ABSTRACT
The topic of displacement, particularly displacement due to environmental change and climate, has been gaining global attention. The predominant response to this projection of future displacements has been to seek ways to prevent it. But what does it mean to live with hazards? When we reimage the Indian Ocean worlds, how can we conceptualize its precarious, lively, and unstable margins? Can the process of becoming displaced be entangled with placemaking and other processes? This paper proposes a worlding called “displacemaking” to rethink the connections between displacement, hazards, and placemaking. By focusing on a case study of the emerging dried fish (shutki) industry connected to Kutubdia Para, a semi-permanent coastal settlement in southeast Bangladesh, and using shutki as a socio-material assemblage, this paper explores the possible “becomings,” contamination and movement of people and non-humans in the Indian Ocean worlds. In addition, the complex and changing relations of food, socio-economic status and connections between different regions are explored in order to contribute to a conceptualization of the indeterminacy and complexities of everyday placemaking and displacement in the margins of the changing, damaged world.
