Sayema Khatun

US-based Independent Anthropologist| Feminist| Border and Identities in the South Asia | Stateless, Refugee and Genocide| Bangladeshi Women Solidarity Network|

[Sayema Khatun @sayema]

I am honored to be featured as a global scholar in the Yale University Human Research Area File Repository, USA this year for my research on Policy Response to the Influx of Rohingya in Bangladesh.

https://t.co/6EyiDsgHu6

[Sayema Khatun @sayema]

Enjoy my article on the Slow Reads:
Politics and Archaeology of Ayodhya https://t.co/QlHIoCupF4

[SubRosa )✿( Magick @subrosamagick.bsky.social @SubRosaMagick]

She was 57 years old.
White hair. No carefully managed image. No media training designed to make her more palatable. Just thirty years of accumulated knowledge and the calm, unhurried authority of a woman who had spent her life mastering her subject.
She sat on a BBC panel, answered questions about immigration and politics, cited evidence, made arguments — and then went home.
The next morning, her inbox looked like a crime scene.
Her name is Mary Beard — Cambridge professor, classicist, one of the most respected scholars of ancient Rome and Western civilisation alive. And the internet had decided that a woman speaking with quiet authority on television needed to be punished for it.
The messages were not criticism. They were not debate. They were rape threats. Death threats. Coordinated campaigns of personal destruction targeting her appearance, her age, her voice — anything that could be used to remind her that spaces like the one she had just occupied were not meant for her.
Most people would have gone quiet.
Mary Beard went further in.
She did what scholars do when they find a pattern that disturbs them: she followed it backward. Through decades. Through centuries. Through millennia. All the way back to some of the oldest texts in Western civilisation.
And she found it had always been there.
In Homer's Odyssey — one of the foundational works of Western literature, nearly three thousand years old — there is a scene that most readers pass over without registering its quiet violence. Penelope comes downstairs and asks the poet to sing a different song. Her own son, Telemachus, cuts her off. He orders her back to her room and tells her plainly: speech is the business of men.
She goes.
Mary Beard read that scene and recognized it immediately.
Not as ancient history. As a pattern.
In ancient Rome, women who dared to speak in public were not described as orators or thinkers. They were described as noise — disorderly sound, something that did not deserve to be called language or argument. Their voices were not speech. Their thoughts were not thoughts.
In the medieval world, women who claimed public authority were labeled as witches.
Elizabeth I — Queen of England, ruler of a nation — had to rhetorically reshape herself into something masculine just to be taken seriously as the leader of her own country.
The silencing of women who speak with authority was not invented by social media. It was not a modern pathology or a cultural accident. It was built deliberately, over centuries, into the very foundations of how Western civilisation defined who gets to speak, what authority sounds like, and who is allowed to take up space in public life.
Mary Beard had found something important.
In 2017, she published Women & Power: A Manifesto — short enough to read in an afternoon, substantial enough to reframe everything you thought you understood about why this keeps happening.
Her argument was precise and devastating.
The problem is not that women lack the ability to lead. The problem is that the model of leadership itself — the template for what public authority looks, sounds, and feels like — was built by men over centuries and has never been redesigned. When a woman enters public life and doesn't fit that template, she is not failing. The template was never built for her. It was built specifically to exclude her, and it has been doing exactly that, efficiently and continuously, for three thousand years.
The solution, Beard argued, is not to teach women to perform power the way men have always performed it. The solution is to dismantle and rebuild the very concept of what power is allowed to look like.
She kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept appearing on television — white-haired, unhurried, carrying her decades of authority without performing it, without packaging it for comfort, without apologizing for it.
The threats continued.
But other messages began arriving too. Letters from women and girls who had spent their entire lives feeling that every door was slightly too narrow, every table slightly too high, every room slightly reluctant to make space for them. Women who had spent years wondering what was wrong with them — why they couldn't quite fit, couldn't quite belong, couldn't quite be taken seriously no matter how much they knew or how hard they worked.
They read the book and understood, perhaps for the first time, that nothing had ever been wrong with them.
The room had been designed without them in mind.
That is not a personal failing.
That is a three-thousand-year-old architectural decision.
And one Cambridge professor with white hair and a calm voice — who refused to go quiet when the internet told her to — spent her career documenting it, naming it, and handing that knowledge to everyone who needed to hear it.
Telemachus told Penelope that speech was the business of men.
He was wrong then.
He is still wrong now.
And Mary Beard has three thousand years of evidence to prove it.
via The Inspireist

#FeministFriday #HERstory

[Transforming Anthro @TransformAnthro]

Our spring issue is out now! With articles on Black geographies and ecological care, educational reform, institutional exclusion, and residential segregation, this issue moves across sites of US Empire while insisting on conjuring geographies of our own.

[Sayema Khatun @sayema]

Anthropology changed my life and I change anthropology as I practice it.
This degree changed my life. And it’s essential to a changing America. https://t.co/bLxDuvwA3k

[Sayema Khatun @sayema]

Revisiting this recent history, I wonder what constitutes first or second independence when it comes to women.
What constitutes independence for women? https://t.co/SXfoiDv6NV

[Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth]

How do geopolitics and distrust of foreign intervention get taken up in vernacular narratives? Our latest issue features this article from Shamim Homayun on Afghan folk tales and beliefs about shrines and antiquities:

[Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth]

Out now! 📢 The newest issue of Cultural Anthropology is now available open access - please check out the seven articles at the link below:

[David Bergman @TheDavidBergman]

What the EU Got Wrong About the Bangladesh Election

The headline emerging from the European Union's preliminary report into the Bangladesh election was that it was "credible and competently managed, marking a pivotal step towards restoring democratic governance and rule of law."

