Dear Friends,
Welcome back to Berkeley! Hope you all had a wonderful summer.
Events
This semester at the Center is full of lectures, films, and panel discussions, and we hope you will join us. A quick round up of the events lined up for this semester are:
- Thursday, September 20, 2018
Rohingya Crisis, One Year On: Research and Reflections
4-6 p.m. | 10 Stephens Hall
- Tuesday, September 25, 2018
Sabina Rashid | The Invisible Reality of ‘Chinthar Roge’ (A Life of Chronic Worry): The Illness of Poverty in Dhaka’s Urban Slum Settlements
12-1:30 p.m. | 10 Stephens Hall
- Tuesday, October 2, 2018
Samia Huq | Thinking about the Secular: Practices, Dispensations, and Possibilities in Bangladesh
12-1:30 p.m. | 10 Stephens Hall
- Tuesday, October 9, 2018
The Rohingya: On the Edge of Existence: Photo Show Opening Reception
5-7:30 p.m. | Boalt Hall, School of Law, Donor Lobby
- Thursday, October 11, 2018
Cross Border Entanglements in Eastern South Asia: A symposium with the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies at the Annual Conference on South Asia in Wisconsin-Madison in October 2018
8:30--3 p.m. | Wisconsin Ballroom, The Madison Concourse Hotel and Governor’s Club, 1 West Dayton Street, Madison, WI 53703
- Tuesday, October 23, 2018
Sarwar Uddin Ahmed | Does it pay to be socially responsible in Bangladesh?
12-1:30 p.m. | 10 Stephens Hall
- Thursday, October 25, 2018
Gary Bass | Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide
5-7 p.m. | 10 Stephens Hall
- Thursday, November 1 - 4 & 17, 2018
3rd i's 16th Annual SF Int'l South Asian Film Festival
Screenings at different locations: November 1-4 (San Francisco) November 17 (Palo Alto)
- Thursday, November 1, 2018
Daniel M. Kammen | The Clean Energy Transition in Bangladesh - Local and Global Impacts and Opportunities: The Chowdhury Center Distinguished Lecture for 2018
5-7 p.m. | Wheeler Hall, Room 315, Maude Fife Room
Listen to Director
Sanchita Saxena on Radio Zindagi (audio playback point 31.10) where she discusses all of these upcoming programs.
Earlier this summer, the Chowdhury Center was delighted to welcome Bangladeshi politician and former Foreign Minister of Bangladesh, Dr. Dipu Moni to campus. She is pictured below standing third from left) with (from left) Malini Chowdhury, Sanchita Saxena, & Subir Chowdhury. Please see
HERE for more pictures from the event.
All our events are video recorded and made available on our website. Please scroll to the bottom of the sidebar on the right to see a list of all the newly added videos.
Student Funding
The Chowdhury Center provides three scholarships to Berkeley students for conducting research to improve the lives of those in Bangladesh and one prize for the most outstanding paper written on any Bangladesh-related topic. In 2018, the following students were the recipients of these awards:
Chowdhury Center Fellows
Elizabeth Herman (Political Science) received the Malini Chowdhury Fellowship on Bangladesh Studies;
Helen Pitchik (Epidemiology, UC Berkeley School of Public Health) was awarded the Subir Chowdhury Fellowship on Quality of Life in Bangladesh; and
Joshua Dultz, (BA, Major: South and Southeast Asian Studies) received the Subir Chowdhury Undergraduate Scholarship.
The Outstanding Paper Prize in Bangladesh Studies
Lauren Glasby (Political Science, Class of 2018),
Marylin Wang Longley (Political Science, Class of 2018), and
Lorraine Pereira (Molecular Environmental Biology, Class of 2020) for their paper titled,
Female Political Empowerment in Bangladesh and Pakistan: The Influence of Economic Participation.
Collaborations
As part of the Center's focus on creating opportunities for collaborative research between UC Berkeley and universities in Bangladesh, we are delighted to welcome two distinguished faculty members from BRAC University.
Sabina Rashid and
Samia Huq.
Dr.
