Samina Luthfa (DPhil, Oxford) is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Dhaka and a cultural activist who also identifies herself as an activist researcher. Her interests include environmental justice movements, political ecology, feminism and media. She has written books, book chapters, and articles on indigenous identity, the environmental justice movement, the Phulbari movement, the Sundarbans movement, the rights of women workers, theater artists, and mandi farmers and ‘Tiger Widows’, as well as on the patterns of their negotiations and struggles. She is the co-author of the book Vulnerable Empowerment: Capabilities and Vulnerabilities of Female Garment Workers of Bangladesh (2016) and the co-editor of the book The Bangladesh Environmental Humanities Reader (2022).

She recently completed an international and inter-university research project on climate change and the garment industry in Bangladesh as a senior research fellow of the BRAC University. Currently she is working on slow fashion, ensuring food safety in fish value chains, workers’ rights in the apparel industry, environmental justice movement in South Asia and aftermath of July Uprising in Bangladesh. She is currently working as a co-editor of a volume analyzing the path to transitional justice and democracy post- July Uprising. She is also leading a project that is identifying and documenting women participants in the Uprising. She has worked as the Athena Swan Gender researcher at the University of Oxford, and Gender Advisor in a Multi-country project by FSIL, USA. She also taught sociology at the Bangladesh Agricultural University and Independent University, Bangladesh.