Presentation short abstract

This paper examines DURBAR, a youth- and girl-led climate governance platform in coastal Bangladesh, showing how participatory praxis transforms girls from ‘beneficiaries’ to agents of adaptation, reshaping knowledge, power and resilience in climate governance.

Presentation long abstract

Across coastal Bangladesh, climate change and disaster risk governance are embedded in everyday negotiations of power, gender relations, and uneven access to decision-making. This paper examines the DURBAR initiative, a youth- and girl-led and locally rooted climate governance platform, as a political ecology praxis that reconfigures agency and transforms research–policy hierarchies. Drawing on participatory action research, co-creation and iterative consultations with youth activists, it investigates how young people move from being framed as “vulnerable beneficiaries” to becoming knowledge-producers, institutional actors, and catalysts in adaptation processes.

DURBAR engages adolescent and young women in three intersecting arenas - participatory learning, policy dialogues, and community resilience planning. The programme mobilises storytelling, peer-to-peer learning and lived-experience testimonies to surface climate-justice narratives. These practices reveal everyday climate impacts such as erosion, salinity intrusion, water scarcity and slow-onset ecological loss, while also questioning whose knowledge counts in defining “resilience.”

The paper argues that feminist, youth-centred praxis offers a way to re-imagine expertise and build collective agency in the margins of climate governance. Rather than positioning participatory methods as add-ons, DURBAR embeds them into an unfolding community transformation where knowledge circulates across youth, researchers, policymakers, NGOs and local institutions. This process foregrounds the politics of recognition, accountability and scale, generating new imaginaries of adaptation and justice.

Ultimately, the paper proposes that youth- and girl-led political ecology is both a methodological and normative intervention: it decolonises who speaks for climate impacts, challenges extractive hierarchies, and expands resilience beyond infrastructural solutions toward lived, situated and relational transformation.

Presentation short abstract

This study foregrounds a political ecology praxis that engages with activism – referred to as ‘doing’ political ecology – to note how fishworkers’ organizations negotiate power, translate local grievances into political claims and shape policymaking within contested terrain of blue economy in India.

Presentation long abstract

‘Doing’ political ecology entails translating the ‘framework’ into ‘praxes’ that forge activism as a continuous dialogue with power, a direct advocacy and sustained mobilization against policies that have systematically altered social and ecological vitalities of small-scale economies. We present the case of small-scale fishworkers’ struggle, culminating into ‘counter-action’ against the (long-)prevailing processes of commercialization, technocratic adjustments and inevitable degradation of coastal fisheries. Fishworkers’ movement in the marine sector of West Bengal has its base deep into the persistent protests of fishing community in the southern states in India. Through field-based observations, interviews and participatory engagement, we highlight the victories and vicissitudes of protests since the 1990s and map uneven trajectories of social movement organized by Dakshinbanga Matsyajibi Forum (DMF) and National Federation of Small-Scale Fishworkers (NFSF) in West Bengal (India). We, further, note how the activism encapsulates both covert ‘everyday’ response and long-term resistance linking community’s rights to water and livelihoods – something rooted in ecological attachments and relations of mutual dependence. Even then, the potential of the movement can be weakened by factors such as manipulative interests, moral disagreements, and bureaucratized actions. We argue that the activist-scholarship embedded in fishworkers’ protests can be brought into wider discussions of contemporary (and future) struggles in fisheries. To that end, this study also brings insights into how creative platforms translate dense, policy-oriented language into accessible, grounded narratives towards broadening the experience and impacts of doing political ecology.

Presentation short abstract

This Indian Sundarbans transdisciplinary (TD) project engaged local 'inhabitant interviewers' for agroecological research. It argues that this reverses (un)intentional TD hierarchy, shifting from external facilitation to community agency, toward enabling sustainable transitions.

