Farhana Sultana

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Syracuse University

This critical analysis examines the geopolitics of planetary environmental injustice and the imperative for systems change to address the intertwined crises of climate breakdown and unsustainable economic growth. Climate breakdown has heightened attention to uneven anthropogenic use and abuse of the planet's biosphere and common pool resources. Rec...

Scholarship on the right to water has proliferated in interesting and unexpected ways in recent years. This book broadens existing discussions on the right to water in order to shed critical light on the pathways, pitfalls, prospects, and constraints that exist in achieving global goals, as well as advancing debates around water governance and wate...

The extremely uneven and inequitable impacts of climate change mean that differently-located people experience, respond to, and cope with the climate crisis and related vulnerabilities in radically different ways. The coloniality of climate seeps through everyday life across space and time, weighing down and curtailing opportunities and possibiliti...

In a recent Perspective, Zimm et al argue that “there is no consistent approach to comprehensively incorporate and examine justice considerations” in climate research. In reality, existing scholarship on environmental and climate justice has long examined the intersection of climate change impacts and social inequality, including along class, race,...

Managing climate change-related risks requires robust and actionable insights into future climates. Here we develop the plural climate storylines framework to complement existing physical climate storylines, which have strengthened the usability of climate projections yet struggled to generate action for just climate futures. By taking urban adapta...

Environmental governance (EG) has become a hegemonic concept for understanding and transforming environmental decision-making processes that operate beyond the state. However, political ecologists, drawing from a diverse set of theoretical frameworks, have critiqued the concept for being malleable, vague, and apolitical, which has enabled its appro...

Praxis is central to political ecology scholarship but replete with tensions and ambiguities. This report explores advancements in praxis across epistemological, methodological, pedagogical, and political dimensions. Praxis in political ecology has benefited from detailed insights drawn from Indigenous, decolonial, postcolonial, feminist, anti-raci...

In this intervention, we call for extending the critical lens of intersectionality to the field of climate justice. We do so by identifying the theoretical and methodological links through which intersectionality can benefit climate change studies. These include common roots in radical theory, a focus on marginalized populations, challenging domina...

Climate change has had unequal and uneven burdens across places whereby the planetary crisis involves a common but differentiated responsibility. The injustices of intensifying climate breakdown have laid bare the fault lines of suffering across sites and scales. A climate justice framework helps us to think about and address these inequities. Clim...

The complexities and scope of environmental issues have not only outpaced the capacities and responsiveness of traditional political actors but also generated new innovations, constituencies, and approaches to governing environmental problems. In response, comparative environmental politics (CEP) has emerged as a vibrant and growing field of schola...

Comparative environmental politics (CEP) is a vibrant field of scholarship and practice that addresses a range of environmental issues facing communities, non-state actors, and nation-states. It draws not only on the disciplinary study of politics and policy, but also, as this volume shows, is enriched by interdisciplinary insights from anthropolog...

Political ecologists focus on power relations across scales to develop assessments of systems that produce and maintain crises, such as the overlapping conjunctural crises of the coronavirus pandemic and climate breakdown. Such analyses clarify processual and interconnecting factors, exposing the contours of uneven differentiations and coproduction...

The overlapping global socio-ecological crises of climate change and COVID-19 pandemic have simultaneously dominated discussions since 2020. The connections between them expose underbellies of structural inequities and systemic marginalizations across scales and sites. While ongoing climate change amplifies, compounds, and creates new forms of inju...

Some epistemologies remain marginalized in political ecology. Here I demonstrate why it is important to learn from various relational margins to further advance the field. Insights and critiques from feminisms and decolonial theories have enriched and expanded political ecology in nuanced ways, yet they continue to remain relegated to the margins....

The Covid-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of the rights to water and sanitation. This is true in both the global North and global South, where water insecurities, cut-offs, unaffordability and inaccessibility undermine the ability of communities to deal with the pandemic. The realization of economic and social rights such as the rights t...

Corona Times https://www.coronatimes.net/digitising-critical-pedagogies-higher-education-covid-19/

In light of ongoing racist incidences and protests in the USA and elsewhere, there have been growing resistance movements and conversations of systemic and structural racism in society. In solidarity with #ShutDownSTEM, #ShutDownAcademia, #Strike4BlackLives and #BlackInIvory in early June 2020, we started pondering easy ways for people to think abo...

