How to Be Visible in Student Politics: Performativity and the Digital Public Space in Bangladesh

Abstract

In Bangladeshi student politics, political performances in public spaces play an essential role in establishing patronage relationships and determining local authority structures. As Thomas Blom Hansen has famously argued, “visibility means everything” in such a context. With the emergence of social networking sites like Facebook, new digital public spaces have appeared. Focusing on ruling-party student activists at Rajshahi University, this article examines how student politicians in Bangladesh utilize Facebook to become visible in their everyday politicking. It shows how longstanding performative repertoires in the nondigital public space have gained a new salience through performances in the digital public space. It is those digital spaces that allow the performer to rearticulate even mundane everyday events as political performances. As these new digital public spaces impact the politics of visibility, it is crucial to integrate them in our efforts to understand local politics in South Asia and beyond.

Religion as a Source of Violence: Contending the Narrative of Political Violence Perpetrated in the Name of Islam in Bangladesh

“…In 2013, Jamaat e Islami, the largest Islamic party in Bangladesh, committed much violence and accounted for 33.6 percent of all violence. The proportion of violence produced by other fundamentalist Islamic groups also increased in 2013 (Kuttig et al, 2020). Despite this, the overall death toll and level of violence are negligible.…”

Student Activism in Higher Education: The politics of students’ role in hegemonic university change

“…Importantly, this largely anglophone western move has had a much longer tail across countries in South America, Africa and Asia, where student power is still closely linked with the politics of the students and is more organically connected to the movements to progress education towards consciousness-raising and equitable fair societies (Atiles-Osoria, 2013;Melchiorre, 2020;Tshishonga, 2019). Yet, even in these regions, a decay of student power as connected to student politics is occurring, particularly as partially democratised 91 states begin to capitulate to the hegemony of the Anglophone institutions and move student politics in universities toward political training spaces (Javid, 2019;Kuttig & Suykens, 2020;Snellinger, 2018;D. S. O. Wolf, 2019).…”

‘Firing cannons to kill mosquitoes’: Controlling ‘virtual streets’ and the ‘image of the state’ in Bangladesh

“…As Kuttig and Sukyens (2020) have illustrated, student politics—which historically has been significant in key political events—in Bangladesh is used as a means for developing careers in business and government and as a resource for political parties for a range of tasks, from large-scale political events to hartals . The ‘visibility’ that students cultivate and perform via social media might extend through to deploying new laws against opponents and even creating a Facebook event page to publicise to the local and national echelons of the party how they have used the ICT law against those who are ‘tarnishing the image of the state’.…”