Open Lecture Prof. dr. Farhana Sultana - Climate Coloniality and the University

Climate Coloniality and the University: Forging Intersectional Pathways in Praxis and Pedagogy is an open lecture by Prof. dr. Farhana Sultana (Syracuse University, USA). 
This lecture considers climate breakdown in its alignment to centuries of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and uneven development. 
Farhana Sultana presents what climate coloniality means as a framework, how intersectional gender dynamics are constitutive of it rather than parallel to it, and what successful strategies higher education institutions can involve themselves in to support decolonizing praxis, pedagogy, and research. 

Climate breakdown is considered inequitably borne across intersectionally gendered, racialized, and classed bodies globally.
Climate coloniality names this matrix and the ways it continues to operate through climate impacts, climate governance, and the very knowledge systems we use to make sense of the crisis. 
Universities are not outside these entanglements. Curricula, citation practices, research partnerships, and institutional cultures all carry colonial legacies that must be confronted if scholarship is to support meaningful justice.

Prof. dr. Farhana Sultana recently edited Confronting Climate Coloniality: Decolonizing Pathways for Climate Justice.
She is an internationally renown interdisciplinary scholar on climate justice, water governance, political ecology, development geography, and decolonizing knowledge. Her work is grounded in critical, feminist, and anti-colonial epistemologies and methodologies, especially interested in issues of feminist fieldwork, positionality, power relations, decolonizing academia, and research ethics.
She will visit WUR 24-25 June as follow-up on her online keynote at the symposium Gender+ Equality in Academia and Research, 22 April 2026.

Farhana Sultana’s visit is made possible by:
* Financial support of WASS, WUR staff group on decolonizing education, WUR Gender+ Equality Plan, SSG-KTI and ESG-WRM.
* Organisers Margreet van der Burg (SSG-KTI), Birgit Boogaard (SSG-KTI) and Bert Bruins (ESG-WRM)