Sohela Nazneen has 17 years of experience working on gender and development issues. Her research focuses on gender and politics, feminist movement, women’s empowerment and violence against women in South Asia and sub Saharan Africa.
Before joining IDS, Sohela was a faculty member at the Department of International Relations, University of Dhaka, and a Research Fellow based at BRAC Institute of Governance and Development, BRAC University, in Bangladesh. She worked as a consultant- designing gender and development interventions, conducting programme evaluations and gender policy analysis for the FAO, UNDP, SDC, Irish Aid, The Asia Foundation, The McArthur Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-among others. Sohela’s recent publications include: Negotiating Gender Equity in the Global South: the Politics of Domestic Violence Policy (Routledge, 2019)- a comparative study of six countries- based on her research for the Effective States and Inclusive Development (ESID) center, University of Manchester, UK. She was also a guest editor for special issue on ‘Contentious Empowerment: Women, Development and Power in South Asia’ in Contemporary South Asia (vol 27 no 4). She has published in World Development, Women’s Studies International Forum, Studies in Family Planning, among others.
At IDS, Sohela leads IDS’ Strategic Research Initiative areas on ‘Resisting backlash against gender equity, social justice and civic space,’ and is the convenor of IDS’ flagship MA programme on Gender and Development. She is the political economy lead for the ESRC funded project ‘Sustaining Power: Women’s Struggles Against Contemporary Backlash in South Asia’ and co-ordinates the research in Bangladesh and Nepal. Sohela is the workstream lead on the thematic area- ‘Voice and Women’s Rights’ for the Sida funded programme on Countering Backlash Reclaiming Gender Justice, where Sohela co-ordinates research, convening and capacity building work with partners in Bangladesh, India, Uganda, Lebanon and Brazil. Sohela also co-convenes the ‘Gendered Contentions’ workstream focusing on women’s leadership and claim-making in conflict affected settings for the Action for Empowerment and Accountability Programme (A4EA). Sohela is the gender and methods lead for the British Academy Funded project- the Gendered Price of Precarity, which explores workplace sexual harassment and youth mobilisation in informal sectors in Uganda and Bangladesh.
Sohela currently supervises the following PhD students:
Susana Araujo whose PhD thesis is titled ‘The Dynamics of Social Movements and Countermovements around Gender Equality in Peru’.
Alexandra Obeng—Gyaaba whose PhD thesis is titled ‘Women and Political Appointment: A Study of the Local Government of Ghana’.
Meenakshi Krishnan whose PhD thesis is titled ‘The Ethics of Mainstreaming Care: A Study of the Maternity Benefit Policy in India’.
Andrea Papan whose PhD thesis is titled ‘Epistemological and pedagogical processes in Gender and Development Higher Education: Fostering pathways for feminist transformative learning’.
Fauzia Issaka whose PhD thesis is titled ‘Impact of Autonomous Youth Activism on Progress to Gender Justice’.
Ayesha Khan whose PhD thesis is titled ‘Feminist Actors, Political Voice and Gender Policies in Pakistan’.
