Dr Mursed Alam
RACE.ED Archival Research Fellow, September - December 2023
Home institution: University of Gour Banga
Mursed Alam teaches as Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Gour College, University of Gour Banga, India. His areas of research include subaltern studies, Islamic traditions in South Asia, decoloniality, literary and cultural history of Bengal Muslims, and minor intellectual traditions in South Asia, etc. He was awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship in 2018 for archival work in the British Library. He is the managing editor of Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium and one of the founding members of Postcolonial Studies Association of the Global South (PSAGS). He is the Coordinator of Ambedkar Centre for Social and Cultural Studies, Gour College and Director of Abid Ali Khan Centre for Digital Archive and Translation of Cultures, Gour College. He has contributed articles and book reviews in journals such as Postcolonial Interventions: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Rethinking Marxism, Economic and Political Weekly, South Asia Research, Contemporary South Asia etc. He can be reached at mursedalam@gmail.com.
Project Title: Vaccine-hesitancy, Colonial Bio-politics and Debates around Indigenous Medical Epistemes
This project attends to persistent debates around the conflict between traditional life style centric pre-emptive healing knowhows and sophisticated Euro-modern epistemes of therapeutic cure – an aporia that encouraged hostility to vaccines even during the Covid crisis. It traces the genealogy of this modern/indigenous pedagogic tension to colonial bio-politics of epistemic erasure.