This multi-authored collection of papers examines the complex realities of research on natural resource industries, including the messy entanglements of extraction, materiality, and everyday social life this research entails. Of central importance to the contributors is how scholars confront fieldwork challenges ethically, methodologically, and cor...

Scholars have demonstrated that citizenship is tied to water provision in megacities of the Global South where water crises are extensive and the urban poor often do not have access to public water supplies. Drawing from critical feminist scholarship, this article argues for the importance of analyzing the connections between embodied intersectiona...

Decolonization has become a popular discourse in academia recently and there are many debates on what it could mean within various disciplines as well as more broadly across academia itself. The field of international development has seen sustained gestures towards decolonization for several years in theory and practice, but hegemonic notions of de...

The scholarship on the right to water has proliferated in interesting and unexpected ways. Through highly productive sets of conversations, both discourses and struggles around the right to water have: opened new perspectives and possibilities in water governance; fostered new collective and moral claims for water justice; and effected changes in l...

Geographers should engage with development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by utilizing not only the theoretical and methodological tools from our various subfields but also through advocacy, expanding the role of public intellectuals and holding institutions and people to account. If we want emancipatory politics and transformations i...

While much attention has been paid to controversies over free speech and academic freedom related to university campus debates, events, and activities, I demonstrate that higher education is also under threat by the undermining of academic publishing ethics, integrity and standards, as well as what counts as scholarly rigor. The rise of problematic...

Climate change is exacerbating existing water insecurity globally, with significant gender consequences. Changes in water availability, access, scarcity and security play critical roles in shaping the ways that individuals, communities and countries are tackling existing and predicted climate change. Although climate change is already increasing vu...

Reflexivity is the practice of critical consciousness of one's location and positionality in a research process and how this influences research outcomes and the production of knowledge. It accounts for power relations, subjectivities, epistemology, interpretation of text, and conduct of research methods. Reflecting upon and assessing how one is po...

Open access, download here: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-42468-2

This introduction to a series of essays on the global challenges of food and water security, commissioned as part of the International Year of Global Understanding, provides a definition of key terms and an historical context to these contemporary issues. It discusses the human right to adequate food and water, outlining some of the political strug...

Key Messages Mental health and wellness are issues of growing concern on North American campuses. A feminist geography perspective reveals that there are cultural, institutional, political, and intersectional factors that impede active engagement with mental health and wellness in the academy. We encourage geographers to consider mental health and...

https://www.elgaronline.com/view/9780857936165.xml

Justice invokes notions of fairness, equity, and doing the “right” thing. It also evokes principles by which the benefits and burdens of society should be distributed among people. However, justice is a contested term, of which there are various notions and theorizations across disciplines. The definitional challenges of the notion of social justic...

Downloadable at: www.farhanasultana.com This Advanced Review analyzes recent debates over the human right to water. While accepting critiques from scholars that the right to water risks entrenching unequal and unjust forms of water governance, the paper nevertheless takes a more sympathetic view of the potentials within struggles for the right to...

The discursive and material tensions between words and ideas within geography have real impacts on the lives of peoples and the places we describe and study, and thus we should not take such tasks lightly. Political geography is limited by relying on existing genealogies and the limits of Anglo-based language. Silences and gaps can be better addres...

Although climate change is expected to increase vulnerabilities, marginalization, and sufferings of many in the Global South, impacts will be unevenly felt across social strata. Intersectionalities of social difference, especially along gender and class lines, differentiate the ways in which impacts of climate change are experienced and responded t...

http://www.etrillas.com.mx/detalle.php?isbn=9786071718341&estilo=13&tema=0

Municipal Services Project (MSP) Occassional Paper No. 18., 2013

Delivering safe drinking water is often equated with delivering development in much of the Global South. Yet different arrangements of technologies, waters, and social relations constitute uneven waterscapes and produce different water – society relations across sites and scales. Analyzing the contradictory roles of water-producing technologies and...

