Friday, October 9, 2020
12:00pm - 1:30pm EST
Sharmin Hossain is a Bangladeshi-American Muslim organizer and artist, from Queens, New York. Sharmin is the Political Director at Equality Labs, an Ambedkarite South Asian progressive power-building organization that uses community research, cultural and political organizing, popular education and digital security to fight the oppressions of caste apartheid, Islamophobia, white supremacy, and religious intolerance. A co-founder of the Bangladeshi Feminist Collective and graduate from CUNY Hunter College, Sharmin is committed to community based arts practice, leadership development, South Asian political history and liberation struggles.
As the 2015 Open Society Youth Exchange Fellow, Sharmin founded the Bangladeshi Historical Memory Project, a political theatre and archive documenting Bangladeshi resilience. Formerly, Sharmin was the Logistics and Communications Coordinator of Dalit Women Fight National Tour, where she coordinated the the largest national platform on caste apartheid to transform South Asian American organizing.
Bheempalli David Raju is the Organizing Secretary of the Bangladeshi Dalit and Excluded Rights Movement (BDERM). The Bangladesh Dalit and Excluded Rights Movement (BDERM) was established as a national platform for Dalits in the beginning of 2008. It faces a number of challenges in asserting Dalit rights, including such key issues as various forms of discrimination against Dalit women. BDERM organized the first ever Dalit Human Rights Conference in Bangladesh in Dhaka in January. Approximately 300 Dalit representatives from 47 districts attended the event, and a wide range oftopics related to Dalit rights were presented and discussed.