Haripriya Rangan

Dr. Haripriya Rangan Senior Lecturer

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  I am interested in issues that address regional sustainability and resilience from the perspectives of economic geography, development, and political ecology.

 

RESEARCH

Research interests:

• Political ecology of regional transformations
• Social geographies of marketplace trade
• Environmental history of the Indian Ocean World
• Postcolonial development
• Regional development and management of commons resources

Ongoing Research

1. The political ecology of plant exchanges around the Indian Ocean: My current research with Dr. Christian Kull on plant exchanges around the Indian Ocean engages in a comparative analysis of how introduced acacia species have fared in four sites: the highlands of Madagascar, the highlands of Mpumalanga Province in South Africa, the highlands in southern India, and the outback of northern Australia.  In this research, we focus on: 1) the reasons for the introduction of the species; 2) how these introduced species have been diffused and dispersed across the landscape; and 3) how different social groups and institutions regard the presence of these introduced species in these landscapes.  The research project is funded by a grant from the Australian Research Council.

2. The social geographies of marketplace trade:  A large proportion of people in the world are involved in small-scale trade and businesses that support the everyday life of regions.  Despite their crucial role in creating livelihood networks and marketplace trade within and across regions, most policy makers view these ‘informal sector’ actors and their economic activities as peripheral to the growth of national economies.  I am working on a monograph that rethinks the concept of ‘informal economy’ as regionalised social geographies of marketplace trade, and shows how this alternative concept can provide a richer understanding of how these ‘businesses of everyday life’ of regions contribute to different processes and patterns of regional economic growth and resilience.

3. Commons resource management and the geography of the medicinal plant trade in South Africa: My research in South Africa focuses on two aspects of natural resource management: first, how post-apartheid reforms in rural areas affect people whose livelihoods depend on harvesting commons resources for subsistence or sale; and second, how the economic geography of trade in commons resources influences the ways in which these are subject to conservation and management.  My empirical research on the economic geography of the medicinal plant trade in South Africa has included fieldwork in the provinces of Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, and Limpopo, and in the two largest urban centres for the medicinal plant trade, Johannesburg and Durban.