Camelia Dewan

Kort presentation

Dr Camelia Dewan is an environmental anthropologist focusing on the anthropology of development. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and Environment from the University of London (SOAS/Birkbeck) and is an Associate Professor (Docent) in Cultural Anthropology examining the socio-environmental effects of shipbreaking in Bangladesh. Dr Dewan is the author of Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh (University of Washington Press, 2021).

Biografi

Dr Camelia Dewan is born and raised in Stockholm, but studied in the UK (University of Edinburgh, LSE) and obtained her PhD in Social Anthropology and Environment from the University of London in 2017. Her doctoral work consisted of intercollegiate and interdisciplinary collaboration between the Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies (Birkbeck College) and the Department of Social Anthropology (SOAS). Her thesis was awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute's Sutasoma Award. After her PhD, she was a lecturer in Environmental Anthropology and Political Ecology as well as Development Studies at Stockholm University. Between 2018-2023 she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo.

Forskning

Research interests

Thematic: Politics of Knowledge Production, environmental anthropology and political ecology, the anthropology of development, gender, the anthropology of climate change, food studies, agriculture, aquaculture, rural livelihoods and human-nonhuman relations. Covid-19 and pandemic responses.

Regional: South Asia, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan. Scandinavia, Norway, Sweden

Current and Past Projects

Toxic Foods: An Ethnographic Exploration of Processes of Food Contamination in Bangladesh

From 2025-2027 Dr Dewan is the PI for a new project funded by the Swedish Research Council Formas. Read more here

Climate Change and Misreading the Bengal Delta

Climate change is one of the key challenges of our time and large amounts of development aid are allocated towards adaptation in the Global South. Yet, to what extent do such projects address local needs and concerns? Dr Dewan's book Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh (2021, Seattle: University of Washington Press) decolonizes development narratives of Bangladesh as a ‘climate change victim’. It combines long-term ethnographic fieldwork and environmental history to show that the same modernising interventions that have produced severe environmental effects since colonial times are now repackaged as climate adaptation solutions. For example, rather than mitigating against rising sea levels, permanent embankments (seawalls) silt up important waterways causing damaging drainage-related floods. Similarly, other ‘adaptation’ projects like saline aquaculture and high-yield agriculture threaten soil fertility, biodiversity, and livelihoods. Engaging with multiple perspectives, from Bangladeshi development professionals to rural farmers and landless women, Camelia Dewan demonstrates that Bangladesh’s current environmental crisis goes beyond global warming, extending to coastal vulnerabilities that are entwined with underemployment, debt, and lack of universal public healthcare.

This book informs broader global issues by analysing how development actors’ use of climate change as a buzzword to attract donor funding fails to address the actual needs of the communities they intend to help, ultimately exacerbating climatic risks and structural inequalities.

Shipbreaking and Living with Toxic Development

Bangladesh exhibits one of the largest and most competitive shipbreaking industries in the world and her current project deconstructs the current discourses surrounding the shipbreaking and recycling industries where Bangladeshi workers are cast as exploited victims. The study ethnographically explores the everyday lives of workers in the end-cycle of containerships - from those breaking the ships to those employed in re-rolling mills - to gain a greater understanding of how they negotiate opportunities and constraints in a context of structural precarity and un(der)employment. It engages with wider discussions of increasingly precarious forms of labour in the current economic system and examines how global capitalist interests in shipbreaking interact/co-exist with local modes of economic production and labour (recycling, national steel for construction) and look at the political, economic and social relations embedded in these interactions. This includes identifying the relations, tensions and commonalities between migrant shipbreaking workers, yard owners, re-rolling mills and local residents. Departing from the latest environmental ethnographies on ‘biosocial becomings’ (Ingold and Pálsson 2013), the study also explores how the precarious livelihoods of residents and labourers are entangled with the environment and the multiple species contained within its waters and soils that may have been affected by shipbreaking (fishing, cultivation, health).

Dr Dewan has been invited to hold the 2026 Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture at the University of Rochester to present this research, which she is currently finalising into her second monograph.