Join Global Bangladesh 10AM EST, May 12th 2023 on Zoom for Naveeda Khan’s new book, River Life and the Upspring of Nature (2023, Duke University Press).

In River Life and the Upspring of Nature, Naveeda Khan examines the relationship between nature and culture through the study of the everyday existence of chauras, the people who live on the chars (sandbars) within the Jamuna River in Bangladesh. Nature is a primary force at play within this existence as chauras live itinerantly and in flux with the ever-changing river flows. By showing how the alluvial flood plains configure chaura life, Khan shows how nature can both give rise to and inhabit social, political, and spiritual forms of life.

Here is the RECORDNG

Naveeda Khan is associate professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, where she also sits on the board of the Center for Islamic Studies and serves as affiliate faculty for the Undergraduate Program in Environmental Science and Studies. Her research spans riverine lives and national climate policy in Bangladesh, UN led global climate governance processes, German romanticism, Bengali and Urdu literature and writings on the environment. She is the author of Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (Duke University Press, 2012) River Life and the Upspring of Nature (Duke University Press, 2023) and In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South (Fordham University Press, 2023) and editor of Beyond Crisis: Reevaluating Pakistan (Routledge, 2010). Besides these, Naveeda has published articles and book chapters in various disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals and edited volumes and has edited several special issues of journals such as Anthropology and Humanism, Anthropological Theory, Contributions to Indian Sociology. She is working on two manuscripts “Householding in the Time of Climate Change” and “Schelling and the Romantic Method.” She is unclear what she will be working on next.

Dina Mahnaz Siddiqi is Clinical Associate Professor of Liberal Studies at New York University. Her research is grounded in the study of Bangladesh and joins development studies, transnational feminist theory, and the anthropology of Islam and human rights. She has published extensively on the global garment industry, non-state gender justice systems, and the cultural politics of Islam and nationalism in Bangladesh. She is currently engaged in a project on economic development, discourses of empowerment and the travels of civilizational feminisms. Her publications are available here. She is a member of the NYU Society of Fellows, on the advisory board of Dialectical Anthropology, and on the editorial board of Routledge’s Women in Asia Publication Series. She is on the Executive Committee of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies (AIBS), and an Advisory Council member of the South Asian feminist network, Sangat.

Naeem Mohaiemen is a visual artist and academic who combines photography, films, and essays to research the many forms of utopia-dystopia (families, borders, architecture, and uprisings) in the Muslim World after 1945. He is Associate Professor of Visual Arts and Head of Photography Concentration at Columbia University, New York. His is the author of Midnight’s Third Child (Dhaka: Nokta / University of Liberal Arts, 2023) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 2014); editor of Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism (Dhaka: Drishtipat, 2010); and co-editor with Eszter Szakacs of Solidarity Must be Defended (Budapest: Tranzit / University of Budapest, 2023).

David Ludden is Professor of Political Economy and Globalization in the Department of History at New York University. His research has focused on southern India, Bangladesh, and northeast India. His publications include four edited volumes, three monographs, and dozens of articles and chapters exploring various dimensions of capitalist economic development and long-term globalization. He served as President of the Association for Asian Studies and is founding director of the NYU Global Asia program, based in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai.