Diffracting Young People’s Perceptions and Agency on Adaptation to Climate Change in Bangladesh: Through Socioecological, Posthuman, and Postcolonial Positioning

• In Event: Climate Country: Dismantling and Co-Constructing Climate Change Education on/With Country

Abstract

Bangladesh is extremely vulnerable to climate change and Bangladeshi children and young people witness immense changes taking place in their everyday lives due to the catastrophic impacts of climatehood (climate change and childhood). Local indigenous knowledge is key to addressing environmental problems of majority countries despite being disrupted and suppressed by colonisation and modernisation (Somerville and Hickey 2017). This paper explores Bangladeshi young people’s perceptions and agency towards climatehood, and it employs a child and youth framed methodology where young people carry out visual ethnographic research alongside the university researcher. In this research, four young people (aged from 14 to 16) in urban and rural Bangladesh give voice to their knowledge, beliefs, and practices on adaptation to climatehood through interviews, group discussions, photographs, and drawings. The theoretical underpinnings of this study are socioecology, posthumanism, and postcolonialism and analysis involves a diffractive process where it cuts across, past, present, and future Bangladesh. The narratives, drawings, and photos, provide rich insight into young people’s ecological, cultural, educational, and religious responses and activities to climatehood, in Bangladesh.

Authors

• Marianne Ruth Logan, Southern Cross University

• Ferdousi A. Khatun, NAEM