Mohammad Nasir Uddin Professor, Department of Anthropology
PROFILE
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Google Scholar Link:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=p-L2cpQAAAAJ&hl=en
Academia.edu Link:
https://juniv.academia.edu/MohammadNasirUddin
With diverse research experience, Mohammad Nasir Uddin primarily focuses on the conditions of Bangladesh’s Dalits and other marginalized communities, as well as the lived experiences of women garment (RMG) workers. His research explores social exclusion, marginality, and public policy shifts from the perspectives of those outside the mainstream. He has examined drug-related issues and HIV prevention, the vulnerabilities of female sex workers, sexual abuse and gender-based violence among garment workers, the intersectionality of inequalities faced by Dalit women, and the absence of rights for informal workers in Bangladesh.
In recent years, Professor Uddin has played key roles in several studies that assessed the conditions of Dalits, excluded communities, people who inject drugs (PWID), and female sex workers.
His work focuses on securing rights and entitlements for systematically deprived groups, mitigating HIV risks, promoting democratic practices in Salish (informal justice systems), and analyzing gender dynamics in local level governance, particularly within Bangladesh’s most active local government tier, the Union Parishad (UP).
As an expert in baseline and mid-term evaluations, he has assessed various programs aimed at empowering women, preventing violence, and combating discrimination through economic empowerment, collective mobilization, and advocacy for women's and labor rights. His key research areas also include the conditions of garment workers and other labor forces, domestic violence, workplace precarity, and gender disparities. Additionally, he has conducted studies on policy development and empowerment strategies to enhance the rights, entitlements, and access of marginalized men and women to public services and institutions.
Professor Uddin’s research also addresses menstrual health among sex workers, reproductive health stigmas affecting vulnerable groups, child marriage prevention, and the intersection of gender, poverty, and healthcare access in marginalized communities.
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His doctoral research at Durham University, UK, examined the making and unmaking of self and subjectivity among garment factory workers in Bangladesh. He explored how labor identities, gender norms, familial and social relationships, sexualities, and other affective-emotional values are (re)shaped within contemporary globalized production regimes. His dissertation particularly investigated how neoliberal capitalism’s rapid and chaotic transformations intersected with what was traditionally considered intimate, informal, and local.
While analyzing the interplay of cultural politics and political economy, the work showed how developmentalist neoliberalism made way to appropriate the cheap labor of the "surplus" population—especially girls and women. It uncovered the intersection of production and reproduction within this process and explained the structural conditions that sustained neoliberal extraction and expansion.
His research further illuminated how Bangladesh’s national desire for high economic growth exacerbated the precarity and affective crises of (internal) migrant workers employed in 'global' factories. It revealed how primitive accumulation strategies employed by transnational and local merchants shaped workers’ lives—while also examining how workers actively resisted and reworked dominant economic and social structures.
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His master’s level studies in the University of Bath, UK (2007-2008) made him interested to scrutinize how the perspectives of Political Economy, Sociology and Cultural Anthropology can be brought together to understand the politics of international development. Amartya Sen’s capability approach (and its application to understand people’s pursuit of wellbeing) was among the core areas that he engaged with at Bath.
The areas that he explored in subsequent years included: relationship between women’s ‘economic empowerment’ and wellbeing; governance, citizenship and poverty process; social exclusion; caste, social hierarchy and Bangladeshi Dalit communities; access to justice; local government and dynamics of social justice at community level; child sexual abuse; social capital and food security.
With a growing interest in interdisciplinary research on public policies and social development, he has examined the politics of social relations from an anthropological perspective. A key focus of his exploration has been understanding how dilemmas emanating from ‘social relationships’ influence the wellbeing of grassroots people. This inquiry led him to analyze how cultural politics and political economy intersect, shaping the ways capitalism operates at the local level.
Furthermore, he has conducted ethnographic research on climate change and its socially embedded impacts, particularly in urban settings and among ethnic minorities already facing vulnerabilities. His work explores how communities navigate climate-induced challenges through socially determined coping strategies.
RESEARCH INTEREST
Politics of ‘Development’, Social Marginality,
Labor precarity, Making and Unmaking of Neoliberal Sujectivity
JOURNAL PAPER
Mohammad Nasir Uddin, Transnational Orders, Local Lives: Conceptualizing Victimhood and Agency among Female Factory Workers in Global South, Journal of Social Studies, 154, 2017.
This write-up reviews the diverse and varying ways in which the lives of female workers of ready-made-garment (RMG) sector in Global South are understood and interpreted. It then highlights the point that while the academics, analysts, policy makers or practioners opt for a particular framework to approach and explain the lives of working class women in contemporary neoliberal context, they have to be careful about the premises and assumptions that underpin that framework - this care and caution becomes particularly important as we take note of ever changing ways in which global forces and messy local realities intersect.
Farzana Islam and Mohammad Nasir Uddin, Shifting Masculinities: Everyday Gender Practices among Informal Sector Workers in Urban Dhaka, The Jahangirnagar Review: Part II: Social Sciences, Vol. XLIV, 2020, Vol. XLIV, pp.1-18, 2020. This write-up aims to go beyond the dominant narratives that focus mostly on structures and patterns of ‘classical patriarchy’ and shed light on the ‘legitimizing’ and ‘validating’ discourses of gender inequality. Without undermining the importance of focusing on discourses and patterns, what we try here is to illustrate the quotidian ways in which dominant ideologies, norms, feelings, and emotions relating to femininity and masculinity come to be contested, negotiated, reinforced, and subverted in the context of extensive dispossession, uncertainty and precarity. By putting more emphasis on bodily experience, affect and negotiation of power, we account for the fluidity and plurality that unfolds in the everyday lifeworld. There are heterogenous ways in which diverse forms masculinities are experienced, subverted or reproduced by both men and women of impoverished households located in the margins of in urban and peri-urban Dhaka.Mohammad Nasir Uddin, “(Re)conceptualizing Household in the Context of Neoliberal Precarity”, Journal of Anthropology [Nrvijnana Patrika/নৃবিজ্ঞান পত্রিকা], 25, 1, pp.39-66, 2020. There are serious shortcomings in the way the economists, demographers or census-experts conceptualize and construe ‘the household’ from the vantage point of conducting enumeration, census, survey, or econometric measurement. The anthropologists need to take this issue more seriously into account. Anthropological conceptualization of household must overcome the economism that is dominant even in feminist scholarship on intra-household dynamism. Households are not isolated units of resource allocation and power struggle; the self and subjectivity of a person living in the household is persistently remoulded or reshaped by the forces and processes shaping ‘outside’ the household. In the context of pervasive insecurity and uncertainty brought about by ‘neoliberalism’, it is an imperative to consider the experiences that the assemblages of global and local bring upon a person’s social embeddedness.
Mohammad Nasir Uddin, “Misrecognition, Exclusion and Untouchability: Thinking through 'Dalit-hood' in Bangladesh”, Journal of Anthropology [Nrvijnana Patrika/নৃবিজ্ঞান পত্রিকা], 2015, 20, 1, 2015. This paper draws on Nancy Fraser's theory of justice in which she questions the ‘false’ antithesis between the politics of economic redistribution and the politics of identity recognition. In line with Fraser’s theory, here I argue that 'Dalit-hood' in Bangladesh is deeply entrenched into a politics of misrecognition which creates the bedrock for economic exploitation and political non-representation. Along with explaining the political economy of caste-based exploitation, it is therefore important to unpack the politics that holds back Dalit communities of the country from getting 'recognition' of their identity (or, status), and from being represented with proper distinction.
Mohammad Nasir Uddin, Beyond the Politics of Universalizing Liberal Democracy: In Quest of Global Justice, Asian Studies, 36, pp.1-14, 2017.
This piece takes issue with the main tenets of liberal political philosophy, and engages with a debate, namely, whether global promotion of liberal democracy or eradication of structural inequality should be the focus of international development politics. This piece gives a deeper look into the conceptual base of these two opposing positions, and argues that the utmost emphasize that is given on universal application of liberal democracy is not well founded; such politics of offering 'one size fit all' solution rather serves the purpose of concealing far deeper crises.
Mohammad Nasir Uddin, Contemporary Social Life of Gendered Bengali Proverbs: An Exploration among Garment Workers in Bangladesh, The Jahangirnagar Review: Part II: Social Sciences, Vol. XLIII, 2019, Vol. XLIII, 2019, 1, pp.393-408, 2019.
Mohammad Nasir Uddin, Caste-based Discrimination, Identity Politics and Development Discourse: The Case of Bangladesh's Dalit Communities, Culture and Society, 1, 2018.
This write-up is an effort to make sense of the current state of Bangladesh’s Dalit people. Particular focus is on social exclusion and deprivation that the marginal groups experience in their everyday lives. It also explains the dynamics and challenges that come into play as the efforts are taken particularly by the civil society actors to challenge the discriminatory and exclusionary practices that the Dalit (formerly, untouchable) communities persistently experience. My main intension here is to draw attention to the distinctiveness of caste-related practices in Bangladesh and to show how a generalized framework of caste is inadequate to understand contemporary exclusionary practices in Bangladesh.
Mohammad Nasir Uddin, Bringing Religion into Development: Revisiting the Key Conceptual Issues, The Jahangirnagar Review: Part II: Social Sciences, Vol. XLIV, 2021, Vol. XLIV,Mohammad Nasir Uddin, Wellbeing and Political Citizenship: Conceptual Review, Journal of Anthropology, 14, 2008.
'Wellbeing' - a normative perspective for understanding and explaining the ways in which people can pursue their lives in more meaningful way -- is rather recemt coining within development spectrum. This paper intends to contribute towards further conceptual enhancement of 'wellbeing' perspective by critical incorporation of some the conceptions and understandings that emanate from contemporary citizenship debate.
Mohammad Nasir Uddin, “The Rhetoric of Good Governance and Political Citizenship in Bangladesh”, The Jahangirnagar Review Part II Social Science, Vol. 32, Though in recent decades there has been significant policy focus on diverse agendas relating to achieving ‘good governance’ in Bangladesh, it is apparent that the programmes and initiatives taken thus far have failed to bring in any tangible impact. Whereas these primarily donor-driven actions are susceptible to the accusation that in most of the cases they have remained unconnected to local situation, this paper argues that one of the major flaws have been the lack of sincere commitment to active and inclusive citizenship. In absence of defined commitment toward citizenship promotion, programmes and actions have failed to bring in sustainable social development in general and change in poor people’s condition in particular. The paper intends to show empirically that by employing the conception of inclusive citizenship it is possible to have better understanding and analytical insight as regards the development process of the country.Mohammad Nasir Uddin, Farzana Islam, Intricate tale of social exclusion: Dalit women’s experience of caste, class, citizenship and gender in Dhaka City, The Jahangirnagar Review, 32, pp.5-32, 2008.
This paper argues that the processes and mechanisms of social exclusion in Bangladesh need to be brought under greater scrutiny to have better understanding about the plight of Dalit people themselves as well as about their relationship with the greater society. Given the intensity of exclusion and deprivation that feature life of Dalit people in general, it is almost impossible to explore ‘women question’ per se in the context of Dalit communities. Interventions or activisms that try to focus narrowly on Dalit women’s lives are likely to be counter-productive.
Mohammad Nasir Uddin, “Union Parishad's Role in Enhancing Women's Access to Justice: Reviewing Local Level Institutional Setting in Bangladesh”, Asian Studies, 34, 1, 2015.
This paper examines how local level institutions in rural Bangladesh play role in affecting the situation with regards to women's access to justice. Particular aim of the paper is to assess the strengths and weaknesses of Union Parishads (UP) in current context in terms of reducing violence and injustice against women and girls.
Mohammad Nasir Uddin, Encountering Dominance of Economism: An Anthropological Engagement (in Bangla) / অর্থনীতি শাস্ত্রের আধিপত্য ও নৃবিজ্ঞান, Journal of Anthropology [Nrvijnana Patrika/নৃবিজ্ঞান পত্রিকা], 11, 1, 2006.Mohammad Nasir Uddin, “Ethnography, Knowledge Production and Representation: Reflexivity of Anthropology as a Discipline" (in Bengali)/ এথনোগ্রাফি, জ্ঞান উৎপাদন ও পরিবেশন: নৃবিজ্ঞানের আত্ম-অনুসন্ধান, Journal of Anthropology [Nrvijnana Patrika/নৃবিজ্ঞান পত্রিকা], 10, pp.73-108, 2005.
