Meet Our New Wadsworth Fellows: Zunayed Ehsan
With the support of the Wadsworth International Fellowship, Zunayed Ehsan will continue his training in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, hosted by Katherine Bowie.
I was born and raised in Bangladesh, where I completed my undergraduate studies in Sociology at the University of Dhaka. Subsequently I received the competitive SAARC Silver Jubilee Award to pursue an MA in Sociology and Social anthropology at South Asian University in New Delhi, India. Seeking to further expand my interdisciplinary expertise and horizons of knowing, I completed a second masters in Contemporary Islamic Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha which was fully funded by the Qatar Foundation. Throughout my educational journey, I have been motivated by a passion for attempting to understand the lived experiences that underpin the broader structural inequities of my surroundings. My academic interests ultimately led me to pursue a PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
My research interests include political & historical anthropology, political theology, anthropology of religion, peasant politics, social movements, anthropology of South Asia, critical theory, decoloniality and subaltern studies. During my PhD I intend to explore how the intersection of religion and Marxism (re)shaped anti-colonial struggles, peasant mobilizations and working-class uprisings in 20th-century East Bengal. I believe one’s life experiences shape one’s intellectual pursuits and my motivation for undertaking this research was driven by my subjective experience of living in an authoritarian regime in Bangladesh (2009-2024). Based on my experiences and observations, I realize that there are lapses in the ways we understand and intervene in politics. Politics today have become disconnected from ideals around social justice and reduced to a mere game of accumulating power. In my view, these days there’s a dire need to (re)conceptualize politics grounded in social justice. My PhD project strives to contribute to current critiques of politics. Because I view history not merely as knowledge of the past but as a way of thinking, I argue that applying methodologies drawn from historical anthropology to revisit revolutionary pasts has the potential to reveal alternative imaginations of emancipatory futures. I will also conduct ethnographic fieldwork on the trajectory of this history in present-day state violence, enforced disappearances and political movements in Bangladesh.