How do notions and specificities of “place” allow ethnographers to grapple with the entangled relationships between land, labor, and nature? What can be learned about climate change from the changing relationships between laborers and their lands? What complications does ethnographic attention to buffer zones create in our understandings of the anthropocene and its roots? By analyzing spaces that blur the boundaries between land and water, industrial and rural, inhabitable and uninhabitable, this panel dives deeply into what labor relations look like in light of a changing climate. From the Lakshadweep Islands and Brahmaputra River Basin in India, Sundarbans Forest in India and Bangladesh, West Timor in Indonesia, Nayarit in Mexico and Minas Gerais in Brazil, these presentations investigate place and place attachments in order to uncover more about the localized meanings and experiences of climate change in these places.

 Keywords: agricultural relations, salinity, buffer zones, environmental racism, & development.

Talks & Panelists:

• Salt in Excess: Dissolving the Anthropocene Troubles of Water on Lakshadweep Islands in India, Lakshmi Pradeep Rajeswary (she/her), National University of Singapore

• Industrial Patchwork: Assembling Indonesian Saltscapes, Gillian Bogart (she/they), University of California, Santa Cruz

• Yearning for Reality: Locality, Materiality, and Conscientitização in the Climate Crisis, Jonathan Wald (he/him), McGill University

• Adaptation Labor: Labor and Climate Change in the Sundarbans, Raka Sen (she/her), University of Pennsylvania

• Fluid Lives in Turbulent Waters: The Temporalities of Infrastructure in Brahmaputra Basin, Parag Jyoti Saikia (He/Him/His), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Theorizing Change: Land and Labor in Coamiles, Mexico. Tannya Islas (she/her), University of California, Irvine

Discussant: Dr. Wendy Wolford, Cornell University
Moderated by Raka Sen