Paper short abstract:

This paper takes as its starting point future commons as a theoretical space to explore how anthropogenic effects on rivers, canals and agricultural wetlands in coastal Bangladesh helps to expand concepts of enclosures and uncommoning and its effects on the 'rice and fish [that] make a Bengali'.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes as its starting point future commons as a theoretical space to explore how anthropogenic effects on rivers, canals and agricultural wetlands in coastal Bangladesh helps to expand concepts of enclosures and uncommoning. The fluid materialities of capitalist extraction, pollution and property regimes impact local use rights and material qualities, nutrition and safety of 'the rice and fish [that] make a Bengali'. The Bengal Delta is a fluid commons in a social landscape of rampant and rising inequalities. Looking at various forms of capitalist land use and emerging industrial projects taking place in the Sundarbans [mangroves] coastal region of Bangladesh, it asks how land collective rights of access to previous fluid commons are impacted by the materiality of pollution as it transverses this complex wetlands ecology. Furthermore, as land erodes and silted waters accrete and transform into new lands - how does the loss of land and the claiming of newly-formed lands shift current configurations of ownership, property, dependency and care? It expands on future commons to discuss the potentials of 'fluid commons' to understand how enclosures and shifting ideas of ownership are complicated in an industrialising wetlands ecology.