Professor Naomi Hossain

Naomi is a political sociologist with degrees in philosophy, politics, economics, social anthropology and development studies from the University of Oxford, London School of Economics and Political Science, and the University of Sussex. She is part-Bangladeshi and part-Irish, and has lived and worked in Bangladesh, at the world’s largest NGO, BRAC; in Indonesia and the UK, while at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University; and in the US, at the Accountability Research Center at American University in Washington DC.

Naomi is interested in the politics of development, particularly in how people living with poverty and precarity get the public services they need, and increasingly in the politics of crises and disasters. Her work enters two distinct but occasionally converging areas: the politics of Bangladesh’s development, and the contentious politics of public services. In both areas, she focuses on issues of state accountability and responsiveness, protest and civic agency, and the role of aid. To both she brings an interest in concepts and frameworks from social history, in particular the ‘moral economy’. Recent work has focused on the politics of complaint, food and fuel riots, and how changing civic space shapes development. Naomi aims to be collaborative, inter-disciplinary and visual in her research, and to make a difference that goes beyond the scholarly, working with researchers from around the world as well as with social movements, civic actors, artists, governments and aid agencies.

• Google Scholar profile
• Researchgate profile
• Personal website
• Essays about Bangladesh at 50