Sayema Khatun
Socio-cultural anthropology is the primary field of my academic interest with a particular focus on the post-colonial South Asian culture both in its geographical location and global diaspora. My research interests and ethnographic writings revolve around a wide range of topics, such as indigeneity, collective identity, citizenship, statelessness and making of refugees, violence and genocide, anthropology of institutions, policy and humanitarian intervention, protracted aftermath of partition of British-India and recurring conflicts/crisis in Bangladesh-India-Myanmar borders, violence of development, bureaucracy and corruption, culture and power in Covid-19 pandemic. In the last twenty years, I have engaged with my academic research, teaching, and service by conducting a number of ethnographic studies, publishing peer-reviewed articles, presenting academic papers, attending seminars and workshops as well as writing op-eds, delivering public speeches and participating in grassroot activism as a public anthropologist.
My current ethnographic research is on the Rohingya people, a minority Muslim community from Buddhist dominant Myanmar, persecuted and expelled off the country fled to Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand, India, middle east, the USA and all over the world now. This is my graduate research inquiring the policy response to the influx of Rohingya in Bangladesh. I am exploring the policy culture and policy process evolving in Bangladesh regarding the great Rohingya influx in 2017.
Lately, I am writing my thesis on "Policy Response to the Influx of Rohingya in Bangladesh" as a graduate student of UWM. My supervisor is Professor Erica Borstein. I have conducted a three-month-long fieldwork in Cox's Bazar and Dhaka. I have conducted ethnographic interviews among the policy community of Bangladesh. Qualitative research and ethnographic writing are my areas of expertise.
I have been featured as a global scholar at Human Research Area File at Yale University, USA for 2021.
Supervisors: Professor Erica Bornstein (UWM), Professor Ingrid Jordt (UWM), Professor Thomas Malaby (UWM), Professor Manosh Chowdhury (JU), and Professor S.M. Nurul Alam (JU)
Address: Department of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Milwaukee
Wisconsin
E-mail: [email protected]
My current ethnographic research is on the Rohingya people, a minority Muslim community from Buddhist dominant Myanmar, persecuted and expelled off the country fled to Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand, India, middle east, the USA and all over the world now. This is my graduate research inquiring the policy response to the influx of Rohingya in Bangladesh. I am exploring the policy culture and policy process evolving in Bangladesh regarding the great Rohingya influx in 2017.
Lately, I am writing my thesis on "Policy Response to the Influx of Rohingya in Bangladesh" as a graduate student of UWM. My supervisor is Professor Erica Borstein. I have conducted a three-month-long fieldwork in Cox's Bazar and Dhaka. I have conducted ethnographic interviews among the policy community of Bangladesh. Qualitative research and ethnographic writing are my areas of expertise.
I have been featured as a global scholar at Human Research Area File at Yale University, USA for 2021.
Supervisors: Professor Erica Bornstein (UWM), Professor Ingrid Jordt (UWM), Professor Thomas Malaby (UWM), Professor Manosh Chowdhury (JU), and Professor S.M. Nurul Alam (JU)
Address: Department of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Milwaukee
Wisconsin
E-mail: [email protected]
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Papers by Sayema Khatun
Trajectory of the Rohingya, a minority Muslim community from Myanmar resettled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, has been explored in this ethnographic research. Using life history method, this study reveals a Rohingya perspective of their experience of disenfranchisement from the country of origin, cycle of violence, mass killing, forced migration, physical and sexual abuse and finally, statelessness and refugee status. Finding of this study reveals the everyday practice and agency of ordinary Rohingya people through which they are making their way of life in the midst of extreme violence in the country of origin and in protracted refugee situation in Bangladesh, Thailand and Malaysia before life in the USA.
Language: Bangla
In 1943 Virginial Wolf pronounced “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world”.My purpose is to raise and locate the women question in nationalism with the anthropological theorization and analytical tools. This effort will be seated on the current debates on the birangona issues and representation of women’s contribution in grand narrative of our Liberation war.
Conference, Seminar, Symposium by Sayema Khatun
Op-eds by Sayema Khatun
Talks by Sayema Khatun
The recent position of the Government on Adibashi identity has triggered out a fresh and multifaceted public debate. In the given context, I would like to explore the aesthetic imagination of 'Bengaliness' and 'indigenousness' in the artistic endeavors (i.e. literature, fine art form) and the politics of making indigenous identity as exotic and other of the Bengali self construction. How this artistic representation builds emotionally strong and psychologically embedded base of such collective identity repressive to the other, requires, I believe, disentangling in finer detail for understanding the politics of identity in present day Bangladesh. Considering the contemporary art and literature as heterogeneous site, I would like to make an effort to understand the contestation within it.
