Fixing the National Economy: Tobacco and Ganja across the northern borderlands of Bangladesh

About the Speaker

Sahana Ghosh a social anthropologist, broadly interested in forms and experiences of inequality produced through the intersection of mobility, policing, and gender in our contemporary world. She uses ethnography and feminist approaches to study a range of concerns, such as: borders and borderlands, the mobility of people and goods, citizenship, refuge and neighborliness, the national security state, agrarian change, spatial history, transnational kinship, and the political economy of gendered labor. She conducts research in India and Bangladesh.

Her first book, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the India-Bangladesh Borderlands, chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands and shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the meaning and management of threat and security in relation to mobility. This book recasts a singular focus on border fences and migrants as border-crossers and shows, instead, that postcolonial bordering materializes through multiple forms of violence and devaluation in agrarian, borderland lives. It is a 2020 finalist for Atelier: Ethnography in the 21st Century, a book series at the University of California Press.

Prof. Ghosh's academic writing has been published in the American Anthropologist, the Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the Economic and Political Weekly, Gender, Place and Culture, among others. She has also contributed podcasts, op-eds, and photo essays to engage in wider public debates on these topics.

Prof. Ghosh received her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Before joining NUS, She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University and at the Watson Institute at Brown University. She also holds an MPhil in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford and a BA and MA in English Literature from Delhi University and Jadavpur University, respectively.