Professor Naomi Hossain

Naomi Hossain joined the Department of Development Studies in 2023 as a Global Research Professor.

As a political sociologist interested in how people living with poverty and precarity get the public services they need, Naomi’s work centres on two distinct but occasionally converging areas: the politics of Bangladesh’s development, and the contentious politics of public services and disasters (beyond Bangladesh). 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’. 

With an academic background in philosophy, politics, economics, social anthropology and development studies, Naomi’s work aims to be collaborative, inter-disciplinary, accessible and to make a difference that goes beyond the scholarly. She has worked with researchers from around the world as well as with social movements, civic actors, artists, governments and aid agencies around the world. She has researched extensively across Bangladesh, as well as managing large international studies spanning another 20 countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Her work has examined elite perceptions of poverty; accountability for hunger, social protection, and inflationary price crises; complaints mechanisms; the politics of educational reform; civil society and civic space; the political effects of disasters; and the role of protest in holding public authorities to account, among other issues. 

Naomi is Bangladeshi-Irish and has lived in Bangladesh, Indonesia, the UK and the US. She previously worked at the Research and Evaluation Division of BRAC, the world’s largest NGO; the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University; and at the Accountability Research Center at American University in Washington DC. 

• Politics of development
• Bangladesh
• Protest
• Disaster politics
• Civil society
• Social movements
• Famine

I am now welcoming applications for PhD students, particularly from those interested in working on the politics of development in Bangladesh, energy protests and food riots, and the politics of famine and disasters.

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