Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how my identity as a young, Hindu middle-class Bangladeshi woman, with personal experiences of sexual harassment and academic understanding of gender issues, impacts my abilities to conduct feminist research on gender and violence in Bangladesh.

Paper long abstract:

This paper by reflecting on a feminist study on the diverse perspectives of women’s experiences of sexual harassment on public transport in Dhaka city highlights the challenges a Bangladeshi feminist researcher might face in studying the sensitive topic of gender-based violence in Bangladesh. It starts by portraying the patriarchal socio-cultural context in Bangladesh where this study was conducted. An overview of this research context informs the readers the importance of researching on sexual harassment experiences of women, which is not only considered a ‘taboo’ issue, but often overlooked by the government and non-government organizations working on women’s issues. The paper then goes on to describe the research methods for this study as well as exploring the research philosophy that guides these methodological decisions. Following this, I describe the way in which I used reflexivity to examine how my lived experiences have impacted the research process. In doing so, I shed light on different aspects of my identity and explained how the data I gathered and interpreted while conducting this feminist research is obtained and interpreted by ‘a young, middle-class Hindu Bangladeshi feminist researcher with not only academic understanding of feminist theories but also experiences of working on women’s issues in NGOs in Bangladesh’. Thus, this paper reveals the role of the lived experiences of a feminist researcher in influencing the methods and results of feminist research.