographic research on rural road building combined with literary and visual arts in Nepal reveal a double edge—how practices of illicit extraction foster cynicism and distrust, while also forging a terrain for critique and radical accountability in planning.