Presentation long abstract

Transdisciplinary (TD) research aims to co-produce knowledge through interaction, communication, collaboration, mutuality, trust, learning opportunities, and shared ownership. In doing so, it (un)knowingly creates a defined positionality among actors, allocating specific roles like facilitation or intermediation. Within agroecological transitions, particularly in the Global South, TD is crucial for integrating situated adaptive practices (SAPs) with mainstream, scientific strategies. This study showcases a transformative transdisciplinary (TTD) project in the remote island village of Kumirmari, in the Indian Sundarbans. It sought to build community social resilience, harnessing local agroecology-based livelihood options to counter ‘managed retreat’ from the climate-vulnerable delta. The study features ‘inhabitant interviewers’ (IIs) as an unintended and unexpected consequence of the project process, conducting ethnographic surveys to document drivers, dynamics, barriers, and enablers of agroecological provisions in the region. The IIs emerged as a part of a highly mobilized local community, willing to implement a survey tool, justifying ‘insiders’ involvement’ in gathering first-hand, triangulated datasets from their neighbourhoods in the village. This study argues that the IIs fundamentally challenge conventional understanding of intermediation and positionality in TD research. Their involvement reverses the typical hierarchy, shifting the focus from facilitation (through intermediaries) to community mobilization and agency. This study summarizes the challenges and potential of this social experiment, highlighting how such embedded local actors can directly facilitate agroecological transitions as the ultimate project goal.

Presentation short abstract

Emerging storylines of everyday living from Duars, North Bengal reveal human–(non)human entanglements that do not align with demarcated official maps. Thus, using counter-mapping techniques, for a holistic understanding of coexistence, conflicts and articulating local politico-ecological realities.

Presentation long abstract

Situated in the northern part of West Bengal, Duars is a forest landscape co-inhabited by animals and the forest-dwellers. Drawing boundaries through official maps began with the colonial bureaucracy of forest in Bengal, separating humans from ‘(non)humans’ spaces, to demarcate and control forests. However, the bureaucracy could not confine their intertwined trajectories and ways of living. Based on ethnographic storylines from the forest-villages of Buxa Tiger Reserve, Jaldapara National Park and Gorumara National Park that reveal layered everyday lived experiences in co-inhabiting with (non)human counterparts including elephants and leopards. In this presentation, I would be using counter-mapping techniques on how integration of cartographic practices, community-led mapping, and animal mobility mapping can illuminate forms of knowledge that tell stories beyond the scope of official maps. Everyday encountering emerges through intersecting of living spaces and shared dependencies on the same habitat- animals’ search for food, water and shelter and humans’ engagement in forest-based activities centred around forest resources. Due to which both humans and animals continually adapt strategies and modify their movements in response to each other. These forms of everyday encountering illustrate their situated practices, struggles, negotiations and conflicts emerging through human-(non)human spaces. The storylines, thus, contribute to the understanding that socio-ecological relationships do not align with official demarcations through drawing maps and imposing boundaries. By foregrounding human–(non)human entanglements, the presentation demonstrates the limitations of bureaucratic mapping systems while emphasizing community-led map-making for a holistic understanding of coexistence, conflicts and articulating local politico-ecological realities.

Presentation short abstract

This study applies a Religious Urban Political Ecology (RUPE) lens to examine how faith, power, and everyday practices shape sacred urban ecologies. Through participatory and visual ethnographic methods, it reveals how diverse human and more-than-human worlds co-produce urban religious spaces.

Presentation long abstract

Despite the centrality of urban religious spaces in India as socio-ecological zones shaping urban life, the methodological tools required to understand urban ecologies have remained underdeveloped. Religiously-mediated interactions among devotees, tourists, waste workers, administrators, and more-than-human entities such as rivers, waste, and sacred offerings often remain uncaptured due to plural and hybrid nature: simultaneously religiously coded, and embedded within urbanscape. Addressing this gap, the Religious Urban Political Ecology (RUPE) framework that I offer as an analytical convergence of Religious Political Ecology (RPE) and Urban Political Ecology (UPE), is equipped to examine how social interactions, power relations, and situated practices shape urban ecologies. While UPE underplays the role of faith, and sacred imaginaries, and RPE lacks an urban focus, RUPE emerges as a tool for examining the religio-cultural-political mediations shaping urban ecologies. These RUPE dimensions can be methodologically explored through Participatory Urban Appraisal (PUA) and ethno-graphy. While PUA enables grounded, bottom-up engagement with communities whose everyday practices co-produce these spaces, ethno-graphy integrates ethnographic methods with visualisation techniques, capturing intangible and experiential dimensions. Together, these methods allow simultaneous attention to the material, social, symbolic, and ecological registers of religious urban spaces. This methodological synthesis offers a qualitative-cum-visual account of how ecologically plural “worlds” coexist within sacred urban ecologies - the devotion of pilgrims, the situatedness of residents, administrative negotiations, and the agency of the river. By foregrounding these multi-layered narratives, the study advances methodologies debates in UPE and opens new pathways for analysing city-nature relationships and socio-ecological transformations in religious urban contexts.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation posits the practice of sketching and making comics as a legitimate PE research methodology, not just an illustration of findings. Research hierarchies are destabilised by encouraging the subject(s) of enquiry to take part in the process of sketching during ethnographic encounters.

