JEASURK YANG

Ph.D. Student

Research Title: Uneven Climate Change Adaptation and the Materiality of Waste in Urban Slums of Jakarta
Research Group: Tropical Environmental Change (TEC)
Thesis Advisor: Dr Miles Kenney-Lazar
Co-Advisor: Prof David Taylor

The effects of climate change on the urban poor in the Global South raise profound concerns when their increasing number and socioeconomic vulnerabilities are taken into consideration. The urban poor are forced to live at the margins of urban slums which are especially vulnerable to the impacts of extreme climatic events. The impacts of such events are exacerbated by local political economic conditions in urban slums such as low adaptive capacities and inadequate amenities. In this context, much attention has been given to political ecologies of climate change adaptation of the urban poor.

Framed within urban political ecology (UPE), my doctoral research aims to materialize the adaptation of the urban poor by examining the political ecology and materiality of waste as a non-human entity embedded in urbanized space. In short, I explore how the materiality of waste affects the unevenness of climate change adaptation in urban slums of the Global South with a case study of Jakarta, Indonesia. Theoretically, I stage a dialectic approach between political economy and new materialism of UPE, in which socio-nature is co-constituted both by capital’s structural processes and non-humans’ dynamic processes. This research raises the need for supplementing political economic critiques against socio-ecological inequalities with more than-human understandings of climate change and urbanization in the Global South.