Mushahid Hussain

About

Mushahid Hussain is a PhD candidate in development sociology at Cornell University. Trained in historical sociology and political economy, Hussain works within global/transnational and comparative-historical frameworks in exploring the past and contemporary politics of social change in Bangladesh and South Asia more broadly. Prior to pursuing a PhD, Hussain was a college lecturer in Bangladesh. He earned an MA in Sociology from the State University of New York at Binghamton, and also holds a master’s degree in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi, India).

Research & Teaching

Hussain’s current research has three directions. His dissertation project, titled “Grounding Decolonization: Nationalist Time, Development Regimes, and Cold War Antinomies in the Making of Bangladesh, 1947-1971,” studies the politics of decolonization and state-making in erstwhile East Bengal/Pakistan (today Bangladesh). It explores how and why political demands for ethnolinguistic recognition and provincial autonomy, which arose in the two decades following the partition of British Bengal, were the outcomes of both long-term socio-historical processes and changing conjunctural conditions of the early Cold War in South Asia.

Hussain’s project is an interdisciplinary intervention in the following scholarly areas. First, it contributes to a rich historiography on decolonization and development in South Asia, exploring how and why political economic and cultural processes came to be grounded in the institutions, ideas, and practices that shaped the tensions of a global Cold War ‘from below.’ Second, his project’s approach to the politics and poetics of “nationalist time” develops a conjunctural approach to state formation and class politics. It is an ongoing, social-theoretic effort in differentiating the historical temporalities of the conjuncture, by way of addressing the internal relations between the ‘social’ and the ‘geopolitical’ that are often central to contemporary decolonial and connected/transnational/global approaches in historical sociology and related fields.

This work relies heavily on archives in Bangladesh and the US as well as published sources in English and Bengali, for illuminating the substantive connections between global philanthropy, international development agencies, and local institutions. Hussain received support from the Social Science Research Council and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell for conducting this research, as well as early support from the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University. His dissertation committee members are Fouad Makki (Chair), Philip McMichael, and Viranjini Munasinghe.

A second direction in Hussain’s current research is comparative urbanization in contexts of labor precarity, migration, and displacement. He is engaged in a collaborative project exploring the material and symbolic dimensions of urban practices like land brokering and urban rezoning in Dhaka (Bangladesh) and New York City (US), respectively. Hussain’s work in this area draws on contemporary syntheses of world-systems analysis, planetary urbanization, and the everyday politics of urban space-making. It relies on collaborative fieldwork and multi-sited ethnographies across localities within these city-regions.

Hussain is also interested in the social and political-philosophical aspects of knowledge production, specifically in the institutional contexts of the modern university. He has written on the socio-historical dimensions of higher education, and its institutional transformations in the global South following neoliberal globalization. He continues to research and write on these themes, exploring tensions between techno-politics, ‘new enclosures’, and universities as institutional spaces for critical reflection and decolonial praxis. Hussain’s work here is shaped by his abiding interests in classical theories of value and distribution, and debates regarding them in contemporary social and political thought.

As a lecturer in Bangladesh, Hussain designed and taught courses in environmental economics, international trade and development, and macroeconomics. As a graduate student in the US, he worked both as an instructor and/or teaching assistant on several courses, including introduction to sociology, feminism and globalization, labor and social movements, comparative social inequalities, theories of development, qualitative and mixed methods, and sociology of education. These experiences shape his interdisciplinary lenses on teaching and learning. They also inform his capacity as an educator in working with students from diverse backgrounds across different academic settings. 

Publications

• (2019). Wither the “Development Contract”? Historical Conjunctures in Naomi Hossain’s ‘The Aid Lab: Understanding Bangladesh's Unexpected Success’, Third World Quarterly, 40(6), 1127-1144.
• (2018). Contesting, (Re)producing or Surviving Precarity? Debates on Precarious Work and Informal Labor Re-examined. International Critical Thought, 8(1), 105-126.
• (2018). Perils and prospects of the modern university. African and Asian contexts in a world-historical perspective. In D. Bhattacharya (Ed.) The Idea of the University: Histories and Contexts (ch. 3). London: Routledge.
• (2017). Knowledge Enclosure and University Education: Notes from Post-restructured Bangladesh. In A. Bartlett & J. Clemens (Ed.) What is Education? (ch. 3). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• (2017). (Translated by Patricia García Espín) Bajo los escombros: Trabajadores, marcas y la política de la representación en la industria textil mundial después de Rana Plaza, Laberinto, 48(1), 21-34.
• Forthcoming (2023). Through the Prism of “Community Development”: Decolonization and Cold War Politics in Mid-Twentieth Century East Pakistan.
• Forthcoming (with Kai Wen Yang) (2023). Producing the Urban Semi-periphery: Spatial Politics of Urban Rezoning and Land Brokering in New York City and Dhaka.

Other Publications/In the Media

• “The Power of Everyday Collectivity” Hard Crackers, Issue 9, Fall 2022.
• “Is a Left-wing Nationalism Possible in Bangladesh?” Jamhoor, Special Issue on State and Border-making in South Asia, 2021.
• Review of “Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism by Harry Harootunian”, Essays in History, Vol. 50, 2017.

Committee members

• Fouad Makki (Chair)

• Philip McMichael

• Viranjini Munasinghe