VISITING FELLOWS


Farid Uddin Ahamed (Sociology, South Asian University)


Migration Aspirations and their Transformative Effects on the Integration of Bangladeshi Migrants in the UK


My research focuses on pre-post migration dynamics. I will look into transformative effects of imagined futures ‘away from home’ in the context of the wider interconnections between globalisation and socio- cultural, political and economic transformations and examine how such imaginations transform notions of identity and belonging, livelihood strategies, citizenship and social commitment, health and well being of immigrants. I will analyse how such culturally embedded imaginations link up to local evaluations of human risk in the host country.


I will outline a holistic, in-depth investigation of the migration aspirations and acculturation experiences of British Bangladeshis settled in the UK. I will address in detail how migration, acculturation and integration affect the social well being of Bangladeshis in the UK as well as exploring which features of the local environment help or hinder the processes of social and cultural integration. A better understanding of these issues will facilitate provision of appropriate social services to ethnic minority populations in the UK.


Rachel Cowgill (Music, Cardiff)


Empire, Internationalism and Remembrance in British Musical Culture, 1918-1939


My current research explores themes of transregionalism


in relation to the cultural work done by music in Britain in the interwar period, particularly as it was experienced over the airwaves in the context of the early development of the BBC. Music was central to BBC programming in the 1920-30s and its potential to shape the national imaginary was by no means lost on broadcasting pioneers. The inauguration of the BBC’s Empire Service in 1932 added a new dynamic, with John Reith publicly declaring his intention to use radio to bring the colonies to a truer understanding of the ‘mother country’. The 1930s saw an increasingly internationalist impulse in music-programming.


The resulting tensions were played out vividly in the BBC’s programming for Armistice Day in the interwar period, but also in the early career of Benjamin Britten. My project focuses on two areas: music’s role at the BBC in articulating and mediating conflicting identities and the musical development of Benjamin Britten.


Annu Jalais (Anthropology, Jawaharial Nehru University/LSE) Religion, Community, & the Working Classes of Bengal


My project is a book on subaltern identity, social mobility and religion in the last forty years in Bangladesh and West Bengal. Based on interviews with individuals from resettled and marginalised communities, I will explore what working class Bengalis from the borderlands mean by a Bengali/Bangali/Bangladeshi identity. Through a study of the resettlement of refugees to frontier and ‘wild’ zones, my aim is to explore links both to a complicated Bengali/Bangali identity and to Dalit Bengali Hindu/Bengali Muslim/Minority politics. The first part deals with how the history of both Bengals has affected the working classes. The second part closely looks at social distinctions and their formations. The third part of the book will be concerned with religion and will address various questions: can we talk of a distinct Bengali Hinduism and of a separate Bengali Islam? What has been the role of migrant workers who live in the UK or the Gulf? Why has religion become such an important marker of identity on both sides of the border today?


Andrew F Jones (East Asian Languages & Cultures, UC Berkeley)


Circuit Listening: Electric Folk Music & the Chinese 1960s


I want to write China back into the narrative of the explosion of new popular and vernacular music in the 1960s and reinsert the ‘global’ into our sometimes hermetic


sense of Chinese cultural history. This book hinges on a discursive category of enormous importance to the articulation of Chinese music, literature, and culture since the May 4th Movement and the way in which folk music becomes entangled with newly emergent mass media in the 1960s. Examining the ways in which folk music and discourses of the ‘folk’ were remade, reproduced, recorded, broadcast, and projected onscreen, will necessitate an archaeology of the emergence of the new media networks. This archaeology will also open the question of how we might rethink folk music and folk revivalism, allowing us to listen to music as seemingly disparate as the Beatles and Maoist revolutionary song, or Bob Dylan and Taiwanese campus folk, as phenomena produced more or less simultaneously from out of the circuitry of a newly transistorised world.


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