S10E10 - India, Climate Fiction & Disasters

Episode overview

Episode 10 continues the season's regional focus with a conversation grounded in India and the wider Global South, bringing together a scholar of gender, trauma, and displacement and a development researcher working across climate change, migration, and disasters. The episode explores how literature, capability theory, and self-reflective practice reshape how disaster scholars understand resistance, complicity, and care.

Hosts

• Jason von Meding
• Ksenia Chmutina

Guests

• Sneha Krishnan — Professor, O.P. Jindal Global University; interdisciplinary scholar of environment, humanitarian response, and public health, with a focus on gender-sensitive, trauma-informed approaches to displacement
• Claudia Santos — researcher and practitioner working across climate change, migration, development, and disasters; co-founder of The Upstand, a social impact agency built on relational, community-centered methods

Key themes

• Fiction, dissent, and the politics of storytelling
• Capabilities, freedom, and the construction of vulnerability
• Resistance as a condition for justice
• Complicity, power, and the "double agent" researcher
• Care, sensitivity, and knowing when (not) to act
• Institutional incentives versus community needs
• Creative and participatory research methods
• Hope, courage, and collective responsibility

Core discussion highlights

• Sneha Krishnan discusses Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh, arguing that fiction and dissent are central to disaster scholarship — Roy's prosecution for her activism and Ghosh's framing of the climate crisis as a "crisis of imagination" both push the field to reckon with who gets to tell stories about disaster and its long aftermath.
• Krishnan reflects on reading and creative expression — including poetry and counter-mapping — as forms of solidarity and self-care that resist the narrow evidentiary standards imposed on disaster research.
• Claudia Santos discusses Amartya Sen's capability approach, drawing on her PhD research in Guinea-Bissau to argue that deprivation of basic freedoms, not climate hazards alone, shapes who is able to move, stay, or survive a disaster.
• Santos argues that justice in disaster scholarship depends on resistance, describing researcher self-reflection, "double agent" institutional work, and small acts like reframing language in official reports as legitimate forms of activism.
• The conversation surfaces a recurring tension: institutional funding structures reward quantifiable, depoliticized research, while researchers themselves remain complicit in extractive practices that produce little benefit for the communities they study.
• Both guests close by expressing hope grounded in creative and participatory methods, courage in the face of institutional pressure, and collective — rather than individual — responsibility for structural change.