Threatening Dystopias: Development, Scientific Knowledge and Adaptation to Climate Change

Threatening Dystopias: Development, Scientific Knowledge and Adaptation to Climate Change

With Kasia Paprocki, Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics

Discussant: Hillary Birch, Graduate Program in Environmental Studies, York University

In this talk, Paprocki critically investigates the politics of climate change adaptation in Bangladesh and provides a critique of elite developmental initiatives and the climate adaptation orthodoxies as they prevail in Bangladesh. Drawing on over two years of multi-sited ethnographic and archival fieldwork with development practitioners, policy makers, scientists, farmers and rural migrants, Dr. Paprocki offers an in-depth analysis of the global politics of climate change adaptation and shows how the sedimented histories of colonialism, capitalism, and local agrarian struggles shape the country’s coastline more than carbon emissions.

Paprocki is an associate professor in environment in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she also organizes the Social Life of Climate Change initiative. She teaches and writes on the political ecology of development and agrarian change. Her work is primarily focused in South Asia, particularly Bangladesh, where she has worked and conducted research since 2006, often in collaboration with Nijera Kori, Bangladesh’s largest landless peasant movement. Her writing has been published widely in both academic and popular outlets. She is the author of Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh (Cornell University Press, 2021).

This in-person event is part of the Climate Dystopia series and is presented by the York Centre for Asian Research. For more information: ycar@yorku.ca.