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Accepted Paper:

"Were we born here to suffer?" Constructing notions of belonging and disengagement in Bangladesh  
Ellen Bal (Vrije University Amsterdam)

Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the cultural construction of migration aspirations among educated youth in Dhaka. It shows how the failure of the state, political leadership and fellow citizens to provide human security causes them to disengage with the nation-state and to aspire migration.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the cultural construction of migration aspirations among lower and middle class educated youth in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. It tries to show how a total lack of confidence in the state, (political) leadership and fellow citizens inspires these young and educated people to dream of leaving for places where their dreams can be fulfilled. Those imagined destinies represent everything that they yearn for and that the Bangladesh that they experience is short of. In other words, their dreams of countries of affluence and possibilities are tightly connected to local experiences and to expectations of what a nation-state should be about. Failure of the state, political leadership and fellow citizens to provide human security hamper their sense of engagement and loyalty to the nation-state, and cause these citizens to disengage and to dream of leaving. The paper tries to go beyond the study of migration aspirations as a question of migration only. It takes into account that many dreams are never materialized and that a comprehensive study of imagined futures "away from home" need not directly relate to existing migrant networks and migrant successes. Instead it approaches those imaginations as the outcome of continuous evaluations of individual aspirations and local possibilities against the backdrop of continuing globalization offering new (if only) endless/borderless possibilities.

Panel P35
Imagining Bangladesh and its 40 years
  Session 1