Drowned Out

Urban in/justice collides with erratic climatic outcomes in megacities in the developing world to co-produce new and reinforce old crises. Megacities in monsoonal deltas face climate-related water crises in multitudinous ways. This is heightened in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, where developmentalism, haphazard urban planning, rapid urban population growth, and social inequities reproduce various injustices and vulnerabilities across scales and sites. Flooding, waterlogging, and water scarcity co-exist simultaneously, posing severe problems but in fractured uneven ways. As climate change alters hydrosocial cycles, climate apartheid is being observed where the elite navigate and appropriate the city very differently than others, thus alienating, marginalizing, and essentially drowning out up to a third of the city’s population.

Join us as Dr. Farhana Sultana discusses what climate adaptation means on the ground and how people’s perceptions of, attitudes towards, and lived experiences of climate change adaptation and flooding vary. There is thus a need to focus on the politics of climate adaptation and urban climate justice, instead of assuming it is inherently equitable or just.

This talk, moderated by Sreelakshmi Ramachandran and Pramila Choudhary (PhD students, Department of Geography, Planning and Environment), is part of the Southern Asia Studies Series, which will have programming through 2023-2024.

How can you participate? Join us in person or online by registering for the Zoom Meeting or watching live on YouTube.

Have questions? Send them to info.4@concordia.ca

Dr. Farhana Sultana

Dr. Farhana Sultana is a Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University, where she is also the Research Director for Environmental Collaboration and Conflicts at the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflicts and Collaboration (PARCC). Prior to joining Syracuse, she taught at King’s College London and worked at United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Author of several dozen publications, her recent books are “The Right to Water: Politics, Governance and Social Struggles” (2012), “Eating, Drinking: Surviving” (2016) and “Water Politics: Governance, Justice, and the Right to Water” (2020).

Dr. Sultana graduated Cum Laude from Princeton University (in Geosciences and Environmental Studies) and obtained her Masters and PhD (in Geography) from the University of Minnesota, where she was a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Dr. Sultana is an internationally recognized and award-winning interdisciplinary scholar, speaker, and author whose work spans fields of political ecology, water governance, climate change, post‐colonial development, social and environmental justice, decolonizing knowledge, and transnational feminisms. She was awarded the Glenda Laws Award from the American Association of Geographers for “outstanding contributions to geographic research on social issues” in 2019.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Religions and Cultures and the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment