April 8, 2009

Anthropology graduate student receives fellowship for ethnographic dissertation

Nusrat Chowdhury, Ph.D candidate in Anthropology, received the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for 2009-10, following fieldwork in Phulbari, Bangladesh.

Nusrat Chowdhury is currently writing her dissertation looking at the intersections of energy crisis and political crisis in Bangladesh. Her fieldwork took place in Phulbari in Northern Bangladesh where a local resistance movement had been successful in ousting a foreign coal mining company. Phulbari has since become a focal point in the larger discourses of "crisis" - of both moral and material value - that frame contemporary Bangladeshi political culture. Drawing on ethnographic research, the dissertation aims to show how this particular movement and the nationwide state of emergency that formed the backdrop of her research are best understood when studied in tandem.