Ishrat Jahan

The making of health vulnerability in the climate crisis: Understanding the construction of the gendered nature climate change induced health risks among women in rural communities in southwestern Bangladesh

Department of Health, Ethics and Society, Research institute CAPHRI, Maastricht University

Supervisors: dr. Olga Zvonareva, dr. Mohammed Nadiruzzaman

Background

Ishrat Jahan is a PhD candidate at the Care and Public Health Research Institute (CAPHRI), Maastricht University and holds a Master’s in Climate Change and Development from Independent University Bangladesh through a NORHAD funded Fellowship (COLOCAL). Along with a Bachelor of Social Sciences in Economics from BRAC University, she holds 6+ years of qualitative research experience from her work as a researcher in public health focusing on gender justice, reproductive health, and climate change.

Content

While health impacts are attributed to climate change– there is limited focus on how ‘climate induced health vulnerabilities’ as a site of public health interventions, as well as in the lived experiences of women in rural and ‘climate-vulnerable’ communities become shaped. In the Bangladesh context, the knowledge flows at local and national levels, the reduction of vulnerability within climate change and disaster risk development work and discourse has been a key area of focus in policy and practice for decades, yet little attention is paid to how its construction as a category occurs. Furthermore, critical attention need to be paid to how policy and practice constructions of vulnerability shape the lives of those that it directly seeks to eradicate vulnerability for – marginalised and often minority groups in the southern region of the country. As such this thesis asks the question – what are the tensions that arise between established concepts and measures of vulnerabilities and embodied experience of health for women along the axes of power and privilege in the context of climate vulnerability in Bangladesh?