Dr. Abdul Aijaz was selected to give the first Karan Graduate Lecture on Friday, Feb. 13. In his lecture, “Factional Ecologies: Environmental Imagination and Hydrosocial Futures in Punjab,” Dr. Aijaz examined how environmental imagination, political contestation and ecological transformation intersect in the canal-irrigated landscapes of Punjab amid a global environmental crisis.
Dr. Aijaz is a human geographer whose research brings together political ecology, environmental humanities and literary geographies to examine the entanglements of narrative, infrastructure and ecological crisis. He explores how global discourses of climate change are lived, contested and reimagined in the canal colonies of Punjab, Pakistan, an area shaped by the world’s largest contiguous irrigation system and a legacy of colonial hydrological engineering.