Empowering Subaltern Voices Through Education: The Chakma Diaspora in Australia

Based on a four‐year-long empirical study, this book employs contemporary theories from the Global South to investigate the role of education in the experience of migration and settlement of the Chakma people of Bangladesh in the city of Melbourne, Australia.

Exploring the migration opportunities taken up by the Chakma and their efforts to retain, promote, and enrich their ethnic identity in Australia, the book critically examines the importance of education for ethnic, linguistic, and religious minorities and the extent to which education helped the diasporic community in achieving a ’better’ and ’more secure’ life. It also positions education as a tool to help revive, maintain, and enrich the importance of culture and tradition, both in the home country and in the place of settlement and offers a theorisation of how the self-directed pursuit of education can create opportunities for minority peoples, to advocate human rights, Indigenous recognition and criticise a state’s failure to provide safety and security.

This book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students researching in the fields of education, diaspora studies, Indigenous studies, and migration studies.

Urmee Chakma works as a lecturer of humanities and pedagogy in the School of Education at La Trobe University, Australia. She earned her PhD from the Faculty of Education, Monash University and worked as a teaching and research associate at Monash from 2018 to 2022. She has been an educator for over 15 years. Her areas of research interest include Indigenous education, diasporic communities, citizenship studies, and social justice.