Nikhil Deb

California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Based in

United States
North America

Nikhil Deb is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Shahjalal University (Bangladesh) and Murray State University. He studies how political and economic activities typically favor some human groups at the expense of other currently living or future human groups or the environment. Specifically, he examines whether the change in the governance of the global South, i.e., transition to neoliberalism, has contributed to environmental and social problems in marginalized locales, with particular attention to India and Bangladesh, the country of his origin. While his research in India shows how the neoliberal turn in Indian governance played a crucial role in the production of many lingering consequences, evident in the 1984 Bhopal catastrophe in Bhopal, India, his research in Bangladesh examines the ways in which neoliberal development projects in southern deltaic Bangladesh, an area exceptionally vulnerable to and an experimental laboratory of climate change, reproduce the vulnerability of many land-depended communities. His research is primarily ethnographic.