Dr Rahul Ranjan
Lecturer in Environmental and Climate Justice
Contact details
- Email: rahul.ranjan@ed.ac.uk
Background
I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Environmental and Climate Justice at the Department of Geography, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh. I have a sustained research interest in interdisciplinary scholarship with a key interest in environmental justice and humanities, political ecology and social justice, ethnography and qualitative methods. Over the decade, I have ethnographically worked on the longstanding conflict between social movements, Indigenous peoples' struggles and extraction politics in India. Recently, I have also undertaken ethnographic fieldwork in the western Himalayas and conducted a short pilot study and consultation work in Aotearoa New Zealand — exploring countors of river’s rights and community mobilisation.
My long-term and doctoral research: "The Political Life of Memory: Birsa Munda in Contemporary India", was recently published by the Cambridge University Press in 2023. The Political Life of Memory examines the representation of Birsa Munda’s political life, memory politics and the making of anti-colonialism in contemporary Jharkhand. It offers contrasting features of political imaginations deployed in developing memorial landscapes. The framing of Birsa in the heroic narrative through a grand scale of memorialisation, often in the form of the built environment, curates a selective version. This isolates the scope of elaborating his political ideas outside the confines of atypical historical records and their relevance in the contemporary context. This book argues that everyday politics through affective sites such as memorials and statues produce political visions, emotions and opportunities. It shows how such symbolic sites are often strategically placed and politically motivated to inscribe ideologies. This process outlines how the state and Adivasis use memory as a political tool to lay claims to the past of the Birsa movement. I have also recently edited a volume, “At the crossroads of Rights”, published by Routledge Press, London, 2022.
Between August 2020 - December 2023, I held an appointment as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo (Norway). I worked on the project: "Riverine Rights: The Currents and Consequences of Legal Innovations on The Rights of Rivers", funded by the Norwegian Research Council. The project consists of scholars from various disciplines and countries working towards exploring rivers' contours, rights, and legal personhood.
Qualifications
PhD (Political Anthropology)., School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2020.
MPhil (Politics)., Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 2016.
MA and BA Honours (Political Science)., University of Delhi, India, 2009-2012.
Responsibilities & affiliations
I lecture, supervise and research in the areas of environmental and social justice with the regional focus on South Asia.
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