Organizer: Master’s Program in International Relations (MAIR) at NYU
Type/Location: In Person / New York, NY
Description:
Join the MAIR Program and Dr. Arnaud Kurze for a talk on climate justice research.
Abstract:
Climate adaptation scholarship has moved from treating human mobility as a failure of adaptation to recognizing it as an adaptation strategy in its own right. Who is able to move, however, and on what terms, is rarely settled in national policy. It is settled in households, community institutions, and the gendered norms that govern both. This talk offers an overview of an ongoing research program on gender-sensitive climate mobility and National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), building on our recent comparative analysis of Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Fiji (Leppert, Almony, Kurze et al., Progress in Disaster Science, 2026) and on a four-country pilot study currently underway in Niger, the Central African Republic, Cabo Verde, and Lesotho. The first half sets out the conceptual apparatus: intersectional vulnerability, women's agency across the origin, transit, and destination stages of the mobility cycle, and the recurring gap between formally gender-responsive adaptation frameworks and what happens in implementation. It also makes the case for the interdisciplinary lens the problem demands, drawing on justice studies, migration and disaster research, gender studies, and policy analysis. The second half turns to research design, and to a question the pilot forced on us: how do you conduct rigorous qualitative fieldwork with policy actors in settings where bandwidth, security, travel, and institutional gatekeeping make the conventional interview impractical? Our answer has been WhatsApp, used not as a fallback but as a deliberate instrument: asynchronous, respondent-paced, trilingual (English, French, Portuguese), mixing typed exchanges, voice memos, bulk question sets, and documents returned as attachments. I will walk through what this produces as semi-structured data, how it moves through informed consent, pseudonymization, transcript cleaning, and a shared codebook into ATLAS.ti, and what it costs us analytically, before opening the floor.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Arnaud Kurze is Associate Professor of Justice Studies at Montclair State University and Director of Project AROS Lab, a collaboration between Montclair and US-based and international partners that promotes innovative research, experiential learning, and digital literacy. Since July 2025 he has been a non-resident Senior Fellow in the AI Governance programme at the Global Governance Institute in Brussels, Belgium.
Registration:
To attend the event in person, please register here.