Ranjan Datta - Changemaker Profile
Dr. Ranjan Datta (he/him) is a settler scholar of color, born and raised in Bangladesh. He is currently an Assistant Professor and Canadian Research Chair in Community Disaster Research at Mount Royal University. In this profile, he discusses the importance of land-based education, decolonizing education, and bridging the gap between academics and community.
Could you tell me about yourself?
I'm a settler scholar of colour. I was born and raised in Bangladesh, then I moved to Canada as an immigrant. Currently, I'm working on community disaster research as a Canada Research Chair. I have been working from a decolonial perspective in community disaster research. Decolonial research to me transforms both ourselves as researchers and our research to take responsibility to center communities' meanings of disaster from their everyday land-based knowledge and practices, it challenges ongoing colonial management systems and advocates for meaningful collaboration between traditional land-based practices and Western knowledge. Importantly, it emphasizes the recognition of community land rights to support self-determination in disaster adaptation. The land I come from, we have a disaster almost every year - floods, cyclones, and other forms of disaster. So I grew up with many [environmental] disasters, and we had a land based understanding of how to deal with it. When I say land based, that means traditional ways of understanding and how to build community during the disaster, but I didn't learn those perspectives in my [formal] education. And I didn’t learn how land based perspective is important to create community adaption, or how land based perspective is important in disaster policy making - even in Canada.
So that's what I wanted to learn, how communities understand the meaning of disaster from their lived experience, so they can use community-led land-based tools or knowledge to solve their challenges by themselves. Land-based disaster learning is so critical for me because the land based education that I learned from my family and my community was so useful. But when I went to university, I didn't learn the importance of land-based learning in our everyday lives. More often, institutional education is separated from land and land-based practice. So that's why the decolonial and critical anti-racist perspective became so important to me to reconnect with land and land-based spirituality. For me, decolonial education is a process of lifelong learning, unlearning, and relearning responsibilities.
What does it mean to be a changemaker?
I always try to think, “How can I be a changemaker as an educator and scholar?” I often ask myself, "How can I transform my education into action to become a changemaker for myself?" If my research or education doesn't inspire personal transformation, how can I expect to be useful to others? So changemaking has to start with ourselves first. Changemakers take responsibility for being excited to see changes happening within and from me as an educator and researcher. Change for me is happiness, change is a feeling of success, that we are doing something useful. A changemaker makes justice, not only for humans but also for non-humans - everything. Changemaking is a responsibility which starts internally.
What big, beautiful question drives your work?
The big question for me is “Who am I as a researcher and person in the community, and what are my responsibilities?” and from there “How can we create a meaningful bridge between academics and community?” We must first understand what the community expects from us as researchers. In the current education system, there is a significant disconnect between academia and the community. Many academics lack the tools to learn from the community or to incorporate the community's needs into their research. This isn’t just an individual issue—it’s a systemic challenge, as many educational institutions do not provide decolonial or anti-racist education. That's why this is a systematically created gap. Once we see ourselves from the responsibility lens, there are many doors to open and opportunities to learn. So we have the responsibility to decolonize ourselves as a researcher and educators because it benefits us all.
How do you embody changemaking in your work?
I teach research-based [practices] to my students. When I'm talking about academic theory, I showcase [to my students] the way I did it, so that they can see how change is happening through my research and so that they can relate their work to make it transformational to their life. Fifteen of my students showcased their stories in two books I edited with a high-ranked book publisher and twenty peer-reviewed high-ranked journal articles. There is happiness for these students, not only for themselves, but for their communities, because of these shared stories. Our decolonial [learning] journey gave us lots of hope that as a collective, we can do a lot. We can start changemaking within ourselves. Changemaking doesn't happen suddenly, it has to start with taking internal responsibility. It has to start from land based learning or community learning. Everyone is a changemaker, but you must find the light within yourself.
How do you see changemaking happening at MRU?
My two books, journal publications, and other activities with my students are great examples. What I’ve observed from my students is that their changemaking goes beyond academic writing. They take on leadership roles to drive change within their academic institutions, communities, and at national and international levels. When they enter professional fields, they carry their learning forward, teaching others how to be changemakers. I am very hopeful for my MRU students, as they embrace the responsibility of becoming agents of change.