Exploring political ecologies of water and development This theme issue draws on political ecology scholarship to explore how hydrosocial relations are produced and transformed through development interventions that provide and manage water in the Global South. In the five papers that draw insights from different contexts globally, the authors exam...

http://pah.org.pl/m/3220/PAH_prawo%20do%20wody.pdf

Reprint of 2006 chapter of same title

A nature–society geography approach to health and well-being demonstrates that socioecological parameters, in addition to economic and political factors, are critical to explaining outcomes of health crises. In expounding on this multifaceted understanding of health and well-being in the context of development, I draw on research on chronic arsenic...

In most of rural Bangladesh, the proliferation of tubewells that pump up groundwater has increased people’s access to drinking water over the last couple of decades. Most of the tubewells found in households, markets, schools, mosques, and other locations are privately owned, although the government has also installed some public tubewells. The gov...

This article argues that resource access, use, control, ownership and conflict are not only mediated through social relations of power, but also through emotional geographies where gendered subjectivities and embodied emotions constitute how nature–society relations are lived and experienced on a daily basis. By engaging the insights from feminist...

Reprint of 2002 article of same title

'Space' and 'place' mediate gendered norms and practices through a complex interplay of social structures and institutions. They, in turn, impact women's life experiences significantly in terms of how they are played out in different contexts. Based on detailed studies across South and Southeast Asia, the essays in 'Gendered Geographies' foreground...

Considerable literature exists on floods and weather-related disasters, but limited attention has been given to the varied social implications of hazards in the lives of people, especially from a gender perspective. This is particularly poignant in floodplains and coastal areas, where water is a key element in giving, sustaining and taking away lif...

This introduction summarizes the work featured in the themed section of Gender, Place and Culture titled ‘Global geographies of gender and water’. It brings into dialogue scholars investigating a variety of gender–water relationships at different scales, including: poisoned waterscapes; fishing practices; and the implications of neoliberal water po...

This article seeks to contribute to the emerging debates in gender–water and gender–nature literatures by looking at the ways that gendered subjectivities are simultaneously (re)produced by societal, spatial and natural/ecological factors, as well as materialities of the body and of heterogeneous waterscapes. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in Ban...

Community and participation have become popular in development discourse and practice, particularly in the global South and in relation to water resources management. Greater involvement of people in decisionmaking, implementation and evaluation of water management practices is expected to increase efficiency and equity in water projects. However,...

Reprint of 2006 chapter of same title

There are critical disjunctures between aspects of everyday behaviour in the field and the University's institutional frameworks that aim to guide/enforce good ethical practice, as the conduct of fieldwork is always contextual, relational, embodied, and politicized. This paper argues that it is important to pay greater attention to issues of reflex...

Research in […] a time of uncertainty, and in an era when knowledge as power is reinscribed through its value as a commodity in the global market place, presents tricky ground for researchers. (Smith, 2007, 102)

This article looks at the nature of water politics (pani politics) in the context of arsenic contamination of drinking water in rural Bangladesh. Pani politics is found to be a product of intersecting similarities and differences among women and men, where water comes to have material and symbolic power that people can exercise, which can lead to c...

Tropical Agriculture Association Newsletter, 27 (4): 12-13, 2007.

This paper undertakes a gendered analysis of India's river-linking project in order to shed light on the multifaceted impacts that are often overlooked in discussing the project. The paper argues that lessons from a gendered analysis of the Farakka Barrage provide key insights on what is likely to emerge with the mega river-linking project for down...

International Water Management Institute (IWMI)

Water plays a pivotal role in economic activity and in human well-being. Because of the prominence of water in production (primarily for irrigation) and in domestic use (drinking, washing, cooking), conflict over water and the effects of gender-influenced decisions about water may have far-reaching consequences on human well-being, economic growth,...

In this paper we examine some of the issues relating water and gender in the particular social and environmental conditions of Bangladesh. Bangladesh is a small, deltaic country with a large population (over 120 million), a low level of economic productivity (GNP/capita is currently estimated at about $250), and an intense subordination of women. S...

Water plays a pivotal role in economic activity and in human well-being. Because of the prominence of water in production (primarily for irrigation) and in domestic use (drinking, washing, cooking), conict over water and the effects of gender-inuenced decisions about water may have far-reaching consequences on human well-being, economic growth, and...