Delta Futures: Time, Territory, and Capture on a Climate Frontier — With Jason Cons
- Jason Cons Associate Professor of Anthropology
Join us for an engaging discussion with Jason Cons, Associate Professor of Anthropology at UT Austin, as he presents his latest book, Delta Futures: Time, Territory, and Capture on a Climate Frontier (University of California Press, 2025). The book offers an insightful exploration of the diverse and often contradictory visions shaping the climate futures of the Bengal Delta.
More about Delta Futures:
Delta Futures explores the competing visions of the future that are crowding into the Bengal Delta’s imperiled present and vying for control of its ecologically vulnerable terrain. In Bangladesh’s southwest, development programs that imagine the delta as a security threat unfold on the same ground as initiatives that frame the delta as a conservation zone and as projects that see the delta’s rivers and ports as engines for industrial growth. In the book, Cons explores how these competing futures are being brought to life: how they are experienced, understood, and contested by those who live and work in the delta, and the often surprising entanglements they engender—between dredgers and embankments, tigers and tiger prawns, fishermen and forest bandits, and more. These future visions produce the delta as a “climate frontier,” a zone where opportunity, expropriation, and risk in the present are increasingly framed in relation to disparate visions of the delta’s climate-affected future.
Praise for Delta Futures
“Jason Cons’s ethnography of Bangladesh’s Sundarbans is filled with fascinating insights into the multiple and often contradictory entanglements of global warming, crime, politics, development, and projected ‘climate solutions.’ This important work presents a detailed, ground-level portrait of the region’s ongoing transformation, examining the ways in which climate change, economic uncertainty, and historical legacies are shaping its future.” Amitav Ghosh, author of Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories
“Both synoptic and ethnographic, Delta Futures illustrates how the Bengal Delta and its inhabitants are being ‘captured’ by particular actors and imaginations, struggling to navigate the ‘siltscape’ with ever smaller margins between climate frontier futures. A very powerful book.”—Franz Krause, author of Thinking Like a River: An Anthropology of Water and Its Uses along the Kemi River, Northern Finland
“In this creative and original work, Cons makes the reader think more closely about how climate change is remaking a place that could be considered a ‘sentinel space’ for the planetary crisis, and how people are living through it.”—Nayanika Mathur, author of Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene
About Professor Cons
Jason Cons works on borders in South Asia, climate and agrarian change, and rural development. He has conducted extensive research in Bangladesh on a range of issues including: climate security, disputed territory along the India-Bangladesh border, the impacts of shrimp aquaculture in coastal areas, and the politics of development. His current research is situated in the Sundarbans and the Southwest Delta region of Bangladesh. Addressing climate change related development, conservation, industrialization, piracy, and security, it explores the ways that imaginations of future climate change are shaping the delta and the India-Bangladesh border in the present.
Cons’s first book, Sensitive Space: Fragmented Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border, was published by the University of Washington Press in 2016. It explores questions of territory, belonging, and borders through an ethnography of enclaves (pieces of India inside of Bangladesh and vice versa) along the India-Bangladesh border. More recently, he is the co-editor of a volume titled Frontier Assemblages: The Emergent Politics of Resource Frontiers in Asia for Wiley’s Antipode Book Series. He is an editor of South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies and part of the Limn Editorial Collective.
Cons teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the anthropology of the state, political ecology, environmental anthropology, the anthropology of security, social theory, and the anthropology of development. You can find more of his work at: jasoncons.net.