Sep 27: Decolonizing Climate Coloniality

Sep 27, 2022
  • 1pm
  • Location:
    xʷθəθiqətəm
    Place of Many Trees
    Liu Institute for Global Issues
    6476 Marine Drive
    Vancouver, BC

A public talk by Dr. Farhana Sultana presented by The Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, The Centre for Climate Justice and The Centre for India and South Asia Research.


Colonialism haunts the past, present, and future through climate. Legacies of imperial violence live on not only exacerbating environmental degradations but increased climate-induced disasters. 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 possibilities through global racial capitalism, colonial dispossessions, and climate debts. Decolonizing climate needs to address the complexities of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, international development, and geopolitics that contribute to the reproduction of ongoing colonialities through existing global governance structures, discursive framings, imagined solutions, and interventions. This requires addressing both epistemic violences and material outcomes for climate justice.

Dr. Farhana Sultana
Dr. Farhana Sultana is a Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University, where she is also the Research Director for Environmental Collaboration and Conflicts at the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflicts and Collaboration (PARCC). Dr. Sultana is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary scholar of political ecology, water governance, climate change, post‐colonial development, social and environmental justice, decolonizing knowledge, and transnational feminisms. Her research and scholar-activism draw from her experiences of having lived and worked on three continents as well as from her backgrounds in the natural sciences, social sciences, and policy experience. Prior to joining Syracuse, she taught at King’s College London and worked at United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Author of several dozen publications, her recent books are “The Right to Water: Politics, Governance and Social Struggles” (2012), “Eating, Drinking: Surviving” (2016) and “Water Politics: Governance, Justice, and the Right to Water” (2020). Dr. Sultana graduated Cum Laude from Princeton University (in Geosciences and Environmental Studies) and obtained her Masters and PhD (in Geography) from the University of Minnesota, where she was a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow. She was awarded the Glenda Laws Award from the American Association of Geographers for “outstanding contributions to geographic research on social issues” in 2019.