Adil Hossain
Areas of Interest & Expertise
- Anthropology of Citizenship, State and Bureaucracy
- Ethnic Conflict
- Internally Displaced People
Biography
Adil is a political anthropologist who is interested in exploring the link between citizenship and development. In 2020, he was awarded with DPhil in International Development from the Merton College, University of Oxford.
At Oxford, he was the Merton-QEH scholar whose thesis looked at the politics of citizenship among the survivors of 2002 riots in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. During his DPhil, he was trained in areas of citizenship, biopolitics, conflict, urban anthropology and political activism.
His academic background is multidisciplinary, having received his undergraduate degree in Geography and then an MA in Mass Communication from Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). Thereafter, he secured a Commonwealth Scholarship to study another MA in Development and Rights at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Apart from academics, he had a background in journalism before starting his research at Oxford. He had previously published political and developmental pieces with many media organisations including Guardian, Scroll, The Wire, The Quint, Discover Society, Fair Observer, Sunday Guardian, Catch News, DNA, etc.
In the past, he was involved in Right to Information (RTI) activism in India, and Outlook magazine, in 2010, profiled him as one of the top five youth RTI activists in the country.
Publications and Writings
Book Chapter
- Hossain, A. (2021). Transitional Justice and Moving On After the 2002 Gujarat Riots in India. In S. Wastell (Ed.), Transitional Justice Beyond Blueprints: Ethnographies and Case Studies. Routledge.
Book Review
- Hossain, Adil (2017) [ Review of the Book Urbanisation, Citizenship and Conflict in India by Tommaso Bobbio] Contemporary South Asia, Vol 25(2): 215 – 216 (peer reviewed)
- Hossain, Adil (2015, March-April) [ Review of the book The Song of the Shirt: Cheap Clothes across Continents and Centuries by Jeremy Seabrook]. Biblio, Vol. XX: 3 – 4
Online Articles
- Hossain, Adil (2020) ‘The biopolitics of pandemic citizenship’ Discover Society (online), May 11, 2020.
- Hossain, Adil (2020) “What AIMIM Needs to Know to Repeat its Bihar Success in West Bengal”, November 25, 2020.
- Hossain, Adil (2020) “Bengal’s universities are progressive bastions- so what explains resistance to OBC reservations”, September 6, 2020.
- ‘Assam NRC Row: What we can learn from philosopher Hannah Arendt’, The Quint, August 21, 2018.
- ‘Students, photographers, civil society under arrest — The chaos that is becoming Bangladesh’, DailyO, August 13, 2018.
- ‘Vaclav Havel and Karunanidhi: How the artist politicians shaped their world around them’, DailyO, August 10, 2018.
- ‘In one West Bengal district, Bangladeshi Hindu refugees attempt to oust Indian Muslims’, Scroll, May 9, 2014.
- ‘To be young and poor: the crisis of development’, The Guardian(online), 10 June.
- ‘Standing with the 99%’, The Sunday Guardian, July 6, 2013, p. 12
(All articles available at: https://adilhossain43.contently.com )
Ongoing Projects
Documentary citizenship and Bengali Muslims, anti-CAA protests and new languages of social movement