Raka Sen

Raka Sen is an assistant professor in Sociology at Arizona State University’s Social Justice and Human Rights program. She completed her PhD in the sociology program at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include the sociology of climate change, labor, gender, and disaster.

Raka’s research considers how climate change adaptation in the Indian and Bangladeshi Sundarbans is fundamentally reshaping everyday lives in the region. She looks at how everyday adjustments in peoples lives are in fact a form of climate change adaptation. She has published on this work in Ecology & Society, Global Environmental Change, and Sociological Forum. She is currently developing this work into a book that takes a grounded, ethnographic view of social life changed by climate change in the Sundarbans.

Prior to beginning her graduate study, Raka was a Researcher at Rebuild By Design, a resilience initiative launched after Hurricane Sandy. At Rebuild she worked on a study of managed retreat in the Sandy region and studied how long term infrastructure projects develop over time. She holds a B.A. in Sociology, Urban Design & Architecture Studies from New York University.