Farrah Hasan
Farrah Hasan is a second year Master's student at the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs. She is qualitative researcher with an interest in climate migrant receiving cities, more narrowly in the Global South and particularly in Bangladesh. In the coming fall, she will begin her PhD in City & Regional Planning at UNC Chapel Hill. There, she plans to further her work on destination cities while further exploring the fields of critical geography, political ecology, and policy analysis.
Farrah's project summary:
This poster, “Salt Country, Water Scarcity,” is based on my Master’s thesis, “Resilient Destination Cities: Migrant Resettlement in Mongla, Bangladesh.” I did my fieldwork in the port city of Mongla, Bangladesh, where I conducted semi-structured interviews with flood induced and non-flood induced migrants. A major theme in this data was the struggle residents are facing with freshwater scarcity. The poster’s background is a photo I took of one of the city’s community-initiated water reservoirs with a watercolor filter applied to it, and the text are quotes from the interviews. Even the title is from language a migrant used when describing the city.
The quotes progressively reveal the nuanced experiences with water in Mongla. The first quote reveals the acceptance one migrant has come to terms with: freshwater is no longer a privilege to expect. In fact, he carries a sense of gratitude for even being provided for, regardless of the quality. The quote immediately preceding takes the same concept of “any water” and turns it from acceptance to defeat, portraying the scarcity of clean, drinkable water. This dichotomy presents often in the data: migrants do not often cite water as a desired intervention because they have come to acceptance, or defeat, in their situation. The focus then shifts to scarcity as a potentially solvable issue. Migrants were asked during their interview whether they knew of the crisis before arriving, and the overwhelming majority did and came anyway. The third quote portrays the hope some have carried to the city, that perhaps the crisis would be resolved. The lack of criticism could be emerging from the fact that the city has been making notable progress, such as the construction of the two aforementioned water reservoirs. The fourth quote emphasizes the nature of them: while the government executed the vision, the community initiated it. The crisis is a collective one, as is its confrontation. The fifth quote demonstrates the optimism and satisfaction one migrant has with the reservoir (which in Bangla, has been referred to as the word closer to “pond”). However, this quote is an exception, as optimism is not representative of this study’s sample. The sixth quote is a migrant’s response to the question, “Are you satisfied with the city’s services?” This poster returns where it started: acceptance and defeat; “they can live in so much unhappiness.” The closing quote is a response to the interview’s closing question, “Would you suggest to your co-villagers that they migrate to Mongla?” Most migrants said that they would, or that it was ultimately up to the person, so this migrant’s response was an exception. While it is similarly not representative of the larger sample, it portrays the magnitude of helplessness experienced by him. In an ideal world, this response alone should be sufficient to activate change.