Presentation long abstract

Modern systems of power and social control are practised through conscious manipulation of images and the notion of 'gaze'. The objective distance from which this gaze is performed inevitably entails a certain degree of objectification. I use comics as a methodological corrective lens. The multimodal language of comics– image, text, gesture, and temporal flow– captures embodied knowledge, spatial practices, and material entanglements that conventional fieldnotes cannot. Comics making in the field transforms ethnographic observation into collaborative storytelling. Sketching while observing slows down perceptions and allows co-construction of narratives. When I walked the wastewater canals of Kolkata, my initial sketches focused on the piles of refuse and the resulting stench, but the inhabitant children guided my eye towards the biodiversity that thrives in this ecosystem despite the pollution. They also showed interest in posing for sketches themselves. Encouraging the subject of enquiry to take part in the sketching process challenges the hierarchy between the observer and the observed. Back at the desk, fieldnotes sketched in the form of comics need to be analysed and reflected upon, and may be aided by more ‘exact’ forms of documentation like photographs. However, using this comparative visual method is challenging in Europe, where cultural norms and the GDPR make public photography tricky. I found a way around by using realistic sketches to document the setting and comics-influenced supplements to capture more nuance. In this presentation, I will elucidate my arts-based praxis with a focus on how comics can one-up conventional fieldnotes in political ecology research.

Presentation short abstract

A journey along the Nile led to collaborative work with Qursaya’s fishermen, artists, and researchers, reviving rituals, addressing ecological pressures, and using photography as a catalyst to explore the island as a microcosm of the Nile’s wider challenges.

Presentation long abstract

In this presentation, I trace the gradual evolution of my work around the Nile, which began with a journey from one of the river’s major sources in Ethiopia, through Sudan, and into Egypt. This trip first rooted me in the geography of the Nile, and later guided me into its layered histories, myths, and rituals from ancient Egypt.

My research eventually led me to Qursaya, a small island in the heart of Cairo, home to a community of fishermen who collaborate with the environmental initiative VeryNile to collect plastic waste from the river, now ranked among the world’s top contributors of plastic pollution to the oceans.

As fish stocks in the Nile decline, collecting plastic has become an alternative source of income for the fishermen.

This encounter opened the door to a series of collaborations at multiple levels: working with the fishermen to co-revive the ancient ritual of the Nile Parade in celebration of Nile Day; collaborating with researchers to understand environmental challenges on the island; and engaging with artists to create projects with the fishermen and their children. These layers of engagement culminated in the Nile Parade which is a collective celebration of the river. Yet the parade is not an endpoint but a beginning.

The trust built through collaborations allowed me to explore deeply the lives of families, water quality, and the island as a microcosm of the Nile’s challenges. At each stage, a single photograph acted as a catalyst, opening pathways for new research and collaboration.

Presentation short abstract

Water crisis is exacerbating under climate crisis. Hydraulic intervention further complicates water governance. Ethnographic fieldwork reveals a complex socio-political context that shaped water access, management and use, highlighting the need for participatory and adaptive water governance.

Presentation long abstract

Climate change is increasingly experienced as a water crisis, particularly in deltaic regions where rising seas, erratic rainfall, hydraulic interventions, and competing demand for water create a complex water regime. An apolitical, techno-bureaucratic water management approach further complicates water governance. This study examines water governance in coastal Bangladesh through a political ecology lens, challenging the dominant techno-bureaucratic paradigm that privileges infrastructures and market outcomes over socio-political realities.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and policy review, we highlight how local communities navigate seasonal water scarcity and monsoon waterlogging while confronting conflicting water demands between shrimp aquaculture and agriculture. Fieldwork reveals a complex socio-political context that shapes water access, management, and use. Community-led initiatives—including partial banning of shrimp farming, constructing small scale water infrastructure, and politicizing water access in electoral agendas—demonstrate adaptive, participatory governance that contrasts sharply with national policies focused on mega infrastructures, e.g., embankments, and centralized management, i.e., district water committees.

