The Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: Agency & Belonging in Displacement
Date: 14 Nov 2023, Tuesday
Time: 15:30 – 17:40
Venue: Tonan-tei (Room no. 201) on the second floor of Inamori Foundation Memorial Building, CSEAS, Kyoto University
Seminar chair
Professor Yoko Hayami (Kyoto University)
Paper-One
Digital Literacy in Refugee Life: An Emerging Agency in Rohingya Camps in Bangladesh
Professor Nasir Uddin (Chittagong University)
Paper-Two
Women of the Rohingya Exodus: Negotiating Gender and Belonging in Bangladesh’s Refugee Camps
Dr. Farhana Rahman (Cambridge University)
Comments
Dr. Nakanishi Yoshiniro (Kyoto University) [10 minutes]
Dr. Miriam Jaehn (Singapore National University) [10 minutes]
Open discussion (Q & A)
Abstract
Digital Literacy in Refugee Life: An Emerging Agency in Rohingya Camps in Bangladesh
Professor Nasir Uddin, University of Chittagong & CSEAS, Kyoto University
‘Digital literacy is the ability to access, manage, understand, integrate, communicate, evaluate and create information safely and appropriately through digital technologies’ (ICTVET, UNESCO). An individual’s skill to create, evaluate, utilise, and communicate necessary content through digital technologies like social media, mobile devices, virtual space, and internet platforms is called digital literacy. It combines both technical and cognitive abilities with social and political awareness for using ICT to create, evaluate, and share information with a wider global audience. While digital literacy manifests a higher and more advanced literacy level, the Rohingya youths have gained higher digital literacy with a lower literacy rate in the formal education system. The paper argues that when people belong to a lesser than the minimum rate of literacy, digital literacy appears in their lives as a strong means of communication, an effective force for activism and a platform to build contact and network with the global space. The Rohingya people, the world’s most persecuted ethnic minority, in Bangladesh’s protracted refugee situation increasingly have obtained digital literacy as both a vibrant space and prolific ground to unfold their everyday forms of discrimination, the constant struggle for a decent life in refugee camps, human rights violations, natural disasters (sudden fire and flood), as well as their ethnicity, dreams, aesthetic sense, love & emotion, aspiration and uncertainty. ‘Digital arts’ activities have the potential to enable the Rohingya refugee youths to express themselves, voice their muted feelings, and develop their existing digital skills, combining these into new forms of capability (Sen 1999; 2008). In addition, their digitally circulated and disseminated artistic outputs can generate self-efficacy in an alternative discourse other than the refugees being represented as passive, silenced, and dangerous. The paper presents an empirically informed analysis of how increasing digital literacy works as an agency to bring about changes in Rohingya life in the refugee camps in Bangladesh.
Women of the Rohingya Exodus: Negotiating Gender and Belonging in Bangladesh’s Refugee Camps
Dr. Farhana Rahman, Cambridge University
On August 25, 2017, an escalation of violence in Rakhine State, Myanmar reached a tipping point. Horrific reports emerged of the murder and kidnapping of Rohingya men by Burmese soldiers, forced public nudity and humiliation, and gang rape by military captivity directed against Rohingya women and girls. And then, a million desperate journeys began – a mass exodus of Rohingyas who left their homes behind, setting off on a dangerous and precarious journey, ultimately reaching the makeshift refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Based on long-term feminist ethnographic research, my presentation traces Rohingya women’s lived experiences during and after forced migration and its effects on their everyday lives and subjectivities in Bangladesh’s refugee camps. It shines a nuanced lens on the gendered impacts of forced migration, and the ways in which Rohingya women learn to negotiate and navigate within and against this precarious environment. Rohingya refugee women’s narratives thus reveal the construction of new gendered identities in displacement, and evidence women’s incredible resilience in spite of profound trauma and suffering.
Short bio of the presenters
Professor Nasir Uddin is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS), Kyoto University and a Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chittagong. Uddin carried out research at the University of Oxford, Johns Hopkins University, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), the University of Sydney, the London School of Economics (LSE), East-West Center, Washington DC, Heidelberg University, VU University Amsterdam, Ruhr-University Bochum, Delhi School of Economics at Delhi University, the University of Hull, Kyoto University and the University of Dhaka. He is the editor of “The Rohingya Crisis: Human Rights Issues, Policy Concerns, and Burden Sharing” (SAGE, 2021). His latest book “The Rohingya: An Ethnography of ‘Subhuman’ Life” (The Oxford University Press, 2020) was short-listed for the ICAS book prize in 2020-2021. He is globally known as the theorist of ‘subhuman’ life in the scholarship on refugees, forced migration, forcibly displaced people, stateless people, asylum seekers, camp people and non-citizens.
Dr. Farhana Rahman is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College Cambridge. Previously, she was a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tokyo, a Non-Residential Fellow at the Centre for Asia Pacific Refugee Studies at the University of Auckland, and a Fellow at the Harvard University Asia Center. Farhana holds a PhD and MPhil from the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Gender Studies. For her extensive contributions to the field of gender and development, Farhana was the 2021 recipient of the Paula Kantor Award from the International Center for Research on Women.
* This event is supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 21H03703.