Situating ICTs in Cross-border Displacement

Project Highlights
This project is led by Dr Faheem Hussain, Arizona State University, and has multiple collaborators from the University of Toronto and Trinity College, Dublin. We have been trying to address the gap in ICTD literature by drawing on our more than three years long research with the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. I joined the field research on December 2018 and later as a consultant of BRAC, I contributed in survey design for quantitative part of this research. We are now building on a rich body of literature on development sociology and philosophy to demonstrate how the refugees infrastructure their hope through various artful practices of solidarity, leadership, and negotiation, and how ICT plays an important role in and around each of these practices. We discuss how our study further contributes to the ongoing discourse in ICTD around aspiration, hope, design, and empowerment.

Outcomes
Peer reviewed conference papers: (1) Faheem Hussain, Abdullah Hasan Safir, Dina Sabie, Zulkarin Jahangir, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, “Infrastructuring Hope: Solidarity, Leadership, Negotiation, and ICT among the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh”, In Proceedings of International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD 2020), Ecuador.(2) Abdullah Hasan Safir, Faheem Hussain, and P.J. Wall, “Information Flow Pathways for Rohingya Refugees: Challenges, Resilience and Innovations”, In Proceedings for Research-in-Progress Papers, Page: 242-244, the Future of Digital Work: The Challenge of Inequality, IFIP Joint Working Conference, Hyderabad, India, 2020. Conference Presentations:
(1) Faheem Hussain, Abdullah Hasan Safir, Zulkarin Jahangir, “Evaluating the impact of fake news on displaced population: experiences with Rohingya Refugees from Myanmar”, International Conference on the Rohingya Crisis in Comparative Perspective, University College London, 2019.
(2) Faheem Hussain, Abdullah Hasan Safir, Zulkarin Jahangir, “Rethinking access to information: the missing links and undiscussed questions of exclusion in Rohingya camps”, International Conference on Rohingya Crisis in Bangladesh: Challenges and Sustainable Solutions, North South University, July, 2019.