Dear Friends,
Welcome back to Berkeley and best wishes for a Happy New Year!
Events
Event highlights this semester include a joint Berkeley-LSE summit on
Bangladesh (Feb 22), a book reading by Author
Arif Anwar on his debut novel,
The Storm, that covers fifty years of Bangladesh's history through five love stories, and the 2nd ISAS-VSB Lecture on Religion in the Modern World by Religious Studies scholar and Bengal expert
Tony Stewart (Apr 5). Join us on Mar 5 as our newly established
Rohingya Working Group updates us on the latest developments on our various research projects and collaborations.
A quick round up of all our events lined up for this semester are:
- Friday, February 1, 2019
Elora Shehabuddin | Women's Activism in Cold War Pakistan: A Transnational History
Lecture | 12-1:30 p.m. | 602 Barrows Hall
- Thursday, February 21, 2019
Arif Anwar | The Storm: A Novel
Reading | 5-7 p.m. | 10 Stephens Hall
- Friday, February 22, 2019
Chowdhury Center-LSE Bangladesh Summit 2019
Reimagining Health, Empowerment, and Sovereignty in Bangladesh
Conference | 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m. | B-100 Blum Hall
- Tuesday, March 5, 2019
Community Updates: A Report by UC Berkeley's Rohingya Working Group
Panel Discussion | 4-6 p.m. | 10 Stephens Hall
- Thursday, March 28, 2019
Cost-Effective Approaches to Extreme Poverty: A Chat With BRAC
Panel Discussion | 12:30-1:30 p.m. | 10 Stephens Hall
Friday, April 5, 2019
The 2nd ISAS-VSB Lecture on Religion in the Modern World
Tony Stewart | Subjunctive Explorations: Fictive Sufi Tales of Early Modern Bengal
Lecture | 5-7 p.m. | 10 Stephens Hall
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. For 2018, the Subir Chowdhury Undergraduate Scholarship was awarded to
Nadia Budiman (BA, Major: South and Southeast Asian Studies). Nadia is interested in writing and education related initiatives in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.
Graduate student fellowships were awarded last semester:
Elizabeth Herman (Political Science) was the recipient of the Malini Chowdhury Fellowship on Bangladesh Studies and
Helen Pitchik (Epidemiology, UC Berkeley School of Public Health) received the Subir Chowdhury Fellowship on Quality of Life in Bangladesh.
The Chowdhury Center, along with the Institute for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley, is pleased to announce the
Live Life Like Tarishi Scholarship Award, an award established by Tulika and Sanjiv Jain, parents of Cal sophomore Tarishi Jain. Tarishi lost her life in a terrorist attack while participating in a Chowdhury Center-sponsored internship program in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her family and friends, along with the Berkeley community honors her life, spirit, and light with this scholarship so that other students who dream of a Berkeley education can pursue it as she did. The award provides for a single grant of $2000 to UC Berkeley undergraduate students with a demonstrated commitment in the field of South Asian history, society, languages, and culture. The scholarship requires participants to submit an essay that demonstrates a desire to make societal impact in South Asia. The application is currently open and will close on February 1, 2019 at 5 pm. More details
HERE.
Working Group on the Rohingya
Since August 2017, Burmese security forces have been carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State forcing over half a million of them to flee to neighboring Bangladesh to escape killings, arson, and other atrocities. This mass migration has resulted in one of the worst humanitarian crises of our time. In Fall 2018, the Chowdhury Center, in an attempt to understand this, launched the
Rohingya Working Group, a group in which students, researchers, and practitioners are invited to develop ideas and collaborations to further our collective work related to the Rohingya crisis. All members have access to a common Google folder to share research, resources, and any other materials that may be helpful to others in the group. If you would like to join this group then please sign up by using this
GOOGLE FORM. Once you are approved, you will be given access to various folders.
Revisiting Rana Plaza
On November 27, 2018, Chowdhury Center Director Sanchita Banerjee Saxena gave a talk at the United Nations Forum on Business and Human Rights where she discussed labor and global supply chains in Bangladesh. Her presentation critiqued the strategies employed over the last five years by Western retailers focused on monitoring and compliance, while neglecting issues around the entire global supply chain, as well as proposed solutions to further improve the sector and to prevent horrific tragedies like Rana Plaza from occurring in the future. See more HERE.
Collaborations
As part of the Center's focus on creating opportunities for collaborative research between UC Berkeley and universities in Bangladesh, we were delighted to welcome two distinguished faculty members from BRAC University, Professors Sabina Rashid and Samia Huq in Spring 2018.
Reflecting on their time at UC Berkeley, Professor Rashid writes: "... As an academic who lives and works in Bangladesh, the generous endowment by Subir Chowdhury provided a space and opportunity for me to access resources, think critically and write, and engage with eminent scholars at the global level. For academics coming from low income countries this is an opportunity of a lifetime, and will contribute to better academic outputs and research and ultimately improve the quality of our teaching in Bangladesh... "
And Professor Huq says: "...I would like to thank Subir and Malini Chowdhury for setting up the center, for providing opportunities of exchange between UC Berkeley and Bangladeshi institutions and scholars, and in general creating a space for critical thinking on Bangladesh to flourish. I hope that the Center and BRAC University will find ways to continue such exchanges. I, for one, look forward to that and to be back in Berkeley."
Read their full thoughts HERE
Publications
Publications by past Chowdhury Center fellows include:
Dr. Mubashar Hasan, a participant in the first workshop on Research and Writing recently published Bangladeshi ‘Boat People’: Context, Drivers And Policy Implications, in South Asia Research. The article sheds some insights on people trafficking and irregular migration through boats by Bangladeshis against the backdrop of Rohingya crisis, political unrest and drug smuggling network.
The latest edition of Khabar, the Institute for South Asia Studies' annual newsletter, is out. Bangladesh-related news items include an article on how the Chowdhury Center is leading the way in mentoring scholars and junior faculty from Bangladesh and a report on the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. Read also an award winning photo essay on sanitation workers in India, a faculty response to Congress VP Rahul Gandhi's 2017 UC Berkeley visit, and
about new South Asia-related faculty on campus as well as new publications by UC scholars and alumni. You can read Khabar online here or click on the box on the right. If you’d prefer the paper and ink version, please drop by the Institute (anytime after Feb 1) to get a copy. Alternatively, you can drop us a line and we will mail a hard copy to you.
A recent article in Viewpoint includes David Bergman's How safe is the current Awami League government?, an excellent analysis of the recent elections in Bangladesh.
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!