Our findings underscore that water governance is inherently social and political, shaped by everyday negotiation, contestation, flexible cooperation and local power dynamics. By providing empirical evidence on community-led water management strategies, this research contributes to the greater debate on adaptive water governance in an exacerbating climate crisis context, emphasizing the need to bridge the gap between policy design and practice in vulnerable coastal environments.

Presentation short abstract

This study uses a political ecology and justice lens to examine how the Matarbari coal project reshaped coastal space through dispossession, exclusion, and undervaluation of land, and shows how local resistance highlights the need for people-centred, accountable coastal governance.

Presentation long abstract

Mega development projects along amrine and coastal zones are accelerating across global south, yet critical research on blue justice at the land-ocean interface remain limited, particularly in Bangladesh. This study applies a political ecology and justice lens to examine the Matarbari Coal Fired Power Plant, one of Bangladesh’s most consequential coastal mega projects and the multiple injustice it has generated. Drawing on qualitative data from semi structured interviews an secondary sources, the analysis reveals how state and corporate actors leveraged their political and institutional power to reshape coastal space in ways that marginalized coastal communities. Core justice concerns include the lack of transparency preceding alnd acquisition, the systematic exclusion of fishers and farmers from decision making and the undervaluation of land that failed to reflect the social, cultural and livelihood importance. Together, these dynamics reflect classic political ecology patterns i.e enclosure of commons, dispossesion through bureaucratic and legal instruments and the redistribution of benefits upwards while risks are borne locally. Resistance to the coal fired power plant emerged as a critical coterforce. These struggles empahsized the centrality of recognition, participation and equitable outcomes within blue justice frameworks. The study concludes that addressing such injsutcies requires substantially strengthened governance arrangements, including people centered legislation, adherence to international best practices for resttlement and impact assessment and early meaningful engagement with those whose lives and territories are most affected.

Presentation short abstract

The presentation deals with an immersive understanding of the ways in which sound and sonic technologies can enumerate interspecies subjections. We explore discourses on welfare ecologies through this new qualitative methodology having significant merits to be deployed in political ecology studies.

Presentation long abstract

How might different technologies capturing ‘sound’ shape what can be attended to in the larger and upcoming discourses on ‘beyond the human’ political ecology? How can sound art as a method facilitate expanded understandings of ‘voice’, ‘belongingness’ and ‘agency’ for species currently termed as ‘beyond the human’? How does field recording, soundscape composition and attentive listening add to existing ethnographic methodological tools in political ecology? In this paper, we demonstrate the use of field recording of ‘sound’ as a critical and creative methodological practice to attune to more-than-human species and their subjection to ‘welfare ecologies’. Despite the widespread use of qualitative methods in political ecology, use of sonification or sound art is almost absent, leading to a substantial omission in capturing non-human ‘perceptions’, ‘movements’, ‘affective connections’ as well as ‘interdependencies’. Many prevalent sound tools, such as hydrophone recordings of crustaceans, can reveal the impact of anthropogenic noise on their lives, while soil vibrations may indicate the presence and movement of subterranean species. Different calls and movements of domesticated animals (like cows and goats) can also provide avenues to understand affective expressions and responses to physical events. Our study conceptually lends its inspiration from Donna Haraway’s ‘Chthulucene’ (which extends beyond the Anthropocene), which is an era of examining the profound and intricate connections within the animal kingdom. We explore different ways in which sound-based methods can reveal patterns of communication, stress signals, behaviors and responses, offering an altogether first-hand understanding of animal subjectivities and their lived experiences in the Anthropocene.

Presentation short abstract

Event ethnography of Kolkata’s annual hawker mobilizations offers a methodological lens on how urban political ecology and urban informality intersect, revealing the sensory, embodied, and relational practices through which street vendors contest precarity and claim urban space.

