Dr Rahul Ranjan
Lecturer in Environmental and Climate Justice
Contact details
- Email: rahul.ranjan@ed.ac.uk
Background
I am the Co-Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies and a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Environmental and Climate Justice at the University of Edinburgh. My research examines the urgent political struggles at the intersections of Indigenous lifeworlds, social movements, and extractive capitalism, with a core focus on how communities contest dispossession and mobilise alternative ecological futures. I am currently writing a new monograph tentatively entitled: "Fractures of the Himalayan Anthropocene" for the Cambridge University Press. It is based on over five years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Indian Himalayas, analysing the entwined terrains of environmental justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and the turbulent infrastructures of hydro-modernity—where dams, rivers, and mountains become sites of both violent transformation and decolonial possibility.
My first book, The Political Life of Memory: Birsa Munda in Contemporary India (Cambridge University Press, 2023), investigates the contested legacies of anti-colonial resistance and the political life of memory in contemporary Indigenous movements. Before joining Edinburgh, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Oslo Metropolitan University, contributing to the Norwegian Research Council–funded project Riverine Rights, which explores the implications of recognising rivers as legal persons.
I hold a PhD in Political Anthropology from the University of London, following earlier studies in Politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Delhi. Across my work, I remain committed to collaborative scholarship that amplifies Indigenous sovereignties and strengthens environmental justice movements shaping our shared planetary future.
Qualifications
PhD (Political Anthropology)., School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2020.
Responsibilities & affiliations
I lecture, supervise and research in the areas of environmental and social justice with the regional focus on South Asia.
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
Yes
Areas of interest for supervision
Current PhD students supervised
1. Nabanita Samanta: The Littoral Imaginaries in Sundarbans, India
2. Eric Okwir: Greening the tea? Ecolabelling, anticlimax and the remaking of conservation people in Uganda.
Research summary
Project activity
Project: Riverine Rights: The Currents and Consequences of Legal Innovations on The Rights of Rivers (2020-23)
Through the study of legal cases and their aftermath in three countries – Colombia, India and New Zealand – the 'Riverine Rights' project investigated the implications of recent court rulings recognizing rivers as subjects or persons. The research created new, relevant and critical knowledge about an apparent innovative form of environmental protection, and with particular attention to the following:
a) the mechanisms established for enforcing rivers protection for different user groups;
b) the implications for existing legal frameworks and debates on the rights of nature;
c) the insights these cases may offer for current debates about how to understand and govern the relationship between society and the natural world.
Past project grants
2020-2023: Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Agency: The Research Council of Norway
Project: Riverine Rights: The Currents and Consequences of Legal Innovations on The Rights of Rivers