Katharine Rankin

My research spans the ‘economic’ and ‘socio-cultural’ sub-disciplines of Geography and Planning, especially as they have been contoured by insights from political economy, feminist theory and post-colonial studies. It has contributed broadly to scholarship on market and state formation through a focus on attendant processes of social change and a commitment to ethnographic approaches. I joined the fields of Geography and Planning with a background in anthropology, and take a basic commitment to ethnographic approaches into more participatory and community-based directions—through research on commercial gentrification in downtown Toronto, road building in remote but urbanizing regions of Nepal, post-conflict state-building in Nepal, and microfinance in Nepal and Vietnam. Overall, I am interested in tracing forces of injustice like displacement and exploitation, while also exploring and helping promote imaginaries of alternative, more just futures. I welcome inquiries from motivated prospective graduate students sharing these specific or general interests.

Publications 

Rankin, K. N., P. Hamal, E. Lewison and T. Sigdel. 2019. ‘Corruption as a diagnostic of power: Navigating the blurred boundaries of the relational state,’ South Asia 42(5): 920-936.

Rankin, K.N., A.J. Nightingale, P. Hamal and T. Sigdel. 2018. ‘Roads of Change: Political Transition and State Formation in Nepal’s Agrarian Districts,’ Journal of Peasant Studies 45(2): 280-300. DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2016.1216985.

Rankin, K. N. and H. McLean. 2015. ‘Governing the commercial streets of the city: New terrains of disinvestment and gentrification in Toronto’s inner suburbs’, Antipode 47(1): 216-239. Lead author.

Rankin, K.N. 2013. ‘A Critical Geography of Poverty Finance,’ Third World Quarterly 34(4): 551-572.

Rankin, K. N. 2010. ‘Reflexivity and post-colonial critique: Toward an ethics of accountability in planning praxis,’ Planning Theory 9(3): 1-19.