After the Exodus: Gender and Belonging in Bangladesh's Rohingya Refugee Camps (book talk)
After the Exodus (Cambridge University Press, 2024) examines how forced migration of the Rohingyas from Myanmar to Bangladesh has affected the gendered subjectivities and lived experiences of Rohingya refugee women, and transformed gender relations and roles in displacement.
Based on 14 months of feminist ethnographic fieldwork in Bangladesh's Kutupalong-Balukhali refugee camp in 2017 and 2018, the book uncovers the everyday strategies employed by refugee women to create a sense of belonging and to make a life for themselves after forced migration.
Rohingya women adapt to camp life by negotiating marriage and intimate experiences, adjusting to changing gender divisions of labour, and navigating encounters with humanitarian aid agencies and male camp leaders. These women strategically bargain shifting power relations to reconstruct their lives in displacement, thereby reclaiming agency and asserting their identity through the spaces they create, inhabit, and reshape; the coping mechanisms they employ; and the bonds of kinship and community they forge.
Speaker & chair biographies
Dr. Farhana Afrin Rahman is an interdisciplinary scholar of gender, development, and forced migration. Her work draws on feminist and postcolonial approaches to examine lived experiences, humanitarianism, and the dynamics of power, care, and community across the Global South. She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Her first book, After the Exodus: Gender and Belonging in Bangladesh's Rohingya Refugee Camps (Cambridge University Press, 2024), won the 2025 L.H.M. Ling Outstanding First Book Prize from the British International Studies Association. For her contributions to the field of gender and development, she received the 2021 Paula Kantor Award from the International Center for Research on Women.
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
*Banner photo by by Julie Ricard on Unsplash
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