Field notes & Essays
Essays, field notes, and reflections on digital politics, everyday life, and teaching anthropology in Bangladesh.
Since 2006, my writing has lived across blogs, online forums, and social media—quiet observations, political reflections, fragments of memory, and field notes from a changing Bangladesh. What began as experimental blogging slowly became a long-term practice of documenting the digital public sphere, social movements, and the intimate textures of everyday life.
Long before I became an anthropologist of the digital, those early posts were already small field notes—attempts to understand how people speak, hope, resist, and transform in online spaces. From Somewhereinblog to Facebook to academic journals, my writing has followed me through different versions of life: student, researcher, teacher, and witness to a country always in motion.
For nearly two decades, I have written at the intersection of personal narrative and political imagination: Shahbag, the July Revolution, digital activism, everyday Dhaka, and the fragile architectures of our online public sphere.
This blog brings those pieces into one home—a living archive and a continuation of that long conversation.
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After 40 in Dhaka: Intimacy in the Gigacity
Why relationships after 40 feel fragile in Dhaka—where class, migration, religion, and gigacity life quietly reshape intimacy.
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After Control and Chaos
Bangladesh has moved from digital censorship to speech chaos—but repeal alone cannot repair the damage. This essay explores what real repair would require: legally, institutionally, and socially.
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After July: Campus Politics, Moral Authority, and the Conditions of Islamist Ascendancy
After the July 2024 uprising, student union elections across Bangladesh’s public universities produced a striking outcome: the near-monopolistic victory of Islami Chhatra Shibir. Is this a sign of rising Islamo-fascism, or something else entirely? This long-form analysis examines Generation Z politics, material movements like road safety and quota reform, memory exhaustion around 1971 and Shahbag, organizational power, Islamic commerce, and the unresolved histories of violence—arguing that what we are witnessing is not ideological conversion, but structural collapse and organizational survival.
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Bangladesh: Culture, Faith & Everyday Life | Critical Essays | Digital Society, Work & AI | Public Writing
After July: Permanent Demand, Fragile Civil Society, and the Return of the Mob
After July 2024, Bangladesh did not enter stability or revolution—but an era of permanent demand. This essay explains why protests persist without transformation.
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After the Streets Reopened: Internet Regulation and the Crisis of the Digital Public Sphere in Bangladesh (2006–2024)
For nearly two decades, internet regulation has reshaped political life in Bangladesh. This essay traces how digital space became the country’s last political public sphere—first disciplined through law, and later destabilized into contentious speech anarchy after July 2024.
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Bodies, Belief, and Power: Public Assemblies in Contemporary Bangladesh
“An anthropological reading of public assemblies in post–July 2024 Bangladesh, examining how presence, legitimacy, and institutional fragility interact.”