A significant finding, and whilst one can quibble at the edges this is not a finding most independent observers would disagree with. Indeed, the credibility of the elections appears widely accepted in Bangladesh.

What was problematic, however, was the response given by the chair of the EU Observation Mission to the question that (almost) dominated the press conference in which it set out its findings, at least in terms of numbers of questions: What is the EU’s view on the exclusion of the Awami League from the election?

The answer given by the chairman of the EU observer mission was this: "We are here to observe the elections. What we are interested in is the process of elections. Transitional justice is an extremely painful and sensitive issue in many countries including many European countries. But of course the elections are a way to move forward and what we have observed in these elections is that they have been hugely competitive and the choice presented to the voters with these 2000 candidates have been considerable. This is really a way forward for Bangladesh democracy to go."

Is it really possible for an election observation mission to sidestep the exclusion of a political party that has, for most of Bangladesh’s history, been either the largest or second-largest party in the country? Whatever one’s view on the justification for that exclusion, it is self-evident that the election was not fully inclusive. A substantial minority of voters were unable to cast their ballots for the party they traditionally support.

The EU appears reluctant even to acknowledge this obvious point.

The difficulty, perhaps, lies in the question the EU does not wish to confront directly: Was the exclusion of the Awami League justified? Only by taking a position on that issue can an observer mission coherently assess the quality of an election conducted in its absence.

Instead, the EU seems to have placed the issue of exclusion under the heading of “transitional justice” rather than “electoral fairness.” That distinction is unconvincing. The exclusion of a major political party is not merely a transitional justice matter; it goes to the heart of electoral inclusiveness and representativeness.

The inconsistency becomes clearer when considering the mission’s remarks on participation and turnout. The chair emphasised at the press conference that a key concern was whether “all relevant groups in society” were participating – including “all political groups and all social groups.” Yet Awami League supporters constitute one of the country’s most significant political constituencies. Their effective exclusion from meaningful participation raises precisely the participation issue the mission claims to prioritise.

And whilst it is true that the contest between the BNP and Jamaat alliances was competitive -- competitiveness between two blocs does not necessarily equate to breadth of political choice. The assertion that the presence of 2,000 candidates ensured “considerable” choice misunderstands the nature of party-based electoral politics in Bangladesh. The election offered voters a contest largely between a centre-right and a religious-right formation. The socially liberal centre-left space traditionally occupied by the Awami League was absent.

An election can be competitive without being fully representative. To use a comparative example, an election in the United Kingdom confined to a choice between the Conservative Party and Reform UK might well be highly competitive -- but it would hardly be described as offering the electorate comprehensive political choice.

By declining to address the implications of exclusion directly, the EU risks appearing selective in its view of the Bangladesh election. A more intellectually honest approach would have been to acknowledge the lack of inclusiveness, explain its view on whether that exclusion was justified, and then assess the procedural quality of the election within that framework.
https://t.co/qIEzn2pStr

[Naomi Hossain @nomhossain]

Who I ran into campaigning in Karwan Bazaar!

[Bangladesh America Alliance 🇧🇩🇺🇸 @bdusalliance]

#YesForBangladesh

[Sayema Khatun @sayema]

Ramachandra Guha: In praise of Dr Umar Khalid, from one historian to another https://t.co/izts3DoxpF

[Prashant Bhushan @pbhushan1]

Ramachandra Guha: In praise of Dr Umar Khalid, from one historian to another.
“The young scholar’s work, though not without its flaws, is one of the most accomplished doctoral dissertations by an Indian that I have read.” https://t.co/1voLbvrNw2

[Sayema Khatun @sayema]

NCP betrayed themselves!
Sabotaged the spirit of youth revolution. They had a chance to deliver politics into a novel direction.Tragically, despite having the historical opportunity, they failed to recognize their own potential and apparently failed those who entrusted them.

[Apsana Begum MP @ApsanaBegumMP]

Bangladesh is at a critical juncture.

Sharif Osman Hadi was a young aspiring Parliamentarian who rose to prominence in the student-led mass uprising of 2024. His killers must be found and held to account.

True democracy, accountability and press freedom must also prevail in Bangladesh to end these cycles of violence.
https://t.co/Yie4dqsbw5

[Apsana Begum MP @ApsanaBegumMP]

I’m proud of the campaign I ran despite the situation I faced, but where has it been reported in the media?

It’s not like the safety of MPs hasn’t been of public interest or newsworthy.

Yet with me, there evokes a deadly silence & women’s experiences are treated so differently.

[Sayema Khatun @sayema]

@bdusalliance As I observe through the evolving situation, Hadi emerged as a charismatic youth leader with promise of a politics based on pragmatic reasons aligned with the aspiration of July revolution.

[Sayema Khatun @sayema]

On Osman Hadi:

[Bangladesh America Alliance 🇧🇩🇺🇸 @bdusalliance]

Osman Hadi - Assasination Attempt https://t.co/Abynq81toV

[Bangladesh America Alliance 🇧🇩🇺🇸 @bdusalliance]

Bangladesh America Alliance (BAA) strongly condemns the heinous attack on Osman Hadi, a prominent son of the July revolution. As Hadi fights for his life, we continue to fight for a new Bangladesh free from reign of terror and dictatorship. People’s power will prevail. Our thoughts and prayers for Hadi and his family. Stay strong Bangladesh!

[Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth]

Worth checking out: @AmEthno's new online collection featuring ten essays on the anthropology of free trade: https://t.co/B5K403gJzz

[Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth]

Now that #AAA2025 is a wrap—time for an award 🏆 thread! Congratulations to Lisa Messeri for winning this year's Gregory Bateson Book Prize!! Awarded for In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles. More info here from @DukePress: https://t.co/5dZJ0ia5l5