The Rohingya: Negotiating Gender, Subjectivity, and Belonging in Bangladesh’s Refugee Camps

Monday, 13 February 2023 , 5:00pm
FML 309

Event chaired by: Dr Salman Al Azami, Senior Lecturer in English Language

Guest speaker: Dr. Farhana Rahman, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge

Dr. Farhana Rahman is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. She received her PhD and MPhil from the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Gender Studies. Farhana is currently finalizing her book (based on her PhD), forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Through feminist ethnographic research, Farhana's PhD focused on how the mass exodus of the Rohingya community to the refugee camps outside of Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh transforms Rohingya gender relations and roles in displacement – specifically, how forced migration affects the gendered subjectivities and lived experiences of Rohingya refugee women. Farhana is also co-founder of Silkpath Relief Organization (silkpathrelief.org), a non-profit providing humanitarian assistance to individuals devastated by calamities – in Afghanistan, and with Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and Malaysia. In 2015, she helped establish the first academic program in gender studies in Afghanistan, based at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul, where she was a lecturer. For her extensive research and work in the field of gender and development, Farhana was the 2021 recipient of the Paula Kantor Award from the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW).

Summary of the talk:

Until recently, Rohingyas making the perilous trek by boat and foot across the border into Bangladesh were predominantly male, as they were not only denied citizenship and legal rights in Myanmar but they also lacked economic opportunities within the country to support their families and communities. The 2017 attacks in Rakhine state, however, resulted in a drastic increase of women and girls undertaking these dangerous journeys to escape intense violence – including mass sexual violence – targeted against the Rohingya minority. The migration journeys of these women entailed not only violence and hardship, but also regular incidents of exploitation, including trafficking, rape, and forced marriage. Based on 14 months of feminist ethnographic research, this talk traces Rohingya women’s lived experiences of violence and conflict during and after forced migration on their everyday lives and subjectivities in the squalid camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. 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 by employing strategies of survival. Rohingya refugee women’s narratives reveal the construction of new gendered identities in displacement, and evidence women’s incredible resilience in spite of profound trauma and suffering.

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