Sign up & Read Newsletter #18: www.aiai.network/news/

Thanks to ‪@ssrc.org‬ and American Institute of Bangladesh Studies for the generous fellowships, which allowed me to conduct fieldwork for this research. I’m grateful for the thoughtful feedback/suggestions from friends and colleagues at NYU and @yaleisp.bsky.social

This research doesn’t romanticize shalish. Yes, this site can be patriarchal and reinforce gendered violence. A nuanced take shows that state courts often fail rural women too. The comparison reveals gaps in state law, and aims to rethink justice more broadly across legal systems

Alternate epistemic frameworks of justice can recognize and center rural women’s positionalities, desires, and standpoints, pointing to the need to decenter thinking about law and evidentiary processes rooted in Eurocentric, patriarchal, and urban frameworks.

This article draws on ethnography in Bangladesh, archival research, and interviews to compare (non)admissible evidence across state courts and shalish, examining the legal reasoning behind decision-making.

Customary marriages, often unregistered & without any paperwork, are common in Bangladesh. This means many women have no documentation to prove their marriage. So where do they go? Not to state court, but to shalish, community-based courts that recognize these forms of marriages.

Is a marriage invalid without a marriage certificate? What happens when the state doesn’t recognize your marriage/relationship, but your community does? In Bangladesh, this is not hypothetical. It’s daily life for many women.

And at that point, I probably applied to another post in the same department that same week 🥲