The Centre for Refugee Studies is delighted to announce that Mara Mahmud has received the 2022 Anthony Richmond Scholarship. This scholarship recognizes promising graduate student research on the intersections of forced migration and environmental changes, such as climate change, flooding, drought, forest fires, and land or sanitary degradation.
Mara is an MA candidate in the Faculty of Environmental Studies and Urban Change. Her research is focused on the intersection of climate change and migration, and how this relationship plays out within the context of urban development in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Her intention is to produce a documentary exploring the current domestic efforts to support low-income migrants who end up living in slums and other informal settlements within the urban context. The purpose of this research to both establish an understanding of development at the local level in lieu of challenges posed by climate change, as well as to highlight where alternative methods of urban planning and development may be more effective in better engaging with and supporting the needs of those low-income slum communities.
This research seeks to unpack longstanding embedded colonial attitudes that appear within the development context headed by Western entities like NGOs, Governmental Organisations, and international aid funds.
Ultimately, this research seeks to provide a meaningful contribution to the mounting discourse around best approaches to managing climate change and its subsequent crises through the minds and perspective of diverse groups around the planet. A commitment to moving away from hegemonic Western ideals of good development and effective climate action and making room for alternative takes and context-appropriate approaches.
