Mohammad Rakibul Hasan
The Centre for Refugee Studies is pleased to announce that Mohammad Rakibul Hasan has received the 2025 Anthony Richmond Scholarship. This scholarship recognizes promising graduate student research on the intersections of forced migration and environmental changes, such as climate change, flooding, drought, forest fires, and land or sanitary degradation.
Mohammad is an MA candidate at the Department of Anthropology, York University. He received his bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Before coming to York, he held research positions at BRAC University and Aspire to Innovate (a2i) program, both in Bangladesh. His research interests build on the growing body of literature on political ecology, climate change, climate migration, and climate and environmental justice. He aims to provide critical anthropological perspectives on how economic and environmental factors shape marginalized communities’ future by enforcing the structural inequalities embedded in global capitalism.
Mohammad's MA research at York investigates how internally displaced climate migrants in Bangladesh adapt and integrate into the urban labor force, particularly in the Ready-Made Garment (RMG) industry. Through ethnographic fieldwork in the capital city Dhaka’s industrial area, he traces the trajectories of displaced rural populations- how they transitioned from their displacement into urban informal settlements and eventually into the formalized yet exploitative RMG workforce. The research empirically examines how climate change-induced dispossession is appropriated under neoliberal economic logic to create a surplus labor force for global capital. However, through its focus on how displaced populations navigate precarious working and living conditions without adequate support from the state, the research emphasizes their agency within systemic precarity. By integrating anthropological political economy with the critique of neoliberalism the research puts forward an alternative narrative that contradicts the dominant narratives of passive victimhood spun around global warming and climate change. Instead, it offers a grounded, critical analysis of how state policies, climate change adaptation regimes, and capitalist developmentalism jointly shape forced migration and labor exploitation. He hopes that the research will contribute to the growing discourse on climate migration and its relationship with labor exploitation in the Global South and offer insights that can inform more humane and effective policy interventions.