Naveeda Khan will bring together two aspects of life in Bangladesh that are usually kept separate within national discourse but actually are experienced together within the context of life lived in physically dynamic surroundings: the voice of the Muslim preacher such as Delwar Hossain Sayidee who is internationally known but who has recently been sentenced to death within the context of a tribunal on the war of 1971 for his part in collaborating with the Pakistani army but whose call to Islam makes unassimilable his changed status to war criminal within the public domain.  Dr Khan will place this alongside the early warning systems for cyclones, floods and erosion with their differential success among the public. She will discuss how these calls/warnings/signs both rely upon a link to the metaphysical to gain traction/urgency/intensity but also need an infrastructure/apparatus to make them efficacious.

Naveeda Khan is an an associate professor of anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research is located at the intersections of the study of material environments, temporality, and the everyday.  Her first book, Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (2012), explores how the Islamic tradition and the aspiration to strive together shape collective projects in Pakistan.  Her most recent research shifts location and focus to examine rural and riverine environments in Bangladesh as they intersect with multiple possible futures, including the temporalities of everyday life, those of material substances such as riverine flows and silt sedimentation, and the crisis-inflected future of climate change.