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Paper short abstract

Bhasan Char became a camp twenty years after emerging from the Bay of Bengal, decades before such islands are considered habitable. I follow how sediment's material instability participates in governance and settlement, troubling boundaries between land/water, life/nonlife, permanent/temporary.

Paper long abstract

Coastal researchers and settlers consider that chars (silt islands) require thirty to forty years before becoming suitable for habitation. Bhasan Char, a sedimented island in the Meghna estuary of Bay of Bengal, was transformed into a refugee camp for Rohingyas within twenty years of its emergence. This temporal disruption offers a productive site for rethinking how human politics align with deep time processes, a central concern of recent work on geological matter in anthropology (Povinelli 2016; Yusoff 2018; Oguz 2020). This paper explores how sediment's material instability participates in producing particular forms of governance and settlement. I trace movements of granular materials across the island: construction sand and eroded embankment dust contributing to farming practices while salinity causes plants to die with scorched leaves, crops struggling in soil that resists growth. Farming happens through ongoing transformation of geological matter. Attending to sediment's materiality raises questions about temporal and spatial politics. The char's geological processes operate across decades, while refugees hold temporary status, NGO projects last one to two years, and infrastructure decays within months. How do these different temporalities meet in the same unstable ground? What does it mean when neither earth nor people can claim permanence, yet both are expected to produce: crops, livelihood, territorial order? By following granular materials as they move, transform, and accumulate, I explore how sediment's ongoing incompleteness troubles fixed categories: land/water, permanent/temporary, life/nonlife, natural/built. Rather than backdrop to refugee politics, sediment actively participates in shaping relations between state speculation, humanitarian projects, and survival practices.