Presentation long abstract

In India, street vendors, commonly known as hawkers, are highly visible and central to the lifeworld of the street, yet they remain legally invisible and structurally precarious. In Kolkata, where my work is empirically situated, hawkers are frequently targeted by clean-up drives that cast their presence as antithetical to the visions of the world-class city. In this presentation, I examine how event ethnography, conducted during “Anti-Eviction Day” and “International Hawkers’ Day,” celebrated annually, opens an imaginative and methodological window for studying urban informality through the lens of Urban Political Ecology (UPE). Such events transform ordinary streets into charged arenas where memories of past evictions are reconstructed, bodies gather in dense proximity, and sound, smell, and emotion intermingle to create atmospheres in which political meanings are not only articulated but viscerally felt. In these moments, UPE gains access to the embodied, affective, and relational practices through which hawkers negotiate urban life. While these gatherings create temporal ruptures in the ordinary functioning of urban space, they also reveal the bonds of solidarity that sustain political organizing. These events become sites of knowledge production, where marginalized actors recall the trauma of eviction raids, circulate stories of survival, and produce counter-narratives that unsettle elite imaginaries of disorder, pollution, and congestion. Event ethnography thus foregrounds their agency in shaping city spaces, advancing political claims, and imagining more just urban futures.

Presentation short abstract

Speculative political ecology reframes the future as a site of political struggle, where un-equal socio-ecological futures are actively produced through present governance regimes and non-human relations. This paper examines Wade (2020) to analyse animated worlding as critical–creative SPE method.

Presentation long abstract

Political ecology has been foundational in showing how environments are socio-politically and epistemologically produced, yet its critiques of socio-ecological crises remain largely retrospective, often ceding questions of futurity to linear projections or technocratic scenarios. Speculative political ecology (SPE) addresses this lacuna by refiguring the future as an immanent terrain of socio-political struggle, where environmentally unequal futures are actively assembled in the present through infrastructural arrangements, governance practices, everyday dwelling and more-than-human relations (Rusca, Harris & Santos, 2024; Rusca et al., 2023).

Against this framework, this paper examines Wade (2020), an Indian animated short film set in a permanently inundated future Kolkata, through the lens of SPE. The film centres a community of environmental refugees -urban residents whose lives are unsettled by a hydro-apocalypse- while redistributing agency towards water, animals and built forms as co-constitutive forces in socio-ecological becoming. In doing so, Wade transcends conventional environmental storytelling to perform animated worlding as a critical–creative practice that merges speculative ethnography and transdisciplinary boundary work, visualising the affective and embodied dimensions of futures that elude empirical modelling while bringing together artistic, academic, and community knowledges. However, the short-film format risks compressing heterogeneous, contested realities into a single stylised narrative. The paper, therefore, interrogates how speculative political ecology, when grounded in such embodied and narrative methodologies, shifts from a discipline of critique toward a praxis of co-creation, offering not only a decolonial framework to analyse power relations but a participatory means to reimagine the actants, spaces, and temporalities of environmental justice.

Presentation short abstract

The collective fiction and knowledge-ing project 'Future Story' interrogated ‘expert’ knowledges and responses to climate change within care-centred, non-hierarchical spaces, in which critical creative practices were deployed to reimagine researcher-participant power dynamics.

Presentation long abstract

Political ecologists and critical social scientists have emphasised how power dynamics permeate even apparently plural and transdisciplinary climate change research. Established hierarchies of expertise and internalised behaviours can also cause researchers to be complicit in ingraining rather than challenging oppressions and injustices. The pursuit of transformation and justice thus calls for greater levels of reflexivity and critical engagement in climate research. We present a collective fiction and knowledge-ing project Sgeul ri Teachd / Future Story that took place in the islands of Uist in the Scottish Outer Hebrides (UK). Drawing on feminist political ecology, ethics of care and emancipatory pedagogies, this experimental bilingual project emerged in response to questions of identity and community in the face of coastal climate change, as well as global narratives of polycrisis and calls for climate justice. We created care-centred, non-hierarchical spaces that blurred distinctions between facilitator and participant, employing a range of text and visual arts-based activities. These allowed participants to interrogate ‘expert’ ways of knowing and responding to climate change and expand their own situated expertise by engaging with their land, heritage, language as well as ancient premonitions about the future. A collaborative diary supported our critical praxis as researchers, allowing for continuous shared reflection and adaptation. This innovative and experimental methodology made it possible to question knowledge, power and injustices in climate change. In so doing, it revealed how greater critical reflexivity can guide us to ‘do otherwise’ in political ecology and transdisciplinary research.