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Paper short abstract

This paper provides a reflection on whether doctoral research provides the scope to enact decolonial feminism, examining decarbonising academic practice and developing vulnerable, collaborative methods through a study of women’s agency and structural violence in Bangladesh’s climate crisis

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the possibilities and limits of pursuing decolonial feminist praxis within doctoral research, using the present study of women’s agency and structural violence amid the climate crisis in Bangladesh as a contextual point of departure. It interrogates the structural, ethical, and methodological tensions that shape doctoral work undertaken within institutions still marked by colonial, extractive, and carbon‑intensive logics.

The first line of enquiry asks to what extent doctoral‑level research can meaningfully be understood as decolonial feminism when it is embedded in academic systems that reproduce hierarchies of expertise, knowledge extraction, and uneven access to resources. The second explores how doctoral researchers might contribute to the decarbonisation of academic practice, reflecting on the contradictions of conducting climate‑related research from within infrastructures that remain materially entangled with the crisis, not to mention when pressurised by the expectations of funders. The third develops the notion of vulnerable research methodologies - approaches that embrace discomfort, acknowledge complicity, and foreground care, repair, and collaborative meaning‑making with participants in the Global South.

By situating these enquiries within feminist and decolonial debates on epistemic justice, the paper argues that doctoral research can open small but significant cracks in dominant development and technopolitical imaginaries, even as it remains constrained by the very structures it seeks to unsettle. It ultimately proposes that such praxis requires attention to how these commitments unfold in situated research with women navigating the climate crisis, where their agency, experiences of structural violence, and collaborative meaning‑making intersect with the institutional limits of academia