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
Corruption furnishes the central problematic for this project. Rarely have we encountered a single issue that animates such a wide range of knowledge producers grappling with the dystopian outcomes of development. My principal objective as a JHI Faculty Fellow is to write the first draft of a sole-authored monograph titled Corruption and the situated logics of ethical judgment: Road building in Nepal as a zone of ontological difference. The book contends that approaching corruption as a matter of multiple, emergent ontological frames can inform radical epistemologies of planning that foreground situated logics of ethical judgment.