The global translinguistics of Bengali Muslims

This chapter presents a discussion of a literary genre called puthis, a premodern tradition of religious stories and plays in what is now Bangladesh, as an example of vernacular cosmopolitanism in an Asian context. The language of this genre, called Dubasha, is a “mixed language mode” (Seely 2008) characterized by the replacement of Sanskrit vocabulary – tatsamas – with Persian and Arabic. Such replacement creates heteroglossic utterances indexing its Islamic character and popularizing purpose. Sanskrit lexicon and the tatsama register are eschewed in the genre, I argue, because of rhetorical and religious reasons even though they represent the sadhu bhasa – the literate register – associated with local literary tradition. The heteroglossic feature of this genre functions to constitute the umma – the Islamic community of believers – and to communicate an Islamic cosmology to the converted Muslim population. The chapter ends with an argument of what can be learned about language as a social and rhetorical resource from this premodern tradition of global translinguistics practiced in Asia

Social Protection Experiences of and Attitudes Towards New Urban Poor After Covid-19 in Bangladesh

The Covid-19 pandemic led to a large increase in poverty in Bangladesh, especially in urban areas. Rising food prices and high inflation rates further compounded already high levels of socioeconomic uncertainty. Social protection is vital to help mitigate the effects of crisis and make households more resilient to uncertainty. This paper provides insights into urban residents’ experiences of poverty and the support they received since the Covid-19 pandemic, and derives implications for social protection programming in urban Bangladesh. Using secondary longitudinal data collected since the start of the pandemic with new quantitative surveys and qualitative data collected in Kallyanpur, Dhaka and Shantinagar, Chittagong in March 2023, the study points to high levels of precarity; poverty’s toll on mental health; widespread stigmatisation and discrimination of residents of low-income neighbourhoods, and inadequate social protection support. It argues for the need to expand social protection in urban areas; counter area-based discrimination; ensure dignified delivery of assistance, and provide an integrated policy response

Socialization in the Neoliberal Academy of STEM Scholars: A Case Study of Negotiating Dispositions in an International Graduate Student in Entomology

This article examines how neoliberal orders of discourse shape the dispositions to academic literacies of an international graduate student in entomology. As this ideology of market logic consolidates its hegemony in universities of excellence and US culture at large, academic socialization and disciplinary activities increasingly aim to create scholarly dispositions and subjectivities that align with it. Such processes are further complicated by the backgrounds of international graduate students—an ever-larger proportion of graduate students in STEM who often hail from educational cultures significantly different from the U.S. Our analysis of an international graduate student’s literacy practices in terms of motivations and outcomes shows that his literacies echo the dispositions pushed by neoliberal ideologies, but are not over-determined by them. Rather, as our case study illustrates, his socialization is a layered process, with ambiguous implications and strategic calculations making up literacies and disciplinary outcomes. We believe closely mapping such tensions in literacies and socialization processes increases humanities scholars’ awareness both of the potential contradictions of educating international graduate students into the neoliberal model and of how the university can still be used to develop the dispositions needed to renegotiate the neoliberal order of discourse for more ethical and empowering purposes