Research

Book Manuscript

Tanjeem, Nafisa. Can Workers of the World Unite? A Transnational Feminist Ethnography of Labor Organizing Across the Apparel Supply Chain (In progress).

Description

This book project examines transnational labor activism and activist discourses developed in relation to the deadliest garment industrial disaster in human history, the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza – a factory building housing five garment factories in Savar, Bangladesh, and continued until the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. It examines the gendered, racialized, classed, and (trans)national trajectory of labor organizing around the Accord, the Alliance, and the COVID-19 pandemic proposing diverging concepts of safety, security, and labor rights, and the challenges that arise when these concepts clash in various local, global, physical, and virtual organizing spaces. Drawing on seven-year-long physical and digital ethnographic observations and interviews, this project specifically investigates what it means for grassroots labor organizers in the Global South, who are often restricted by national borders and neoliberal socio-economic-political forces, to engage in transnational solidarity building.

Journal Articles

Tanjeem, Nafisa, and Michael Illuzzi. 2022. “Decolonizing Or Doing the Best With What We Have? Feminist University-Community Engagement Outside WGSS Programs.” Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Learning 8 (2): 110–19.

Illuzzi, Michael J., and Nafisa Tanjeem. “Pandemic Pandemonium: Can There Be a Feminist Pedagogy within e-Learning Industrial Complex?” (Under review)

Chapters in Peer-reviewed Books

Menon, Nidhiya, Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, and Nafisa Tanjeem. (Under Review). “The Agricultural Marketplace and Women’s Work.”

Tanjeem, Nafisa, and Rawshan E. Fatima. 2023. “The 2018 Road Safety Protest in Bangladesh: How a Student Crowd Challenged (or Could Not Challenge) the Repressive State.” In Young People Shaping Democratic Politics: Interrogating Inclusion, Mobilising Education, edited by Ian Rivers and C. Laura Lovin, 55–81. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tanjeem, Nafisa. 2022. “Political-Social Movements: Unions and Workers Movements: South Asia.” In Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (Supplement XXIII), edited by Joseph Suad. Leiden and Boston: BRILL.

Tanjeem, Nafisa. 2021. “The Labor of Fashion, Transnational Organizing, and the Global COVID-19 Pandemic.” In The Routledge Companion to Fashion Studies, edited by Eugenia Paulicelli, Elizabeth Wissinger, and Veronica Manlow, 259–68. Oxon and New York: Routledge.

Rodgers, Yana, and Nafisa Tanjeem. 2021. “The Roles of Women.” In Understanding Contemporary Asia Pacific (Second Edition), edited by Katherine Palmer Kaup, 353-384. Bounder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Tanjeem, Nafisa and Aditi Sabur. 2018. “Bangladesh: The Institutionalization of Women and Gender Studies in Higher Education.” In Education in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Islands, edited by Debotri Dhar and Hema Letchamanan, 29-46. London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Tanjeem, Nafisa. 2016. “Social Media and Conforming Voluntarism in the Neoliberal Era: The Case of Rana Plaza Collapse in Savar, Bangladesh.” In Revealing Gender Inequalities and Perceptions in South Asian Countries through Discourse Analysis, edited by Nazmunnessa Mahtab, Sara Parker, Farah Kabir, Tania Haque, Aditi Sabur and Abu Saleh Mohammad Sowad, 57-79. USA: Information Science Reference (IGI Global).

Tanjeem, Nafisa. 2012. “The Making of a “Home”: Exploring the Space of Bangladeshi Diasporic Restaurants in Toronto.” In Strangers in New Homelands: The Social Deconstruction and Reconstruction of “Home” among Immigrants in the Diaspora, edited by Michael Baffoe, Maria Cheung, Lewis Asimeng-Boahene and Buster Ogbuagu, 78-90. UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Tanjeem, Nafisa and Ishrat Khan. 2010. Impact of Hegemonic Masculinity at Workplace: An Analysis of Challenges Faced by Middle-Class Working Women in Bangladesh. Dhaka: University of Dhaka, Department of Women and Gender Studies – Working Paper Series.

Book Review

Tanjeem, Nafisa. 2020. “An Empire of Touch: Women’s Political Labor and the Fabrication of East Bengal.” South Asian Review, July, 1–4.