Mohammad Nasir Uddin, “The Question of Exploring the History of Anthropological Theory: Objective Reading or Critical Historical Analysis” (in Bengali)/ নৃবিজ্ঞানের ইতিহাস পাঠের পদ্ধতি প্রসঙ্গে, Journal of Anthropology [Nrvijnana Patrika/নৃবিজ্ঞান পত্রিকা], 10, 2005.
Mohammad Nasir Uddin, “Law, Legal Pluralism and Human Rights: Toward an Understanding of ‘Anthropology of Law'", Journal of Anthropology [Nrvijnana Patrika/নৃবিজ্ঞান পত্রিকা], 9, 2004.
CONFERENCE PAPER
Mohammad Nasir Uddin, Problematizing Nationalism: Reflections on contemporary experiences in Bangladesh, “Contested Nationalisms and the New Statism”, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Penang, Malaysia, September 2-4, 2004.BOOK
Mohammad Nasir Uddin, Benchmarking the Draft UN Principles and Guidelines on the Elimination of (Caste) Discrimination based on Work and Descent: Bangladesh report, 2015.EDITED BOOK
Mohammad Nasir Uddin, Ainoon Naher, Mujibul Anam, Sayema Khatun, লিঙ্গীয় সম্পর্ক, অন্যতা ও বাজারমুখী বিশ্বায়ন, 2015.BOOK CHAPTER
Farzana Islam and Mohammad Nasir Uddin, “Climate Change and Urban Poverty: The Case of Dhaka’s Extreme Poor” in A. Naher et. al. (eds.) Gender Relations, Otherness and Globalization, Dhaka: Novela Publishers,Mohammad Nasir Uddin , “On the Politics of Poverty Measurement in International Development: Concealing more than Revealing?” , Book Chapter in A. Naher et. al. (eds.), ‘Gender Relations, Otherness and Globalization’, Dhaka: Novela Publishers., 2015.
Mainstream understanding of poverty and wellbeing has evidently gone through significant transformation in recent decades. Multi-dimensionality of poverty has come to the fore and importance of non-economic factors in shaping human wellbeing has gained much currency. However, there is still a long way to go in terms of moving beyond pre-occupation with narrow economistic and income-centric measurement. Even though the newer conceptual frameworks such as 'human development', 'capability' or 'well-being' questions ‘econometric orthodoxy’ to a great extent, dominance of quantitative measurement is still easily discernible. This article argues that the dominance of measurement practices is a reflection of the fact that international development establishment still conceives and interprets poverty and wellbeing mostly as apolitical and technical phenomena, and fails to relate them to the structural and institutional processes that are at the root of persistent inequality and injustice.
Teaching
| Course Code | Course Title | Semester/Year |
|---|---|---|
| Anth-508 | Anthropology of Law and Human Rights | MSS; Year 2013 |
| Anth-207 | Bangladesh: History, Culture and Society | BSS Part II - 2023 |
| Anth-510 | Anthropology of Public Policy | MSS 2021 |
Academic Info
Period: October 2015- September 2020
Period: October 2007 - September 2008 [MSC in International Devlopment]
Experience
Position: Tutor
Period: 2008
Position: Assistant Commissioner (Land)
Period: 2002 (June - December)
Activity
Position: Principal Investigator (PI)
Period: 2023-2024
As PI, carried out a fieldwork-based research on: "Exclusion, Marginality and Climate Change in Everyday Life of Rakhine Communities of Patuakhali District”. The research was commissioned under the purview of Bangladesh Climate Change Trust supported project: “Inclusive Resilience to Climate Change: Plainland Ethnic Minority People’s Climate Change Vulnerability and Culture Sensitive Adaptation Pathways (IRCC)”.
Position: Principal Researcher (commissioned competitive research)
Period: July 2020- June 2021
Period: June - October 2021
Position: Qualitative Data Collection and Analysis Adviser
Period: June - October 2021
Position: Assistant Commissioner
Period: January 1999 - December 2022
Contact
Mohammad Nasir Uddin
Professor
Department of Anthropology
Jahangirnagar University, Savar, Dhaka-1342, Bangladesh.
Cell Phone: 01911008275
Email: nasir@juniv.edu
, mailmnu@hotmail.com, mailmnu@gmail.com
