Nafisa N Tanjeem
Nafisa Tanjeem (she/her) is a teacher, researcher, writer, and activist. Currently, she works as an Associate Professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Worcester State University in Massachusetts, United States.
She is also an Affiliate Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center of Brandeis University and Affiliate Faculty member at the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University.
Research and Teaching Interests:
Nafisa’s research and teaching interests include transnational, postcolonial, and decolonial feminisms; critical race theory; globalization and feminist politics; critical community engagement; nonprofit industrial complex; critical university studies; and transnational social justice movements with a specific focus on the United States and South Asia. Before joining Worcester State University, Nafisa taught at Lesley University, Rutgers University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Dhaka.
Nafisa is currently working on finishing her book manuscript that examines transnational labor activism and activist discourses developed in relation to the deadliest garment industrial disaster in human history, the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza – a factory building housing five garment factories in Savar, Bangladesh, and continued until the global COVID-19 pandemic. The project examines the gendered, racialized, classed, and (trans)national trajectory of labor organizing around the Accord, the Alliance, and the COVID-19 pandemic proposing diverging concepts of safety, security, and labor rights, and the challenges that arise when these concepts clash in various local and global, physical and virtual organizing spaces.
Community Organizing and Public Scholarship:
Nafisa has been actively involved in community organizing and social justice activism. She is an organizer of the Meye (“Woman” in Bangla) network, which is a voluntary, grassroots, and organic network advocating for women’s solidarity and leadership in Bangladesh. In the past, she was a co-chief steward of the core faculty union of Lesley University, which was a part of SEIU Local 509. She organized with the Rutgers University chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) on the garment worker solidarity campaign in New Jersey. She also worked as a Community Organizer and Events Coordinator with the Council of Agencies Serving South Asians (CASSA) on poverty reduction, gender equity, and youth engagement among South Asian immigrant communities in Toronto, Canada. Nafisa recognizes the value of public scholarship and contributes to many local and international platforms, such as Common Dreams, Jamhoor, the Daily Star, New Age, Prothom Alo, Thotkata, and Bama.
Education:
Ph.D. (Women’s and Gender Studies), Rutgers University, USA, 2017
M.A. (Women’s and Gender Studies), University of Toronto, Canada, 2009
B.A. (Women and Gender Studies), University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2008
She is also an Affiliate Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center of Brandeis University and Affiliate Faculty member at the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University.
Research and Teaching Interests:
Nafisa’s research and teaching interests include transnational, postcolonial, and decolonial feminisms; critical race theory; globalization and feminist politics; critical community engagement; nonprofit industrial complex; critical university studies; and transnational social justice movements with a specific focus on the United States and South Asia. Before joining Worcester State University, Nafisa taught at Lesley University, Rutgers University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Dhaka.
Nafisa is currently working on finishing her book manuscript that examines transnational labor activism and activist discourses developed in relation to the deadliest garment industrial disaster in human history, the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza – a factory building housing five garment factories in Savar, Bangladesh, and continued until the global COVID-19 pandemic. The project examines the gendered, racialized, classed, and (trans)national trajectory of labor organizing around the Accord, the Alliance, and the COVID-19 pandemic proposing diverging concepts of safety, security, and labor rights, and the challenges that arise when these concepts clash in various local and global, physical and virtual organizing spaces.
Community Organizing and Public Scholarship:
Nafisa has been actively involved in community organizing and social justice activism. She is an organizer of the Meye (“Woman” in Bangla) network, which is a voluntary, grassroots, and organic network advocating for women’s solidarity and leadership in Bangladesh. In the past, she was a co-chief steward of the core faculty union of Lesley University, which was a part of SEIU Local 509. She organized with the Rutgers University chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) on the garment worker solidarity campaign in New Jersey. She also worked as a Community Organizer and Events Coordinator with the Council of Agencies Serving South Asians (CASSA) on poverty reduction, gender equity, and youth engagement among South Asian immigrant communities in Toronto, Canada. Nafisa recognizes the value of public scholarship and contributes to many local and international platforms, such as Common Dreams, Jamhoor, the Daily Star, New Age, Prothom Alo, Thotkata, and Bama.
Education:
Ph.D. (Women’s and Gender Studies), Rutgers University, USA, 2017
M.A. (Women’s and Gender Studies), University of Toronto, Canada, 2009
B.A. (Women and Gender Studies), University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2008
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Drawing on the historical tradition of student engagement in political and social movements in Bangladesh as well as the contemporary youth-led social justice organizing, this chapter contributes to the scholarships on young people’s democratic participation in several ways.
First, it deconstructs the conventional meaning of “accident” by unraveling how accidents can be manufactured by structural failures and why the state should take accountability for these failures. It also explores how “the accidental” can turn into a gateway for embodied political engagement of young people.
Second, using the anthropological framework of “the crowd” (Chowdhury, 2019b, 2019a; N. S. Chowdhury, 2020; Steffen, 2020), it elaborates on the immense political potentials of a student crowd that can nurture creative solidarities, develop grassroots, bottom-up, leaderless, and insurgent organizing, and demonstrate the indomitable courage of questioning not only the failing road and transportation system but also the legitimacy of the autocratic state. Along the way, it demonstrates the way a student crowd can disrupt a repressive regime and how a repressive regime surveils, regulates, and dissipates the student crowd.
Third, it unravels how the student crowd on the streets is co-constituted by its virtual embodiment in digital organizing spaces and how both the student crowd and the virtual crowd experience and negotiate state surveillance and state violence.
Overall, the road safety protest unraveled the immense complexity of the transportation sector, its multilayered actors with overlapping as well as competing interests and allegiance, and the need to go beyond tokenistic changes. It also exhibited the power of grassroots, bottom-up, collective organizing of a student crowd that can threaten the autocratic regime and demand greater accountability.
The contemporary globalizing trends around the world have transformed the way women are integrated into the world market in the Asia Pacific region. Market-oriented economic reforms, widespread privatization of state-owned enterprises, and the 1997-98 East Asian Financial crisis and the 2008 global financial crisis have affected the experiences of women in different ways. In some countries, these changes, on the one hand, created jobs and labor market participation opportunities for women and challenged sexist socio-cultural structures. On the other hand, they also disproportionately pushed working-class women into labor-intensive and low-paid working conditions, exploited their cheapened labor, and sustained systems of oppression. Therefore, the impact of these changes and reforms are not linear. Within the same country, they often benefitted some women while marginalized others. We see these variations across class, race, ethnicity, nationality, age, religion, formal vs. informal jobs, and rural vs. urban locations of women.
This chapter is an attempt to capture a comprehensive overview of the varied experiences of women in the Asia Pacific and offer a deeper, critical analysis of various factors shaping these experiences.
We begin the chapter with a broad outline of how various structural shifts ensuing from globalization resulted or did not result in gender discrimination in the Asia Pacific. We then extend the analysis to go into more detail and explore how economic and structural changes translated into changes in health, education, labor market, political and socio-economic outcomes, and legal reforms for women in relation to men. Our analysis reveals whether progress has occurred (or not occurred) in terms of indicators and how the “progress,” or the absence thereof, resulted in varied outcomes for different groups of women.
This essay is divided into three sections. The first section explores ways through which neoliberal economic policies transformed the nature of higher education in Bangladesh since 1980s. The second section situates the history of institutionalizing Women’s Studies in higher education against the backdrop of neoliberalism and international development discourses on women. The third section discusses strategies that the institutionalizing process followed in order to collaborate with as well as subvert what Rubin calls “institutional-disciplinary order of transnational capitalism” (Rubin 2005, 205).
Drawing on the historical tradition of student engagement in political and social movements in Bangladesh as well as the contemporary youth-led social justice organizing, this chapter contributes to the scholarships on young people’s democratic participation in several ways.
First, it deconstructs the conventional meaning of “accident” by unraveling how accidents can be manufactured by structural failures and why the state should take accountability for these failures. It also explores how “the accidental” can turn into a gateway for embodied political engagement of young people.
Second, using the anthropological framework of “the crowd” (Chowdhury, 2019b, 2019a; N. S. Chowdhury, 2020; Steffen, 2020), it elaborates on the immense political potentials of a student crowd that can nurture creative solidarities, develop grassroots, bottom-up, leaderless, and insurgent organizing, and demonstrate the indomitable courage of questioning not only the failing road and transportation system but also the legitimacy of the autocratic state. Along the way, it demonstrates the way a student crowd can disrupt a repressive regime and how a repressive regime surveils, regulates, and dissipates the student crowd.
Third, it unravels how the student crowd on the streets is co-constituted by its virtual embodiment in digital organizing spaces and how both the student crowd and the virtual crowd experience and negotiate state surveillance and state violence.
Overall, the road safety protest unraveled the immense complexity of the transportation sector, its multilayered actors with overlapping as well as competing interests and allegiance, and the need to go beyond tokenistic changes. It also exhibited the power of grassroots, bottom-up, collective organizing of a student crowd that can threaten the autocratic regime and demand greater accountability.
The contemporary globalizing trends around the world have transformed the way women are integrated into the world market in the Asia Pacific region. Market-oriented economic reforms, widespread privatization of state-owned enterprises, and the 1997-98 East Asian Financial crisis and the 2008 global financial crisis have affected the experiences of women in different ways. In some countries, these changes, on the one hand, created jobs and labor market participation opportunities for women and challenged sexist socio-cultural structures. On the other hand, they also disproportionately pushed working-class women into labor-intensive and low-paid working conditions, exploited their cheapened labor, and sustained systems of oppression. Therefore, the impact of these changes and reforms are not linear. Within the same country, they often benefitted some women while marginalized others. We see these variations across class, race, ethnicity, nationality, age, religion, formal vs. informal jobs, and rural vs. urban locations of women.
This chapter is an attempt to capture a comprehensive overview of the varied experiences of women in the Asia Pacific and offer a deeper, critical analysis of various factors shaping these experiences.
We begin the chapter with a broad outline of how various structural shifts ensuing from globalization resulted or did not result in gender discrimination in the Asia Pacific. We then extend the analysis to go into more detail and explore how economic and structural changes translated into changes in health, education, labor market, political and socio-economic outcomes, and legal reforms for women in relation to men. Our analysis reveals whether progress has occurred (or not occurred) in terms of indicators and how the “progress,” or the absence thereof, resulted in varied outcomes for different groups of women.
This essay is divided into three sections. The first section explores ways through which neoliberal economic policies transformed the nature of higher education in Bangladesh since 1980s. The second section situates the history of institutionalizing Women’s Studies in higher education against the backdrop of neoliberalism and international development discourses on women. The third section discusses strategies that the institutionalizing process followed in order to collaborate with as well as subvert what Rubin calls “institutional-disciplinary order of transnational capitalism” (Rubin 2005, 205).