Abstract:

In this talk, Summer Gray will share insights from her recent book In the Shadow of the Seawall: Coastal Injustice and the Dilemma of Placekeeping (University of California Press), which casts critical light on climate adaptation in contexts of historical injustice and political oppression. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Guyana and the Maldives, Gray explores seawall entanglements and how competing logics of adaptation mirror and intensify political struggle on the ground. Seawalls are understood as both physical and symbolic boundaries around which desires for permanence collide through waves of oppression, attachments to place, and the anticipation of loss.