During the recent decades, huge agricultural land around the city has been transforming into residential and commercial areas as the outcome of urban planning policy and the political position of the government and the interest of the investors in the housing sector. The dramatic increase of market value of land has been affecting the whole way of agrarian occupation and transforming the deep structure of the locality. Either the forced acquisition of land by the government or purchase by public/private housing companies, in both cases, the local people has become displaced from their ancestral land in exchange of some amount of money in the name of compensation or the price of the land which turns to a subject of dispute and conflict for prolonged period of time. Growing tension in the uprooting people and fissures and fractures in their economic, social and cultural life persists through generations. There is hardly any anthropological research to investigate the plight of this people victim of the elitist approach of urban planning of the government and the corporate.
In 2010, local people’s successful resistance to such displacement and eviction from their own village and withdrawal of the projects drew my attention into this issue to investigate into a greater detail than the journalistic information in hand. And this proposed paper would be an effort toward the objective.
Consulted Reading:
1977 Fox, Richard G.- Urban Anthropology, Cities in their Cultural Settings, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc
1978 Basham, Richard- Urban Anthropology, The Cross-Cultural Study of Complex Societies, California: Mayfield Publishing Company
1978 Aschenbrenner, Joyce & Collins, Lloyd (eds.)- The Process of Urbanism, A Multidisciplinary Approach, The Hague and Paris: Mouton Publishers
1987 Clammer, John (ed.)- Beyond The New Economic Anthropology, London: McMillan Press
1989 Dannhaeuser, Norbert- Marketing in the Developing Urban Areas in Planttner, Stuart (ed.)- Economic Anthropology, California: Stanford University Press, pp.222-252
1993 Andranovich, Greory D.& Riposa, Gerry- Doing Urban Research, Applied Social Research Methods Series, Vol.33, London and New Delhi: Sage Publications
1993 Certeau, Michel De- Walking in the City in During, Simon (ed.) The Cultural Studies Reader, Routledge: London and New York, 151-160
1996 Gmelch, Goerge & Zenner, Walter P.(eds.)- Urban Life, Reading in Urban Anthropology, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc.
2004 Alderson Arthur S. & Beckfield Jason- Power and Position in the World City System, AJS, The University of Chicago, Vol., 109, No. 4, 811-51The
2005 Swanstrom, B.C. - Political Economy and Impact on Cities in Political Economy of American Urban Center, San Jose: Basic Books, 256-259
Circulation of data through text and image in World Wide Web and social networking sites created a new, alternative and parallel media through which the versatile actors coming up into light and the whole nature of using information and forming social life. The recent wave of shock and fear in the Dhaka city elite beauty care service customer of secret CCTV camera in the private room in the name of security has triggered a number of questions on the citizen’s right of privacy and the limit of authority of surveillance. A significant question has been raised that how the non-governmental, privatized commercial organizations also introducing system of vigilance and surveillance beyond the conventional practice of authority of state to keep surveillance for sake of state security. The outburst of digital technology of recording image through cellular phone to CCTV, by amateur to professional in the everyday life of almost every citizen and fastest circulation in internet has changed the meaning and weight of image and text.
In the new mode of social interaction, as the relations are being redefined, violence has been reproduced in women’s subjection to exposure and voyeurism Women’s body again has become battle field in newer modes. This new modes of violence against women would be investigated in my proposed paper with the revelation of panoptic developed by Foucault, process of construction and destruction of reality elaborated by Baudrillard.
Teaching Materials by Sayema Khatun
Trajectory of the Rohingya, a minority Muslim community from Myanmar resettled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, has been explored in this ethnographic research. Using life history method, this study reveals a Rohingya perspective of their experience of disenfranchisement from the country of origin, cycle of violence, mass killing, forced migration, physical and sexual abuse and finally, statelessness and refugee status. Finding of this study reveals the everyday practice and agency of ordinary Rohingya people through which they are making their way of life in the midst of extreme violence in the country of origin and in protracted refugee situation in Bangladesh, Thailand and Malaysia before life in the USA.
Language: Bangla
In 1943 Virginial Wolf pronounced “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world”.My purpose is to raise and locate the women question in nationalism with the anthropological theorization and analytical tools. This effort will be seated on the current debates on the birangona issues and representation of women’s contribution in grand narrative of our Liberation war.
The recent position of the Government on Adibashi identity has triggered out a fresh and multifaceted public debate. In the given context, I would like to explore the aesthetic imagination of 'Bengaliness' and 'indigenousness' in the artistic endeavors (i.e. literature, fine art form) and the politics of making indigenous identity as exotic and other of the Bengali self construction. How this artistic representation builds emotionally strong and psychologically embedded base of such collective identity repressive to the other, requires, I believe, disentangling in finer detail for understanding the politics of identity in present day Bangladesh. Considering the contemporary art and literature as heterogeneous site, I would like to make an effort to understand the contestation within it.
During the recent decades, huge agricultural land around the city has been transforming into residential and commercial areas as the outcome of urban planning policy and the political position of the government and the interest of the investors in the housing sector. The dramatic increase of market value of land has been affecting the whole way of agrarian occupation and transforming the deep structure of the locality. Either the forced acquisition of land by the government or purchase by public/private housing companies, in both cases, the local people has become displaced from their ancestral land in exchange of some amount of money in the name of compensation or the price of the land which turns to a subject of dispute and conflict for prolonged period of time. Growing tension in the uprooting people and fissures and fractures in their economic, social and cultural life persists through generations. There is hardly any anthropological research to investigate the plight of this people victim of the elitist approach of urban planning of the government and the corporate.
In 2010, local people’s successful resistance to such displacement and eviction from their own village and withdrawal of the projects drew my attention into this issue to investigate into a greater detail than the journalistic information in hand. And this proposed paper would be an effort toward the objective.
Consulted Reading:
1977 Fox, Richard G.- Urban Anthropology, Cities in their Cultural Settings, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc
1978 Basham, Richard- Urban Anthropology, The Cross-Cultural Study of Complex Societies, California: Mayfield Publishing Company
1978 Aschenbrenner, Joyce & Collins, Lloyd (eds.)- The Process of Urbanism, A Multidisciplinary Approach, The Hague and Paris: Mouton Publishers
1987 Clammer, John (ed.)- Beyond The New Economic Anthropology, London: McMillan Press
1989 Dannhaeuser, Norbert- Marketing in the Developing Urban Areas in Planttner, Stuart (ed.)- Economic Anthropology, California: Stanford University Press, pp.222-252
1993 Andranovich, Greory D.& Riposa, Gerry- Doing Urban Research, Applied Social Research Methods Series, Vol.33, London and New Delhi: Sage Publications
1993 Certeau, Michel De- Walking in the City in During, Simon (ed.) The Cultural Studies Reader, Routledge: London and New York, 151-160
1996 Gmelch, Goerge & Zenner, Walter P.(eds.)- Urban Life, Reading in Urban Anthropology, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc.
2004 Alderson Arthur S. & Beckfield Jason- Power and Position in the World City System, AJS, The University of Chicago, Vol., 109, No. 4, 811-51The
2005 Swanstrom, B.C. - Political Economy and Impact on Cities in Political Economy of American Urban Center, San Jose: Basic Books, 256-259
Circulation of data through text and image in World Wide Web and social networking sites created a new, alternative and parallel media through which the versatile actors coming up into light and the whole nature of using information and forming social life. The recent wave of shock and fear in the Dhaka city elite beauty care service customer of secret CCTV camera in the private room in the name of security has triggered a number of questions on the citizen’s right of privacy and the limit of authority of surveillance. A significant question has been raised that how the non-governmental, privatized commercial organizations also introducing system of vigilance and surveillance beyond the conventional practice of authority of state to keep surveillance for sake of state security. The outburst of digital technology of recording image through cellular phone to CCTV, by amateur to professional in the everyday life of almost every citizen and fastest circulation in internet has changed the meaning and weight of image and text.
In the new mode of social interaction, as the relations are being redefined, violence has been reproduced in women’s subjection to exposure and voyeurism Women’s body again has become battle field in newer modes. This new modes of violence against women would be investigated in my proposed paper with the revelation of panoptic developed by Foucault, process of construction and destruction of reality elaborated by Baudrillard.