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Saleh Ahmed

Saleh Ahmed
  • Assistant Professor
  • Department of Sociology
  • PhD, University of Arizona, 2019
  • Berkey 407
  • 509 E. Circle Drive
  • East Lansing, MI 48823

CURRICULUM VITAE

Saleh Ahmed

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Saleh Ahmed is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University. As an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist, Dr. Ahmed’s research interest lies at the intersection of environment, development, and social justice.

He received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Arid Lands Resource Sciences with a minor in Global Change from the University of Arizona. He also has a Graduate Certificate in Science Communication from the same institution. Dr. Ahmed’s previous degrees are on Environmental Sociology (Utah State University, UT), Regional Science (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany), Spatial Planning (KTH–The Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden) and Urban and Rural Planning (Khulna University, Bangladesh).

Previously, he worked with news media, the Government of Bangladesh, World Bank, United Nations/International Labour Organization, and most recently, prior to Michigan State, Dr. Ahmed served as an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Service at Boise State University in Boise, ID.

CURRENT RESEARCH

Dr. Ahmed’s research agenda focuses on the human dimensions of global environmental change, particularly in resource-constrained and climate-vulnerable regions of the Global South. His recent work examines how structural inequalities and the legacies of colonization perpetuate injustice, shape social and environmental vulnerabilities, and create divergent adaptation pathways, including multiscalar security challenges. Broadly, this work falls within the following thematic areas:

  • Social Vulnerability to Climate Change, Adaptation Gaps, and Divergent Adaptation Pathways
  • Social-Ecological Change and Human Security Challenges among Refugees and Displaced Populations
  • Social-Ecological Traps, Borderlands, and Multiscalar Security Challenges 

Through his research, Dr. Ahmed seeks to bring the voices and experiences of marginalized populations into discussions of environmental, development, and sustainability policy. Inspired by Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk in Mi’kmaw)—an approach to learning and knowledge production that values both Indigenous and Western ways of knowing—he primarily employs a decolonial framework and community-based research approaches. His scholarship is grounded in qualitative and archival inquiry, which he complements with quantitative and geospatial methods to investigate complex social-environmental challenges across multiple scales.

AFFILIATED PROGRAMS

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS