PhD Human Geography and Urban Studies 'Seasonal Labour Migration from Satkhira, Bangladesh to Urban and Peri-Urban Spaces: A form of In-/Ex-Situ Envir

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This PhD project explores seasonal labour migration from Satkhira, Bangladesh to urban and peri-urban spaces within the country. It seeks to contextualise seasonal labour migration from the region in relation to histories of land use change, dispossession, environmental hazards and changes in the landscape and the effect these factors have on livelihood options in the region. The project builds on a growing literature that decentres climate as the cause of environmental change in coastal Bangladesh and shifts focus to infrastructure, land use change, dispossession, and development regimes. By utilising a multi-sited and mobile ethnographic approach, this research will trace how changes in livelihood opportunities in the sending location translate into seasonal labour migrants finding livelihoods in urban and peri-urban locations. Aiming to give more holistic insights into the lives, motivations and relationships that shape patterns of rural to urban mobility from environmentally changing regions of Bangladesh while drawing from literature related to political ecology, climate/environmental mobilities and adaptation. A mobile and multi-sited ethnographic approach was selected for its utility in understanding migration as a multi-sited process connected to various relationships in travel, and the sending and receiving location. This is influenced by a range of scholarship within the mobilities paradigm that highlights the advantages mobile and multi-sited ethnographies offer in providing nuance in an interconnected and globalised world. This approach offers opportunities to better understand migration in Bangladesh as previous research has largely focused on migration in the context of the sending or receiving location. Further, this research seeks to address the limited empirical research that interrogates migration in relation to concepts like environmental displacement, and climate adaptive migration in Bangladesh. In recent years, political ecologists such as Camelia Dewan and Kasia Paprocki have highlighted how complex social, political, and economic histories in coastal Bangladesh contribute to environmental change. These factors and resulting environmental change led to changing patterns of livelihood opportunities for inhabitants and can result in migration. This project contributes to this literature by tracing mobility from the perspective of seasonal labour migrants, exploring how the opportunities to migrate are shaped by international development, urbanisation, and global political economy. Bringing into view their experiences of changes in place and connecting this to a growing body of research that seeks to de-exceptionalise displacement. This will facilitate critically appraising concepts like climate adaptive migration, climate migration and environmental displacement that have become a subject of much debate in academic and policy discussions of climate futures. Led by the movements of seasonal labour migrants, this project has the potential to give new insights to urban livelihoods such as work in brick fields that have received comparatively little scholarly attention in Bangladesh compared to India. This research builds on two months of field research done in Satkhira for my master's thesis at the University of Sussex, which identified the opportunities a project like this presented in better contextualising internal migration in Bangladesh and to contribute to a broader literature that seeks to better understand the relationship between environmental change, livelihoods, and migration.