On November 13, FMST Professor Neel Ahuja was featured in a talk presented by the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee - "From Insecurity to Adaptation: Race, Human Capital, and the Figure of the Climate Refugee."
Ahuja shared portions of his forthcoming book: Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century. His talk discussed public images of climate change—particularly those focused on the problem of coastal flooding in Bangladesh—and how they reflect the manner by which both states and emerging green security formations reconfigure inequalities generated by financial, development, and labor policies in terms of environmental processes. As such, the presentation contends that understanding inter-Asian labor and energy flows are crucial for rethinking how climate migration discourse has configured the racialized migrant body as a site of both vulnerability and hope in the wake of the collapse of international carbon mitigation agreements. Ahuja was joined in conversation by Aimee Bahng from Pomona College.
View the video here.
Neel Ahuja is associate professor of Feminist Studies and a core faculty member in the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program at UC-Santa Cruz. He is the author of Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (Duke University Press, 2016).
Aimee Bahng is associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Pomona College. She is the author of Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Duke University Press, 2018) and co-editor of the “Transpacific Futurities” special issue of Journal of Asian American Studies(2017). She has published articles on transnational Asian/American speculative fiction and financialization in Journal of American Studies (2015), Techno-Orientalism (Rutgers University Press, 2015), and MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the U.S. (2008).
