Single authored publication by Raka Sen published in Ecology & Society
This month Raka Sen’s first single authored publication has been published by Ecology & Society. The beginnings of this paper, titled Salt in the Wound: Embodied Everyday Adaptations to Salinity Intrusion in the Sundarbans, was workshopped with EnviroLab members in 2020. Congrats Raka!
This paper explores the relationship between everyday lives and the climate changed present as layered, complex, and deeply embedded in social context. In the Sundarban region of India and Bangladesh, the entangled web of development, anthropogenic climate change, and so-called climate change adaptation projects (such as concrete embankments, the hardening of coastlines, and brackish aquaculture) have interrupted natural adaptation processes and caused environmental degradation that negatively impacts those who live there. Scholars have called for better frameworks to link between everyday struggles and macro-level processes of climate change and development. Building on a long-term ethnographic engagement and existing theories of everyday adaptations to climate change, I utilize salinity intrusion as a case study showcasing the complicated interlinkages of climate change and development on daily life. I argue that there are three interlinked processes of increases and accumulations of salt: naturally occurring, exacerbated by capitalism and development, and exacerbated by climate change. Residents describe the consequences of salinity intrusion as they materialize in their bodies, evidence of the external imposition on their lives. I argue that although climate change is the cause of environmental transformation, it interacts with local conditions in diffuse ways that social science needs to pay attention to. Looking at the causes and consequences of salinity intrusion in tandem allows us to see past hegemonic thought and makes way for understanding climate adaptation outside of the constraints of neoliberal development paradigms.
You can also read Raka’s recent co-authored publication with Brianna Castro about everyday adaptation to climate change here!