www.livingwiththejamuna.com

We recently had the opportunity to do some serious work on our bibliography, and a new version is now available on our References & Links page. Here’s what’s new:

1. We comprehensively searched relevant reference databases and the Internet, as well as citations listed in contemporary studies.We also included a number of references otherwise unknown to us provided by others through our Contact page; thanks to those who contributed!

2. We removed references deemed too weakly linked to the key topics of riverbank erosion and displacement in Bangladesh.

3. We tried as best as was practical to provide complete references in each instance, including full author names.

4. All 692 references were manually edited to (more or less) conform to the same style. A bit more work is required here, and making everything fully conform and ensuring there are no typos left must await the next revision.

We believe the present version of the bibliography is very comprehensive and that it must now include nearly every relevant source in English. Some studies have no doubt escaped our attention, and if you know of any please do send them along. We hope this bibliography is helpful; if it is, we’d appreciate it being cited if used.

One of our most popular web pages has turned out to be our always-expanding list of references and links relating to riverbank erosion and flood in Bangladesh. We intend to provide an update to this bibliography in February 2012. If you know of anything pertinent that is not currently included we’d appreciate you sending it to us via our Contact page soon.

While we have been developing this site we have always thought that it would be useful to use it as a vehicle to make research on riverbank erosion and flood more available, particularly to those with fewer literature resources than us. Accordingly, we have been collecting references to these subjects as we have gone along and have periodically updated our main bibliography.

Our criteria for inclusion in this bibliography have been pretty loose. This chiefly is because riverbank erosion itself still does not receive very much attention, particularly in respect to its sociocultural dimensions. As Haakon Lein (2009 in the bibliography) and M Zulfiquar Ali Islam (2009, ditto) have both  written recently, the bulk of research continues to derive from REIS, the Riverbank Erosion Impact Study.  This joint project between the University of Manitoba and Jahangirnagar University collected most of its core data during the late 1980s. We therefore have included a lot of the socioculturally-oriented literature on flood and some of that on extreme poverty and Bangladeshi responses to disaster.

We also have found that what literature there is specifically on riverbank erosion is quite difficult to locate. As a case in point, searching online journal databases turns up little. Accordingly, we have been primarily expanding the bibliography the old fashioned way: securing relevant documents, reading them, and raiding their reference lists for new citations.

We’d greatly appreciate any relevant references not currently included in the bibliography, which could best be sent to us via our Contact page.