Scribe for Human Rights Explores the Resilience of Female Textile Workers

Each year, the Human Rights Program (HRP) and the Department of English award the Scribe for Human Rights Fellowship to a current Master of Fine Arts student in Creative Writing who serves as a writer-in-residence on human rights topics. As the 2025-2026 Scribe, Amna Chaudhry is writing a novel exploring the experiences of female textile workers in Pakistan. 

During the COVID shutdown crisis in 2020, Chaudhry worked as a journalist who interviewed striking textile workers. The workers informed her of the exploitative conditions they’ve had to endure. Instances of sexual assault, lack of equitable pay, no medical benefits, and poor working conditions defined the experiences of many workers. Chaudhry, inspired by fiction writer Toni Morrison, uses fiction in her novel as a way to bring the historical struggles of South Asian women into the present while also being able to explore the unique experiences of her characters’ lives outside the descriptions present in human rights reports.

Chaudhry shared her experience as the Scribe in a talk hosted by HRP and the Department of English on Thursday, March 26, 2026.The discussion was moderated by V.V. Ganeshananthan, author of Brotherless Night and Love Marriage, who teaches in the MFA program and is affiliated with the Human Rights faculty. 

Chaudhry detailed how she learned through interviewing factory workers that they were made to prioritize protecting merchandise over workers’ lives in a 2012 factory burning. During her time as a reporter, Chaudhry encountered hesitation from factory workers who wanted to share their stories but didn’t want their identities exposed. When writing about these experiences, Chaudhry wanted to share the realities of the horrendous conditions that workers endured without fetishizing violence. “You can’t avoid the violence—you have to confront it—and think about how women are situated within it,” Chaudhry shares. At the same time, Chaudhry seeks to show her characters as fully realized people outside of simply sharing their struggles. Her work engages with questions around the limits of reform in an exploitative system. “Can reforms guarantee worker safety? Is reform the answer, or is it something else?” she says. 

Though Chaudhry admits there are no easy answers to the issues surrounding global capitalism and worker exploitation, her work emphasizes the importance of engaging with the stories of workers. “We must look at the workers,” she says. “What are they trying to tell us?”