Lutfun Nahar Lata | University of Melbourne (original) (raw)

Papers by Lutfun Nahar Lata

Policy & society, May 18, 2024

Journal of sociology, Feb 15, 2024

Australian planner, Feb 1, 2024

Springer eBooks, 2022

For researchers to maximise the potential impact of their work, they must ensure that politicians... more For researchers to maximise the potential impact of their work, they must ensure that politicians and civil servants are aware of their findings. This means learning how to communicate effectively with government and discovering the entry points into the policy-making process. (former British politician, David Blunkett, 2000 in a speech to the Economic and Social Research Council) Justice Henry Bournes Higgins, President of the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court, in handing down his famous Harvester judgement in 1907 establishing the 'Living Wage' researched and referred directly to the study of adequate wages conducted by Seebohm Rowntree (1901) in York, England in the late nineteenth century. This seminal labour law decision was perhaps one of the earliest examples in Australia of research informing directly public policy, and especially for families. The framework established by the Harvester judgement had clearly defined policy goals: a living wage to support a family with two children which continued as the foundation of wages (and family) policy in Australia until the early 1970s when it was replaced by a system of equal pay for equal work (McDonald, 2014, p. 130). Research and evidence takes many and varied forms, often not integrated and strategic but driven by ad hoc opportunities in both public policy and research communities. Despite significant investment from the government in research it is often not released or acted upon-why? For example, the commissioning approach by the government for the research can be critical to determining release and/or nonrelease, or the form and content of the final research product is too complex and not conducive to public engagement or policy translation. This chapter explores both

Australian Journal of Social Issues

Current History, 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the global economy and the livelihoods of disadvantaged populati... more The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the global economy and the livelihoods of disadvantaged populations. Bangladesh, like other developing countries, has been hit hard, and marginalized groups have suffered the most. Before the pandemic, Bangladesh’s economy was growing rapidly, and the country was known for its steady improvement in health and education development indicators. Yet in its pandemic response, the government has been unable to provide adequate aid and health facilities for the large population living in poverty. The response has been hampered by lack of resources, corruption in the delivery of economic support, and existing health inequalities.

Life Course Research and Social Policies

Whether the children of immigrant populations, including refugees, integrate into the host societ... more Whether the children of immigrant populations, including refugees, integrate into the host society is a key challenge facing all countries with large immigrant populations. In Australia, this is crucial given rising numbers and anxieties over refugee settlement in recent decades. Forced migration and displacement due to violence, persecution, or natural disasters with families undertaking perilous journeys fleeing their homes often could mean a turning point and at the same time a stressful event that may have severe negative psychosocial and long-term effects. This can be particularly acute among refugee children, who are typically the least prepared to migrate, have experienced hardship associated with violence and persecution, and must grow up in a new country. From a life course perspective, the integration and wellbeing of refugee children is shaped by the timing and context of migration, including their age at migration and country of origin. In this chapter we draw on longitu...

City

We are an international collective of Early Career Academics (ECAs) who met throughout 2020 to ex... more We are an international collective of Early Career Academics (ECAs) who met throughout 2020 to explore the implications of COVID-19 on precarious academics. With this intervention, our aims are to voice commonly shared experiences and concerns and to reflect on the extent to which the pandemic offers opportunities to redefine Higher Education and research institutions, in a context of ongoing precarity and funding cuts. Specifically, we explore avenues to build solidarity across institutions and geographies, to ensure that the conduct of urban research, and support offered to ECAs, allows for more inclusivity, diversity, security and equitability. *The Urban ECA Collective emerged from a workshop series described in this article which intended to foster international solidarity among self-defined early career academics working within urban research.

Current Sociology, 2022

Access to public space for earning livelihoods is important for street vendors in global south ci... more Access to public space for earning livelihoods is important for street vendors in global south cities. However, due to continuous population growth and the demand for lands by the real estate development sector, pressure on land is very high in the global south. Consequently, global south cities such as Dhaka provide ‘no place’ for its poor migrant citizens. Yet, the urban poor are able to appropriate public space for livelihoods. Drawing on a case study of Sattola slum in Dhaka, this article investigates how the urban poor access to public space for livelihoods and construct counter-spaces by breaking the planned order of the city. This article argues that the urban poor are able to construct counter-spaces with the tacit support of translocal social networks as well as with the support of a range of state and non-state powerful actors who are compromised by the benefits and profits they extract from vendors. This article draws on qualitative data generated through in-depth intervi...

This book conceptualises the role of charity to people who are poor in wealthy countries and outl... more This book conceptualises the role of charity to people who are poor in wealthy countries and outlines a set of practical and conceptual ideas for how it could be reimagined. Despite professionalised welfare states and strong economies, in many advanced industrialised nations, charity continues to play a major role in the lives of people who are poor. Extending what we know about how neoliberalism drives a decayed welfare state that outsources welfare provisioning to charities and community initiatives, this book asks how can we understand and conceptualise society's willingness to engage in charitable acts towards the poor, and how can charity be reimagined to contribute to justice in an unjust society? Through interrogating multiple data sources, including government datasets, survey datasets, media analyses, and ethnographic data, this book shows that charity is not well-suited to addressing the material dimension of poverty. It argues the need for a revised model of charity with the capacity to contribute to social solidarity that bridges social divisions and is inclusive of the poor. Presenting a model for reimaging charity which enables reciprocity and active contributions from recipients and providers, this book shows how power imbalances flowing from the unidirectional provision of charity can be reduced, allowing opportunities for reciprocal care that foster both well-being and solidarity. This book will be of interest to all scholars and students of social policy, public policy, social welfare, sociology, and social work.

Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, is the second fastest growing megacity in the world with a... more Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, is the second fastest growing megacity in the world with a population of 18 million people. This growth largely stems from rural to urban migration , which is often triggered by natural disasters or lack of employment opportunities in rural areas. 300,000 to 400,000 people migrate to Dhaka every year. However, like other megacities, the local government of Dhaka has failed to provide for the housing and employment needs of incoming migrants. Consequently, almost one third of Dhaka's population lives in slum areas. They rely heavily on their social and kinship networks to access public spaces to earn an income. Drawing on interview data with poor migrants from Sattola slum in Dhaka, this paper explores how the urban poor make use of translocal networks to find work and claim a space for livelihoods in the city.

International review of modern sociology, 2010

The study looks at the relative deprivation of children using a normative deprivation index which... more The study looks at the relative deprivation of children using a normative deprivation index which has developed by Townsend (1979), Mack and Lansley (1985, 1992), Hallerod (1994) and Gordon et al. (2000). The index shows the traditions of underscores items the lack of which would constitute poverty eventually. Unlike these studies, the present study does not measure the head count ratio rather exploring the dynamics of this normative construction of deprivation in terms of demographic and socio-economic variables. The data for this study come from a sample survey of 61 respondents, 29 males and 32 females, from Dhanmondi in 2008. The normative deprivation index for Dhanmondi shows that 18 items out of 23 appear significant at the level of alpha=.01 in inter-item total correlation and more than 50 percent of respondents perceive their absence as constituting poverty. More than 90 percent respondents agree on the importance of 8 items: (i) three meals a day, (ii) Meat, fish or vegetar...

Cities, 2019

Studies of informal street vending in the Global South often investigate grassroots resistance to... more Studies of informal street vending in the Global South often investigate grassroots resistance to formal and informal power as a collective and organised phenomenon. In our case study in the megacity of Dhaka, we show collective resistance is not possible due to an overwhelming threat from a coercive state. Informal vendors must resort to other tactics to appropriate public space to preserve their livelihoods. This is achieved by street vendors entering into locally embedded social and economic relations with agents of the state working informally to extort regular payments from them in return for access to public space. These local relations work in opposition to the neoliberalising ambitions of the state to clear and sanitise public space. Vendors look to local police and petty criminals for livelihood security rather than each other. This atomisation, reinforced by the culture of suspicion and kinship insularity, prevents vendors from organising across local boundaries to press claims for greater protection from the state. We argue that in cases where formal power is acting informally, this need to be taken into account to understand the social and economic realities of informal trade and the subsequent obstacles to collective action by the poor in cities such as Dhaka. 2. Contextualising space, power and resistance in urban space Urban informality refers to "a state of deregulation where the

Many urban poor in Dhaka depend on access to negotiated urban space to earn livelihoods. By ‘nego... more Many urban poor in Dhaka depend on access to negotiated urban space to earn livelihoods. By ‘negotiated space’, I refer to any kind of urban space that is used by the urban poor to earn livelihoods through some kind of negotiation processes. The urban poor often face the threat of eviction from their spaces of livelihoods either by the government or local level administration or local residents as they use public and parochial space (Lofland 1998). Use of these spaces for selling products is formally illegal; hence they apply different strategies to appropriate these spaces to earn their livelihoods. Using Sattola slum in Dhaka as a case study and drawing on data from qualitative interviews with 99 street vendors, this paper seeks to explain the power relations and negotiations that the urban poor of Dhaka utilise to access space both within and beyond the slum for earning a livelihood.

Government Information Quarterly, 2021

New Technology, Work and Employment, 2021