PhD Oral Exam - Azra Rashid, Communication

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

Naristhan/Ladyland is a research-creation project that challenges the selective remembering, silencing and appropriating of women’s experiences in the widely circulated images of the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh. As a video, the project juxtaposes the testimonies of survivors and national memory of the war and creates a shift of perspective that demands a breaking of silence. Employing research-creation as methodology, the video and written component engage with the existing feminist scholarship on gender, nationalism and genocide and the archive of the Liberation War Museum in Bangladesh to investigate the dominant representations of gender in the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh. The archive of the war museum in Bangladesh is viewed as a site of institutionalized dialogue between the 1971 genocide and the national memory of that event. An examination of the archive allows us an opening point into the ideologies that have sanctioned a particular authoring of history, which is written from a patriarchal perspective. The photographs on display at the Liberation War Museum offer a crystallizing moment in the national memory; they invoke the resilience and survival of the nation in a war that was largely fought by the men of the country on behalf of the nation. It omits the victimization of women, which did not end with the war in 1971. To question the archive is to question the authority and power that is inscribed in the archive itself and that is the function performed by testimonies in this research. Testimonies are offered from four unique vantage points – rape survivor, freedom fighter, religious and ethnic minorities – to question the appropriation and omission of women’s stories. Furthermore, the emphasis on the multiplicity of women’s experiences in war seeks to highlight the counter-narrative that is created by acknowledging the differences in women’s experiences in war instead of transcending those differences.