Papers

• Teaching Myanmar Curriculum in Exile: Burmese Language Training and Rohingya Teachers’ Classroom Practices in Cox’s Bazar Htet Myet Aung Kobe University

  In Cox’s Bazar, where Rohingya children continue to learn in conditions of displacement, the introduction of the Myanmar Curriculum has created new possibilities as well as new challenges for education delivery. One of the most important challenges concerns language. Although Burmese is expected to function as a medium of instruction within the curriculum, many Rohingya teachers have had limited formal preparation in Burmese and have long relied on Rohingya and other mixed language practices in the classroom. Against this background, Burmese Language Training (BLT) has been introduced to strengthen teachers’ capacity to teach the curriculum more effectively. This paper examines how such training has influenced teachers’ classroom language practices in learning centres in Cox’s Bazar.

  The study draws on a mixed-methods design combining teacher surveys, classroom observations, and interviews with Rohingya teachers. The findings show that BLT contributed to substantial increases in the use of Burmese across classroom instruction, explanation, questioning, feedback, and classroom management. Teachers also reported greater confidence, improved pronunciation, and more consistent use of simple Burmese expressions in everyday teaching. At the same time, the findings show that these gains remain partial and uneven. Teachers continue to face major constraints, including students’ limited comprehension of Burmese, reliance on Rohingya for translation, shortages of appropriate teaching materials, and few opportunities to practice Burmese beyond the training itself.

  The paper argues that language training is not only a technical intervention but also part of a broader politics of education, where questions of curriculum, identity, access, and pedagogy are closely intertwined. By focusing on Rohingya teachers’ lived classroom practices, the paper highlights both the promise and the limitations of curriculum implementation in a refugee setting. It contributes to discussions on education from the margins by showing how teachers mediate between policy expectations and the linguistic realities of displaced communities.

• Home for you, not for me: Second-generation Rohingya refugee memories of home Nur Nadia Lukmanulhakim University of Nottingham Malaysia

  As of 2025, Malaysia has continued to be the home or places of shelter for more than 100,000 Rohingya refugees. As the crisis causing their exile continue to remain unsolved, more and more young generation of Rohingya refugees were born in their places of exile. However, not much has been discussed on home and belonging among Rohingya refugees impacted by prolonged displacement. As such, this paper explores second-generation Rohingya refugees’ memories of home, by exploring their memories growing up in Malaysia and the way it affects them in navigating space and place. Most of these second-generation Rohingya refugees have little to no memories at all of Rakhine, Myanmar, the supposedly home to Rohingya refugees as they were born in Malaysia or have been in Malaysia since they were 7 years old. The researcher conducted oral history interviews onto 20 second-generation Rohingya refugees living in Kuala Lumpur or the neighboring districts. This interview focused on the participants experience of living in Malaysia, from playing with friends, interacting with local communities, going to school, or even pursuing higher education or skill certificates, to navigating house and neighbourhood. The interview reveals a degree of integration between second-generation Rohingya refugees to the local community, which can be seen from their language proficiency and cultural awareness, local network and relationship established, to mobility and migration aspirations. Despite the limitation in access to work and other basic services in Malaysia, the second-generation Rohingya refugees are able to navigate the precarious living in Malaysia via the support of local networks. This paper hope to shed light on the issues of prolonged displacement among refugees in Southeast Asia and its impact to the community.

• ‘Digitised Belonging’ beyond Citizenship: Rohingya Narratives of Nation, Identity, and Claim-making Shamna Thacham Poyil University of Delhi

  The discourse on nationalism remains a deeply contested terrain for the Rohingya, particularly for those deprived of the citizenship and excluded from the legal and symbolic architecture of the Post-colonial nation-state of Myanmar. The denial of citizenship does not merely sever their relationship to the state, it also forecloses access to the rights, recognition, and institutional legitimacy through which belonging is ordinarily mediated (Poyil, 2020). Under conditions of statelessness, how do Rohingya refugees conceptualise the idea of nation and their belonging,? Moving beyond state-centric theories of nationalism, paper adopts an approach from below to examine how ideas of shared history, ethnicity, memory, and collective identity are negotiated by Rohingyas. Drawing from 18 month fieldwork conducted using hybrid ethnography based offline and online interviews amongst Rohingyas in India and Malaysia, the paper argues that belonging cannot be understood solely through the vocabulary of territorial loss and juridical exclusion. It must also be analysed through the digitally mediated practices by which Rohingya refugees constitute, sustain, and articulate themselves across dispersed sites of displacement. Through smartphones, social media platforms, messaging networks, and other forms of technological engagement, Rohingya inculcate digitised
  belonging (Poyil, forthcoming). Here forms of identity-making, memory-keeping, community formation, and claim-making emerge through technological engagement amongst Rohingya diaspora, despite the absence of secure national membership. These digitally mediated practices become crucial sites through which Rohingya refugees narrate who they are, imagine community, negotiate the meaning of nation, assert claims to recognition and recalibrate their belonging.

  References

  Poyil, S. (2020). National identity and conceptualization of nationalism among Rohingya. In Citizenship, Nationalism and Refugeehood of Rohingyas in Southern Asia (pp. 31-50). Singapore: Springer Singapore. Poyil, S. (Forthcoming May 2026). ‘Digitised Belonging and New Contours of Digital Citizenship’ In Oxford Intersections: Borders, Oxford University Press (OUP).

• Visual Narratives of Refugees: Examining Statelessness through Rohingya Photography in Bangladesh. Ishrat Bibi Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University Ishrat Zakia Sultana North South University Dhaka Joaquin David Palazón Monforte Rohingyatographer Collective Mohammed Sahad Rohingyatographer collective Sigfried Janzing University of Amsterdam

  Since 2020, Rohingya youth in Bangladesh have utilised smartphone photography to document daily life, asserting a visual presence against systemic erasure. This paper examines the Rohingyatographer collective as a system of inclusive storytelling and co-authorship, rather than a mere repository of images. However, due to a life in limbo, their visual record remains precarious as a source of knowledge.

  On 13 March 2026, we conducted a masterclass about Ariella Azoulay’s Civil Contract of Photography. This masterclass was part of a 30-week course about human rights and visual storytelling conducted online, led by David exclusively for Rohingya participants. The objectives were twofold: data collection for research on their visual narrative (1) and implementing a system of co-authorship as an ethical principle (2).
  Drawing on this masterclass, the study evaluates how the act of photography functions as a “civic” relationship between the photographer, the subject, and the spectator.

  Moving beyond the extractive “humanitarian gaze,” we analyse a collaborative methodology where the collective’s producers and mentors work alongside contributors to curate narratives that serve as a “visual guide” for community agency. We apply this model to seek if citizenship status or other imaginaries can be promoted through inherent forms of “contract”.

  The presentation details a 10-step performance of the “act of photography,” testing the receptiveness of Azoulay’s framework within a stateless context. We argue that this system transforms survivalist fragmentation into a form of “unity”—a collective archival practice that demands a shift from passive “looking” to active “watching”. This “civic” act aims to transform the current survival mode into cooperation, a renewed sense of community, and action by external benefactors.

• The Role of Emic Categories for Rohingyas in Bangladesh living in the Absence of Refugee Law Valentina Grillo University of Vienna

  The forced migration of Rohingyas in Myanmar has a long history. Due to the genocide and violent persecution, they fled Rakhine State multiple times and took shelter in Bangladesh. In the 1990s, the government of Bangladesh recognised a group of Rohingyas as refugees, who have since been residing in two camps in the southeastern part of the country. The government considered it a mistake to call these Rohingyas “refugees” and, therefore, it has recently adopted a different name policy for the remaining Rohingyas. This paper aims to link the broad theoretical discussion around refugee law in Asia and emic categories addressed among Rohingyas in Bangladesh.

  Almost one million Rohingyas are addressed as “unregistered refugees” in Bangladesh, whereas the “registered refugees” are slightly more than 30,000. The present paper delves into the origin of the category “registered refugees” and other emic categories used among Rohingyas in the refugee camps in Chittagong Division, where in 2022 I conducted one-year ethnographic fieldwork. The analysis of this context reveals the existence of alternative practices to grant asylum in the country, based on systems such as religion, international human rights instruments, the constitution and national laws. To understand their real application, I argue that the study of emic categories can contribute to better tackle these alternative ways to cope with protracted displacement in the geographical Global South. To offer refuge is important in a predominantly Muslim country, no matter what international legal obligations the term “refugee” entails. The government of Bangladesh appears trapped in a conundrum. However, the absence of refugee law should not be interpreted as denying protection to refugees. Emic categories and their analysis reveal how policies impact Rohingyas’ lives in the camps differently throughout time, given the absence of refugee-related law in Bangladesh.

Abstract

Keywords

• Burmese language training
• Cox’s Bazar
• Malaysia
• Myanmar curriculum
• Rohingya
• Rohingya education
• citizenship
• home
• human rights
• photography
• refugee education
• second-generation