Dr Fara Azmat was formerly a government official in Bangladesh. She has been living in Australia for the last 15 years.
These days she works as a senior lecturer at Deakin University. This month, along with her team, she launched a project funded by DFAT and Deakin University which aims to bring back alienated and isolated people - particularly youth, into mainstream society.
To achieve that goal, the group are using arts and culture as a tool. The Geelong-based Deakin university research group have now expanded the project by bringing 15 fellows from Bangladesh to work with Bangladeshi youth.
Born and raised in Bangladesh, Dr Fara Azmat says has observed changing trends in the culture, especially in the youth, some of whom are inclined to radicalism.
Source: Dr. Fara Azmat
"I expanded the project a little bit in the context of Bangladesh," she tells SBS Bangla.
"I was born and brought up in Bangladesh. I know, nowadays there is a trend of radicalisation, especially in the youth."
Dr Azmat explains that her project that they have been working for under-privileged people of Bangladesh who are alienated and isolated.
She says, "My main research interest is to work for those people who are alienated from society for many reasons."
"How to bring them back in society is the main purpose of my research."
To bring them back to mainstream society, Deakin's cross-cultural collaborative counter-terrorism aims to utilize the rich arts and cultural heritage of Bangladesh.
The idea is that participants can easily express his or her emotions or anger through the arts and culture.
Dr Azmat says, "research findings suggest that there are various reasons for this isolation problem, such as: family problems, problems from society and so on."
"So, they can express their emotions by using arts and cultural activities; such as writing poetry or paint and important messages can be conveyed in non-confronting ways, non-threatening ways."
"Arts and culture are a sort of non-threatening tool, compared to other tools", she added.
The project is aiming to raise awareness.
Out of the 15 fellows currently in Australia, eight are from various government offices and the rest are from the private sector.
One is from high-profile Bangladeshi television channel, Channel-i and some of them come from English medium educational institutions.
In Bangladesh, some radicalised youth study in English medium private universities.
One of the fellows comes from BRAC, a non-government organisation which has been working for the social advancement in Bangladesh for long time.
Notably there, there are no representatives from law-enforcing agencies.
When this point was raised, Dr Azmat admitted that, it is true and she hopes funding is managed, they will definitely then be able to bring someone from law enforcing agencies in future.
There were two parts to this fellowship training program. The first has just taken part in Australia in October 2017 and the second part will take place in January 2018, in Bangladesh.
During the training in Australia, the fellows met various experts and scholars of this topic and conducted workshops, went for sight-seeing and gained both theoretical and practical knowledge while visiting Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
Dr Azmat says that so far "feedback of this project has been very positive."
Listen to Dr Azmat's full interview (in Bangla) with SBS Bangla in the audio player above.
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