How communities respond to economic and ecological changes in everyday social struggles and organizing for well-being in efforts to move out of situations of inequality, exclusion and poverty.
Theme one will research the community response to climate change, neoliberal capitalism and extractive development processes. The focus will be on how communities respond to economic and ecological changes in everyday social struggles and organizing for well-being in efforts to move out of situations of inequality, exclusion and poverty. The individual projects will explore gender power relations in organizing for the security and protection of local natural resources in Nepal, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Tanzania and the UK. The studies are based in Global South contexts as well as Europe in order to look for modalities of power that cross different geographical contexts, and that produce similarities and differences in community responses to the impacts of climate change, economic development and resource extractivism, and the forms of knowledge, power and authority that sustain extractive development processes.
The shared framework will look at:
- modes of governing natural resources by national and international governments and private companies;
- forms of community mobilization to defend water and food security, energy, livelihoods and demand fair labour conditions; and
- alliances being formed by communities within and across different locations with attention to gendered cultural, social and economic resource-reallocation.
PhD Topics
- Climate change adaptation programmes and political violence in Nepal
- Virtual water flows: re-articulating gendered structures of accumulation along emerging agro-food commodity chains in Maharashtra, India
- The feminist political ecology of mining on gender and ethnic identities in Kalimantan, Indonesia
- The politics of uncertainty and adaptation to climate change in Kenya and Tanzania
- Drilling through the Anthropocene: fracking, land and expertise in contemporary Britain