Hana Shams AhmedVisiting Fellows

Hana Shams Ahmed is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at York University, Canada, and is currently awaiting defence. Before entering academia, she worked for nearly a decade as a journalist with The Daily Star (2000–2009), producing investigative reporting on gender, minority, migration, and labour rights, and later served as Coordinator of the International Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission (2009–2015), where she led national and international advocacy on Indigenous land rights, militarization, and access to justice. With over fifteen years of engagement with Indigenous activists, women’s movements, and human rights organizations, her research and professional practice are grounded in public and engaged scholarship. Her academic work sits at the intersections of the anthropology of the state, settler colonialism, Indigenous politics, bureaucracy and governance, the politics of documentation and waiting, and critical debates on recognition, refusal, and decolonial methodologies.

In November-December 2025, she joined Fulda University of Applied Sciences as a Fellow, enabling her to participate in the university’s academic and intellectual activities.

Her fellowship was hosted under the Shaping Future Society (SaFe) subproject Indigeneity, led by Dr Eva Gerharz and Dr Bablu Chakma. Through this fellowship, Hana began collaborating with Dr Chakma and Dr Gerharz on an edited volume on the Chittagong Hill Tracts, which examines the region through the shifting, contested dynamics of connectivity and disconnection, foregrounding Indigenous perspectives on state power, militarization, mobility, infrastructure, and transnational solidarity. The publication, which will feature a range of Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics and practitioners from diverse backgrounds who work on the Chittagong Hill Tracts, is planned for 2027.

During her fellowship, Hana took part in the Fulda International Autumn School 2025, held under the theme “The Future of Applied Social Sciences,” an interdisciplinary forum that brought together international scholars to reflect on how social science research can respond to contemporary global challenges and engage more directly with societal needs. She participated in the methods workshop “Bringing Your Research to Applied Settings,” led by Dr. Joseph Anthony (SUNY Cortland), which focused on transdisciplinary knowledge production and translating academic research into applied, policy-oriented, and publicly engaged forms.

As part of the fellowship, Hana also taught the Master’s-level course Indigenous Peoples’ Rights within the Human Rights Studies programme in Politics, Law and Society. The course examined global Indigenous struggles through the lenses of settler colonialism, land dispossession, sovereignty and self-determination, critically engaging with international legal frameworks, gendered and environmental dimensions of extractivism, the limits of recognition politics, and Indigenous practices of resistance, solidarity, and decolonial futures.

During her fellowship, she presented her doctoral research to the SaFe community. Her dissertation, Claiming Land, Hailing the State: The Paradox of Paper in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, which is awaiting defence, examines how Jumma Indigenous communities use written petitions as a strategic and decolonizing practice to assert land rights, challenge dispossession, and negotiate recognition within an authoritarian, militarized, and majoritarian state. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and the anthropology of the state, the research identifies petitioning as both an act of refusal and a calibrated form of engagement with legal and bureaucratic institutions, situating these practices within longer histories of settler colonialism, legal pluralism, and the politics of documentation in a contested borderland.