Sayantika Chakraborty, a fourth year PhD candidate in the Department, won the Public Humanities Incubator Award and Edward Guiliano Global Fellowship by the Modern Language Association of America in the Fall of 2024 and was honored at the 2025 convention in New Orleans for her work in the public environmental humanities. Sayantika’s dissertation is on anthropogenic climate change and its impact on female climate migrants from minority communities in India. In her research, she addresses how the normative climate, conflict, and refugee/migrant discourses are usually geared towards a male-coded approach of managing climate change. Against such decontextualized, gendered representations of climate change, she interprets the female climate migrant experience in the global South as impacted by intersectional factors, such as colonialism, gender, race, and capitalism.
Her research is also shaped by her commitment to the climate migrant community and has personal roots, as she grew up listening to stories from her grandmother, a climate refugee herself, that highlighted the absence of female perspectives in the mainstream climate migration stories. She was also the recipient of the Tedder Doctoral Family Award in Spring 2024, by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, UF, as well as the highly competitive DAAD short term research grant, a German federal fund. As a part of this fellowship, she will be a visiting fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for the Environment and Society in Munich in the Summer/Fall of 2025. At the RCC, she will collaborate with other visiting fellows and develop a public environmental humanities project; a video documentary highlighting the climate crisis stories from the indigenous communities in the global South and the US South.