Nasir Uddin (Bengali: ড.নাসির উদ্দিন)[1] is a cultural anthropologist, post-colonial theorist and prolific writer on topics ranging from human rights, Adivasi (indigenous people) issues, rights of non-citizens, refugees, and stateless people, common forms of discrimination, government in everyday life, media, democracy, and the state-society relations in Bangladesh and South Asia.
From November 2005 to April 2007, he carried out ethnographical fieldwork in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) toward writing his dissertation for his Ph.D. degree, which was eventually conferred in March 2008.
Apart from his intensive works on general ethics, Uddin has been actively involved in doing ethnographic research on the Rohingya people living in the borderland of Bangladesh and Myanmar.
In the same year, Uddin was awarded a British Academy visiting Fellowship for postdoctoral level research at the University of Hull in the UK.
Soon after finishing his project in the country, Uddin conducted advanced research on "The State of Ethnic Minority in the State-formation in Post-colonial State: Experience from Bangladesh" as an affiliate of the Department of Sociology at Delhi School of Economics,The University of Delhi In 2012, Uddin was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellowship to do another postdoctoral research at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany.
Later Uddin joined the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE) as a visiting Scholar to continue his research on indigeneity, state-making, and marginality in the context of Bangladesh and South Asia in January 2014.
[5][6] In addition, Uddin had been traveling across the world and giving lectures and presentations on his research on indigeneity, the state in everyday life, and refugee studies (particularly on the Rohingya people) regularly in many renowned universities of many countries, including the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, India and China.
[citation needed] After the emergency of COVID-19 was lifted from across the world, Uddin was awarded an Asia Studies Visiting Fellowship at The East-West Center, Washington DC in 2022.
Uddin along with Dr. Nasreen Chowdhury of Delhi University is editing another book titled Deterritorialised Identity and Transborder Movements in South Asia (Singapore: Springer, 2018).
[31] All these questions could be answered if ethnography could become a "joint product" where the researcher and the people studied are equally reflected, represented with sensible position, and voiced reciprocally.
Soon after the article was published, Uddin's theoretical proposition 'ethnography is a joint product' received wider academic attention in social sciences, particularly in anthropology across the world.
During the last three decades, anthropology of the state has come up with a very strong field of study where many scholars have contributed to building theories with their own ethnographic works from across the world.