Decolonizing Climate Change from the Ground Up: Labor as Critical Method in the Agrarian Worlds

• In Event: Critical Epistemologies of the Global South (Co-sponsored by Global and Transnational Sociology Section)

Abstract

Climate change is a geographically variegated, historically rooted, and sociologically complex phenomenon. Yet dominant policy frameworks reduce this complexity to atmospheric carbon, technological transitions, and planetary governance. By universalizing transition pathways for a fully proletarianized labor, they bypass land-dependent classes, agrarian differentiations, migration, and social reproductive burdens in the Global South. This paper advances a relational approach that shifts the unit of analysis from climate impacts or policy regimes to differentiated labor processes and their reorganization.
Empirically, the paper draws on comparative ethnographic fieldwork in the northern Indian Himalayas and the Sundarbans delta spanning India and Bangladesh. Rather than treating these as zones of vulnerability defined by extreme events and technical adaptation, we show how the climate crisis reorganizes crop patterns, migration, social reproduction, and caste- and gender-based hierarchies as processes deeply embedded in relations of labor. These regions function as theory-generating locations through which a decolonial method emerges and climate change becomes knowable through relations of labor.
Attending to these relations of labor in the agrarian worlds, therefore, constitutes a subaltern epistemological move and advances a decolonial methodological position that is emic, takes historical context into account, and is materially grounded. Decolonial methodology here is also a theory of knowledge production: it relocates empirical positions of climate theory in agrarian world, displaces colonial hierarchies that universalize analytical categories, redistributes epistemic authority and makes scholarship accountable to communities and lifeworlds from which it emerges. Labor, then, as a lived relation rather than an abstract category, becomes a site through which such epistemic and methodological reorientation is made possible.

Authors

• Surabhi Pant, SUNY-Buffalo

• Raka Sen, Assistant Professor, School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Arizona State University