REAL Seminar by Farhana Sultana

The REAL-Postgrowth project (Post-growth – REAL – A Post-Growth Deal) is excited to announce the following workshop “Decolonizing the Post-Growth Imagination: A Conversation” with Farhana Sultana.

Title: "Decolonizing the Post-Growth Imagination: A Conversation”

Speaker: Farhana Sultana, Professor of Geography & Environment at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University

• Date: Tuesday, July 7th 2026
• Time: 11 h
• Venue: Sala Montseny (Z/022 & Z/023) ICTA-UAB

The workshop will be dialogic and discussion-based (1.5 hours), opening with brief framing remarks before moving into conversation about participants' research. An optional background reading is available for those who wish to engage with it ahead of time: Sultana, F. (2025). "Repairing Epistemic Injustice and Loss in the Era of Climate Coloniality." GEO: Geography and Environment 12(2). Read online

To help orient the conversation, two questions are shared in advance:  

1. Climate governance mechanisms – from loss and damage frameworks to planetary boundaries to conservation targets – make consequential decisions about whose futures matter and whose knowledge of harm and loss is legible. My work argues that epistemic injustice is structurally built into these mechanisms, not an accidental feature that better inclusion can fix. What does that look like in your research, and what would genuine epistemic repair actually require, not at the margins, but architecturally?

2. Degrowth and post-growth scholarship has gotten better at naming the colonial question. But there is a difference between incorporating a critique into an existing framework and genuinely building from different epistemological and political foundations. If the knowledge systems and political demands of the Global Majority were not an add-on but constitutive (i.e. not consulted but load-bearing), what would that demand of our research projects and existing research frameworks/alliances?

Farhana Sultana is Professor of Geography & Environment at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University, and an internationally recognized scholar in political ecology, climate justice, water governance, decolonizing knowledge, and transnational feminisms. She is the author of Confronting Climate Coloniality (2024).