**Due to the winter storm continuing to disrupt transportation, we have cancelled Dr. Pronoy Rai's lecture. We will reschedule this event to a later date.**
Please join the Institute for Asian Studies for a lecture by Pronoy Rai, which examines adaptation to climate change in a village in Maharashtra state in western India from the lens of its impact on agrarian change, landless agricultural laborers, and pre-existing rural class and caste relations. While geographers have been interested in the politics of adaptation, labor has been relatively absent in these discussions. Climate change has been missing from the geographies of labor literature despite the central remit of the body of knowledge to examine how labor and capital reconstitute each other across space. In this research, Rai draws on geographic literature on climate adaptation and climate justice and a qualitative study conducted among landholding farmers and returnee and non-migrant agricultural laborers in Yavatmal district in the drylands of western India during summer 2019 to make three preliminary claims: 1) climate change and agrarian change have detrimental impacts on agrarian environments, labor, and livelihoods; 2) in agrarian landscapes, adaptation is a political process that entails labor exploitation as climate change has differential impacts on a diverse agricultural population; 3) climate injustices must be made legible and resonant by linking them with broader social oppressions, such as in Yavatmal, where climate injustice manifests as deepening class and caste-based conflicts.
Pronoy Rai is an assistant professor of International and Global Studies at Portland State University. He is a human geographer of labor migration, agrarian change, climate change, and gender and sexuality, with a regional focus on India and the Portland metropolitan area. Dr. Rai’s recent projects have focused on the human geography of climate, agrarian, and social change in rural western India and immigrants’ experience during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Portland metropolitan area. Pronoy Rai serves as a visiting faculty in social sciences at the Gawande Mahavidyalaya, a rural liberal arts college in western India. At PSU, Dr. Rai also affiliated with the Department of Geography, School of the Environment, Institute for Sustainable Solutions, and the Institute for Asian Studies. He is a recipient of the 2021 Craig Wollner Junior Faculty Award from PSU College of Urban and Public Affairs, and the 2020 Emerging Scholar Award and 2019 J. Warren Nystrom Award from the American Association of Geographers. Pronoy Rai has a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Illinois.