On Friday May 19, the Dutch Anthropological Association (ABv) organizes its yearly “Anthropology Day” (Dag van de Antropologie). This year’s theme is Solidarity. For more information, registration and the program, please visit their website, or go the their Facebook event.
Lova will be present at the Anthropology Day with a panel titled Gender and Solidarity issues in South Asia: Rethinking Research Practices, Communication and Ethics.
Jolanda Brunnekreef and Mishu Hassan will discuss the central topic of solidarity in their own originals ways. The panel will be chaired by Ina Keuper (VU) and Luisa Steur (UvA) will be the discussant.
Jolanda Brunnekreef graduated in cultural anthropology in 1993 from Radboud University Nijmegen. She has a long time engagement with South Asia. After several years of working for the India Committee Netherlands on the issue of caste-discrimination and getting deeply involved with the Dalit solidarity movement, she started writing journalistic and ethnographic narratives about social inequality in South Asia, and with Dalit women in particular. The experiences within the Dalit movement and the solidarity movement prove to be an interesting field to explore several issues at hand in anthropological sense: what does solidarity mean in intercultural perspectives? How do different ‘world views’, ‘ownership’ and ‘identity’ play a role in this? In the presentation Jolanda will speak about her personal experiences concerning these issues, referring also to very recent events.
Mishu Hassan is a PhD student at Radboud University Nijmegen. He is doing research with a group of homeless children, women and queers, squatting around an Islamic shrine in an urban fringe in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In his presentation he will present the ways in which new ways of communicating research results have been introduced in the study, and discuss issues around research ethics and communication. Written words have not much to offer to the interlocutors, who are mostly illiterate. Yet, songs and music play important functions in the subaltern sociability and popular Islam in Bangladesh. This fact gave birth to the Kokila Rap, a Hip Hop collective with homeless young people. Kokila Rap aims to forge a new kind of soundscape through combining spoken words from the everyday life, subaltern sensibility and samples from local genres with bouncy beats and politics that problematizes the notion of ‘authorship’ in the academy. Girls occupy the central stage of Kokila Rap, and much of the songs originate from feminist point of views.