Title/Position: Assistant Professor
Department/Faculty/Institution: Environmental Studies, Social and Cultural Analysis / New York University
Degree(s)/School(s): BA, Carleton College; MES, PhD, Yale University
E-mail: ar131@nyu.edu
MCRI Projects: C4 South Asia Research Cluster
Background: Anne Rademacher is an environmental anthropologist whose work focuses on urban ecology and political transformation. Through ethnographic analyses of urban environmental change, Rademacher studies how place-based affinities, contested histories, and ideologies of belonging develop in struggles over the form, content, and quality of urban environments. Her central interest is urban ecology – its scientific contours, its application across cultural and political contexts, and its interconnection with social change. Rademacher recently completed a major research initiative in one of South Asia’s fastest-growing and most politically dynamic cities, Kathmandu; other recent work has addressed urban ecology as it relates to housing and migration, political stability, cultural conflict, and alternative forms of environmental knowledge.
Her current work addresses the theory and practice of sustainable building, or green design, in rapid-growth cities of the Global South.
Research Interests: Conservation-Development Initiatives in Urban Areas; Rural-to-Urban Migration and Displacement; Sustainable Design in Urban Areas; Modern Ecology and Statemaking; The Cultural Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge.
Selected Publications:
Rademacher, A. & Sivaramakrishnan, K. (eds.) (2013). Ecologies of Urbanism in India. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Rademacher, A. & Kose, B. (2013). Shifting Terrains: Questions of Governance in India’s Cities and their Peripheries. In P. Hamel & R. Keil (eds.) Suburban Governance: A Global View. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Rademacher, A. (2011). Reigning the River: Urban Ecologies and Political Transformation in Kathmandu. Duke University Press.
Rademacher, A. & Anand, N. (2011). Housing in the Urban Age: Inequality and Aspiration in Mumbai. Antipode.
Rademacher, A. (2010). Restoration and Revival: Remembering the Bagmati Civilization. In A. Guneratne (ed). Symbolic Ecologies: Nature and Society in the Himalaya. Oxford.
Rademacher, A. (2009). When is Housing an Environmental Problem? Reforming Informality in Kathmandu. Current Anthropology. 50 (4): 513-534.
Rademacher, A. (2009). Marking Remembrance: Nation and Ecology in Two Riverbank Pillars in Kathmandu. In D. Walkowitz & L.M. Knauer (eds.) Contested Histories in Public Space: Memory, Race, and Nation. Duke University Press.
Rademacher, A. (2008). Fluid City, Solid State: Urban Environmental Territory in a State of Emergency. City and Society 20 (1).
Rademacher, A., Dove, M.R., Mathews, A., Padwe, J. & Maxwell, K.(2008). The Concept of Human Agency in Contemporary Conservation and Development Discourses. In B. McCay, S. Lees & P. West (eds.) Against the Grain: The Vayda Tradition in Human Ecology and Ecological Anthropology. Rowan and Littlefield.
Rademacher, A. (2007.) Farewell to the Bagmati Civilization: Losing Riverscape and Nation in Kathmandu. National Identities. 9 (1).
Rademacher, A. (2007). A ‘Chaos’ Ecology: Democratization and Urban Environmental Decline in Kathmandu. In M. Lawoti (ed.) Contentious Politics and Democratization in Nepal: The Maoist Insurgency, Identity Politics, and Social Mobilization since 1990. Delhi: Sage Publications.
