Decolonizing Sociology for Social Justice in Bangladesh: Delta Scholarship Matters.

Sociology is one of the major disciplines to foster understanding and protection of the livelihoods of local people. For instance, the discipline can describe the linkage between the environment and people and the effects of environmental change on local groups of people in a Delta country such as Bangladesh. However, the imperial philosophy of modernity that dominates the discipline and which is evident in the Sociology department at the University of Dhaka (UofD) underscores a considerable distance between academic conceptualizations of local perspectives on issues such as climatic change and the actual views of the local people of Bangladesh. Grounded on this assertion, this paper explores a question: What are the challenges for Sociology to represent Delta people and protect their social justice? The paper depends on the content analysis of sociological practices at UofD: imperial modernity and climatic adaptation. The findings of the paper argue that Sociology has been failing to represent the local meanings of climatic change due to the domination of imperial conceptualizations of modernity. Climate finance conceptualized by a Western perspective, and Sociology, as a discipline, fails to represent locally contextualized meanings related to climate finance; thus, the marginalized groups of people are increasingly facing survival challenges responsible for climate apartheid. Only a decolonized Sociology can challenge this imperial domination and play an effective role in reducing the discipline's gap of understanding of the local people and in promoting social justice in Delta Bangladesh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]