Anthropology & Pacific Studies Hybrid Seminar: After the Exodus with Dr Farhana Afrin Rahman

Join us for a thought-provoking hybrid seminar exploring gender, displacement, and belonging in the context of the Rohingya refugee crisis. Dr. Farhana Afrin Rahman will discuss her acclaimed book After the Exodus: Gender and Belonging in Bangladesh’s Rohingya Refugee Camps, drawing on 14 months of feminist ethnographic research in the Kutupalong-Balukhali camp. 

Hosted by the Anthropology and Pacific Studies Seminar series, this event brings together critical perspectives on refugee lived experiences, with responses from Professor Yvonne Te Ruki Rangi o Tangaroa Underhill-Sem, Maria Ahmad and Professor Jay Marlowe. Attendees are welcome to join in person or online.

This event is also supported by the Centre for Asia Pacific Refugee Studies (CAPRS). 

________________________________________________________

After the Exodus examines how forced migration of the Rohingya from Myanmar to Bangladesh has affected the gendered subjectivities and lived experiences of Rohingya refugee women, and transformed gender relations and roles in displacement. Based on 14 months of feminist ethnographic fieldwork in Bangladesh’s Kutupalong-Balukhali refugee camp in 2017 and 2018, the book uncovers the everyday strategies employed by refugee women to create a sense of belonging and to make a life for themselves after forced migration. Rohingya women adapt to camp life by negotiating marriage and intimate experiences, adjusting to changing gender divisions of labour, and navigating encounters with humanitarian aid agencies and male camp leaders. These women strategically bargain shifting power relations to reconstruct their lives in displacement, thereby reclaiming agency and asserting their identity through the spaces they create, inhabit, and reshape; the coping mechanisms they employ; and the bonds of kinship and community they forge.

Dr. Farhana Afrin Rahman is is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College Cambridge. Previously, she was a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tokyo, Non- Residential Fellow at the Centre for Asia Pacific Refugee Studies at the University of Auckland, and a Fellow at the Harvard University Asia Center. Farhana holds a PhD and MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an Honours BA from the University of Toronto. Her first book, After the Exodus: Gender and Belonging in Bangladesh’s Rohingya Refugee Camps, was published Nov. 2024 with Cambridge University Press. The book is on the final shortlist of the British International Studies Association’s 2025 L.H.M. Ling Outstanding First Book Prize. For her extensive contributions to the field of gender and development, Farhana was the 2021 recipient of the Paula Kantor Award from the International Center for Research on Women.

Professor Yvonne Te Ruki Rangi o Tangaroa Underhill-Sem (MNZM) is a Pacific feminist decolonial development geographer currently teaching Pacific Studies at Waipapa Taumata Rau/University of Auckland. Yvonnes’s research pivots on the intricacies of labour and climate mobilities; maternities in out-of-the-way places; and diverse markets in a warming world. Yvonne is a member of CAPRS contributing by mentoring Non-Resident Fellows, including Dr Farhana Rahman

Maria Ahmad is a Researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Auckland. Her areas of research and interests include refugee education and civic participation, social justice and equity in higher education, and ethnic women empowerment. She has been involved with The Centre for Asia Pacific Refugee Studies (CAPRS) since its inception in 2020 as an oversight board member.

Jay Marlowe is a professor of social work and head of the School of Social Practice.  He is the co-founder of the Centre for Asia Pacific Refugees, and his research focuses on refugee displacement and settlement futures.