Sabina Rashid is dean and professor at Brac University’s James P. Grant School of Public Health, teaching gender and sexual and reproductive health and rights. Working closely with the LGBT community, she is helping establish SHARENET, a virtual platform in Bangladesh, at the school’s Center for Gender. Dr. Rashid will be a visiting scholar at the Chowdhury Center and at the Center for Societal Medicine.
Dr.
Samia Huq, a visiting scholar at the Chowdhury Center, is an anthropologist and Associate Professor at the Department of Economics and Social Science at BRAC University. She obtained her PhD from Brandeis University, USA, looking at women’s religious discussion groups in urban Bangladesh. Her current research includes cultural activism of Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan, and the impact of secondary secular and madrasa education on gendered norms and practices, as part of the Initiative on Education, Gender and Growth in Asia.
The Chowdhury Center with
The South Asia Centre at the London School of Economics (LSE), hosted the first ever
Bangladesh Summit. The goal was to focus on the major issues that confront Bangladesh as it moves forward and what other solutions that may be available and possible.
Panelists discussed the rights of minorities, ethnic groups and the wider society within which they are located, and heard the views of individuals from different contexts – academics, researchers, activists, grassroots workers, media personnel, and others. Listen to Chowdhury Center Director, Dr. Sanchita Saxena and LSE's South Asia Centre Director, Dr. Mukulika Banerjee discuss their vision for this partnership, Bangladesh studies and placing Bangladesh within the South Asian agenda
HERE. The next Bangladesh Summit will be held in February, 2019 in Berkeley. Stay tuned for further details!
After the great success of the
2016 workshop, we were thrilled to once again partner with the
American Institute of Bangladesh Studies and the
Council of American Overseas Research Centers to host the second
Faculty Workshop on Research Writing & Publishing, a week long workshop at UC Berkeley for faculty at universities in Bangladesh in Spring 2018. This program brought nine faculty members from Bangladeshi institutions of higher education (and one from Sri Lanka) to be in residence for one week at the Chowdhury Center, where they took part in workshops on research methodologies, writing, and the publishing process led by UC Berkeley faculty. After the week in residence at Berkeley, faculty members presented their papers in progress in a day long workshop. Each junior faculty member was paired up with a US based faculty member in his/ her field who provided feedback on the paper presented. The Center asked the visiting faculty to reflect on their time spent in UC Berkeley; these reflections may be viewed by scrolling to the bottom of
THIS page.
We are also pleased to support the 7th annual National Minority and Indigenous Youth Leadership Summit that was held in Dhaka, Bangladesh from July 3-5, 2018. The Summit was attended by over 60 young leaders representing numerous religious and ethnic minority communities from across the country including: Marma, Santal, Urdu-speaking, Dalit, Christian, Buddhist and transgender. Together, and with the nation’s top legal and social justice advocates, they discussed how to support authentic community-led development. The Summit was hosted by the
Council of Minorities, which is a Bangladeshi nonprofit that aims to ensure the social, cultural, political and economic rights of minorities and indigenous people.
Media
The April 2013 Rana Plaza collapse, which resulted in the death of more than 1,125 people working in garment factories in the building, drew widespread attention to hazardous labour conditions in the export garment-manufacturing industry in Bangladesh. Five years later, Chowdhury Center Director, Sanchita Saxena analyzes the aftermath of the tragedy in
Beyond Third-party Monitoring: Post-Rana Plaza Interventions in Economic and Political Weekly. Click the link to read the full article.
Viewpoint
Recent articles in
Viewpoints are two on the imprisonment of Bangladesh’s most respected photojournalist, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's
Who Is Afraid of Shahidul Alam? and Salil Tripathi's
When a witness is arrested in Bangladesh,. Plus Arafath Hossain's analysis of social media posts related to Bangladesh in
A Day with Bangladesh on Twitter and Mubashar Hasan's
Bangladeshi rappers wield rhymes as a weapon, with Tupac as their guide.
Past Events
For those of you who were not able to attend our events last semester, please visit the
Videos section on our website to view recordings of past programs. Newly added events since our last eNewsletter may be viewed in the sidebar on the right.
We look forward to seeing you at one of our many events this semester!
