Negotiating Identities beyond Disaster and Resilience among Migrants from the Sundarbans, India

My doctoral research aims to interrogate the interactions of circular labour mobilities, embedded aspirations and environmental (im)mobilities through documenting the movements of internal labour migrants from villages in Indian Sundarbans to their various forms of worksites within India. In asking, why move and how, the study examines the decisions informing the mobilities from the environmentally fragile deltaic islands, migrant routes and migrant returns to crucially understand the continuous forms of precarities impacting the migrant lives permanently circling home, social ties, informality and host societies. Thus, in understanding the multiple local negotiations by migrants and their emic thoughts to lead life in wellness circumventing precariousness, I have been interested to evidence their agency to organise into informal labour networks as well as autonomous labour migration and show apparent patterns of differentiated (im)mobilities from the Indian Sundarbans.