Munro Lecture - 'Bangladesh and the (Im)Possibility of Climate Justice'

Since anthropogenic climate change started making the news, Bangladesh has been an iconic case of a country facing its worst impacts. The call upon its people to show their capacity for resilience has been met by studies showing instead the entanglement of adaptation efforts with state imperatives that run counter to climate objectives, a development industry that seeks to perpetuate itself, and other vested interests. The language of climate justice has emerged to address this gap between stated goals and material realities, even veering into the language of climate coloniality to decry its impossibility.

In this talk, Professor Khan ponders the tension between the work of making climate change visible within lives and that of unveiling the workings of power, to explore if we have lost our ability to describe crises-filled lives and catastrophic change. Professor Khan speculates whether to regain our voice, that is, to re-attend to precarious lives in these dark times, we need to accept the impossibility of climate justice.

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Host or Publisher School of History, Classics and Archaeology