Women’s Narratives of Heat and Climate Resilience in Informal Settlements in Bangladesh and Uganda
Funder: the British Academy International Interdisciplinary Research Projects (2026-2028)
Project Overview
Extreme heat has emerged as one of the defining climate challenges of the 21st century, with profound consequences for human health, livelihoods, wellbeing, and ecosystems. Its impacts are felt most severely across the Global South, where rapid urbanisation, entrenched poverty, insecure housing, and insufficient adaptation resources compound vulnerability. For millions of women living in informal settlements across the Majority World, extreme heat is not a distant or abstract threat - it is an immediate, everyday reality that shapes how they work, care for their families, move through their communities, and survive. It erodes incomes, intensifies physical hardship, and forces impossible trade-offs between earning a living, staying safe, and meeting family needs.
This project centres on women in informal settlements in Chittagong, Bangladesh, and Hoima, Uganda - two rapidly growing secondary cities where temperatures are rising, infrastructure development remains uneven, and local realities are largely absent from global climate governance. In both contexts, women are central to sustaining households and community life, while also carrying deep, practical knowledge of adaptation strategies, coping mechanisms, and the everyday negotiation of environmental stress. This research seeks to document, elevate and translate that knowledge into action.
Country: Uganda & Bangladesh
Methodological Approach:
Grounded in feminist political ecology and climate justice approaches, this research understands women not as passive recipients of climate impacts, instead as active agents who shape responses to extreme heat through lived experience, creativity, and collective practice. Building on this foundation, the study adopts a participatory approach that positions women as knowledge producers, actively involved in shaping the research direction, thematic focus, and interpretation of their lived experiences. The research uses two complementary methods, Participatory Video-Voice and Geospatial Analysis, to connect lived experience with spatial patterns of heat risk.
This project brings together interdisciplinary collaboration across Geography, Anthropology, Education, Culture, Media and Performance, Social Epidemiology, and Global Health. It aims to co-produce grounded and action-oriented knowledge that supports more just and inclusive approaches to climate adaptation strategies
- Dr Raihana Ferdous, Principal Investigator, School of Animal, Rural and Environmental Sciences, NTU
- Dr Kellen Aganyira, Co-Investigator, College of Education and External Studies, Makerere University
- Dr Nasreen Akhter, Co-Investigator, Department of Anthropology, Chittagong University
- Dr Lucy Clarke, Co-Investigator, School of Animal, Rural and Environmental Sciences, NTU
- Professor Mazeda Hossain, Co-Investigator, the Eastern Africa Centre
- Professor Zoe Strachan, Co-Investigator, School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow