T his event will bring together Rohingya women and Women\, Peace and Security (WPS) scholars to centre feminist perspectives on war\, genocide\, and dis placement. It will feature a keynote address by Rohingya student Farhana Ro shan\, who will share lived experiences of persecution\, forced migration\, and resilience. Her testimony highlights the essential nature of women’s n arratives to understanding the ongoing impacts of the Rohingya genocide and the gendered dimensions of displacement. An all-women panel of speakers fr om advocacy\, academic\, and community spaces will discuss how Rohingya wom en navigate violence\, statelessness\, and humanitarian systems while shapi ng transnational feminist responses and community-led resistance. By placin g personal testimony alongside critical analysis\, this event aims to chall enge dominant humanitarian and policy narratives\, highlight the political agency of Rohingya women\, and foster engagement with feminist approaches t o justice\, solidarity\, and accountability in contexts of mass atrocity an d protracted displacement.
Speaker Information:
< p>Farhana Roshan is a Rohingya activist and third-year student at the Unive rsity of British Columbia (UBC)\, pursuing a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Gender\, Race\, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ). She is a Duolingo A ccess and UNHCR program scholar\, committed to advancing education and lead ership within displaced communities. Alongside her studies\, Farhana active ly collaborates with organizations that support marginalized populations\, particularly the Rohingya community. She is a member of the Rohingya Maìyaf uìnor Collaborative Network (RMCN)\, where she serves as a Women’s Speciali st and Community Mobilizer. Through her advocacy and grassroots engagement\ , she works to amplify underrepresented voices and promote equity\, empower ment\, and social justice.Isabella Aung is a research fellow affilia ted with the Myanmar Policy and Community Knowledge (MyPACK) Hub at the Mun k School of Global Affairs and Public Policy\, University of Toronto. She h as also been a UBC Myanmar Initiative Fellow since 2021. She is a Shangri-L a Dialogue Young Leader and a Network Expert with the Network for Strategic Analysis (RAS-NSA). She was a Civil War Paths fellow (2023-2024) at the Un iversity of York and an inaugural Public Scholarship Fellow (2023-2024) at Queen's University. In 2024 and 2025\, she served as the Head of the Compar ative Politics Diploma Program at Spring University Myanmar\, providing hig her education access to refugee and displaced youths. Her research interest s include Women\, Peace\, and Security (WPS)\, women's political activism a nd participation\, migrant rights\, and digital authoritarianism. Her regio nal expertise is Canada and Southeast Asia\, with a focus on Myanmar.
Katrina Leclerc is a part-time professor in Conflict Studies at Saint-Paul University and a sessional lecturer at the University of Winnipeg\, where her research focuses on gender- and age-sensitive peacebuilding\, youth eng agement\, and inclusive policy in conflict-affected contexts. She has advis ed governments and UN agencies on the Women\, Peace and Security (WPS) and Youth\, Peace and Security (YPS) agendas in 30+ countries\, and her work wa s cited as a best practice in several UN Security Council reports. She is c o-editor of the volume Youth Leading Change: Emerging Sites of Knowledge in Peace and Conflict (Palgrave Macmillan\, 2025)\, and is widely recognised for bridging academic and practitioner spaces.
Yasmin Ullah is a Rohi ngya feminist\, author\, poet\, and a social justice activist. She was born in the Northern Arakan state of Burma/Myanmar. Her family fled to Thailand in 1995 when she was a child and she remained a refugee until moving to Ca nada in 2011.Yasmin is the founder and the executive director of the Rohing ya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network which is a women-led\, Rohingya-led an d refugee-led organization working on Rohingya human rights issues\, SGBV\, education and translocal solidarity with a focus on women\, peace and secu rity as well as intersectionality framework. She previously served as the P resident of the Rohingya Human Rights Network (2018-2020)\, a non-profit gr oup led by activists across Canada advocating and raising public awareness of the Rohingya genocide. Since Yasmin began her work as an advocate for th e Rohingya community\, she has been involved in many processes of advocacy for the rights of Rohingya in exile and at home in Burma/Myanmar namely the genocide determination in various countries like Canada and the United Sta tes. Her works span across the globe in a few short years through various f acets of consciousness raising.
Yasmin also serves as a board member of the ALTSEAN-Burma\, and US Campaign for Burma\, and a member of the stee ring committee in Bridges MM-Myanmar Youth Dialogue project.Among the proje cts she has worked on are\, Time to Act: Rohingya Voices exhibition with th e Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the Genocide Learning Tool: Us vs. T hem with the Montréal Holocaust Museum. Her poetry is published in the anth ology\, I Am A Rohingya along with other Rohingya poets from the refugee ca mps and beyond. Her creative writing encompasses other genres of writing in cluding the recently published children's book called Hafsa and the Magical Ring which encapsulates the experience of Rohingya children living in the camps after fleeing a 2017 genocidal campaign in Myanmar while reconciling current displacement and loss of culture.Yasmin has been a UN Minority Fell ow since 2023. In 2021\, she was named on the FemiList100\, the Gender Secu rity Project list of 100 women from the Global South\, working in foreign p olicy\, peacebuilding\, law\, activism\, development.
This event is p resented by the Centre for Southeast Asia Research.
CATEGORIES:Featured Events,Featured Homepage LOCATION:Room 120\, C.K. Choi Building GEO:49.267258;-123.257967 URL;VALUE=URI:https://sppga.ubc.ca/events/event/rohingya-womens-experiences -and-feminist-perspectives-on-war-genocide-and-displacement/ ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://sppga.cms.arts.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/updated-rohingya.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Vancouver BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 DTSTART:20251102T090000 TZNAME:PST END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR