Document Type

Honors Project

Publication Date

6-13-2025

Abstract

This thesis explores the resilience strategies narrated by women and girls displaced by climate change and subjected to child marriage in Bangladesh. Centering their voices and lived experiences, it highlights the intricate, often invisible methods through which these women navigate the intersectional precarity of environmental displacement, gender norms, and socio-economic marginalization. Through qualitative fieldwork conducted in riverine islands (chars), urban informal settlements, and government resettlement sites, the study foregrounds community practices like adda (social storytelling), mutual caregiving, informal healthcare, bodily negotiations, and strategic silence. Challenging dominant narratives of passive victimhood, it reveals resilience as relational, iterative, and context-specific acts rooted in collective care, cultural continuity, and everyday adaptation. Drawing on feminist theory, intersectionality, and climate justice frameworks, the paper redefines resilience from the perspective of marginalized women actively responding to and surviving complex layers of vulnerability in a changing climate.

Level of Honors

magna cum laude

Department

Government

Advisor

Ameya Balsekar

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