Zulker Naeen is an interdisciplinary researcher whose career traces a deliberate movement from communications practice into evidence-led scholarship and grassroots engagement. He teaches and mentors at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh while coordinating research at the Centre for Critical and Qualitative Studies and leading Fact-Watch initiatives that connect academic rigour with civic impact.
His work is defined by a commitment to translate methodical inquiry into tools and trainings that strengthen local information ecosystems, empower community reporters and bolster democratic resilience across Bangladesh.
His research journey has concentrated on the anatomy of information disorder. Moving beyond descriptive accounts, he investigates how misinformation and disinformation propagate across platforms and borders, how influence operations exploit social cleavages, and how synthetic media reshapes evidentiary practice.
This scholarship is practice-oriented: mixed-method projects combine qualitative fieldwork, content analysis and open-source digital forensics to reconstruct misinformation supply chains and to generate curricula and verification toolkits that are usable by journalists, educators and civil society practitioners.
In parallel to his scholarly output, he has convened and contributed to regional collaborative efforts that interrogate cross-border narratives and coordinate collective response strategies.
At the grassroots level, his work has translated into tangible interventions designed to build civic capacity. He has led community-focused programmes that teach verification workflows, run fact-checking schools for emerging journalists and co-designed media literacy curricula tailored to the social and linguistic contexts of local audiences.
These initiatives deliberately centre local actors: community educators, student reporters and grassroots media outlets are trained not merely to spot falsehoods but to assemble traceable evidence, to document patterns of coordinated inauthentic behaviour, and to design locally-relevant reporting that restores trust and accountability.
As an independent journalist and storyteller, he situates investigative reporting at the intersection of climate, migration and information integrity. His reporting has highlighted the links between environmental shocks, displacement and the politicisation of narratives that circulate online and offline.
These stories inform his teaching and training, providing students with case studies that illustrate how misinformation can exacerbate vulnerability and how rigorous reporting can create openings for policy dialogue and community resilience.
Zulker’s portfolio also foregrounds gender and migration as analytic lenses. In both research and outreach, he applies gender-sensitive safeguards and advocates for inclusive pedagogies that protect marginalised voices while improving the evidentiary quality of public debate. These concerns sit alongside his work on democracy studies and digital citizenry, where he argues that strengthening media literacy and verification capacity is a prerequisite for healthy civic participation in the digital age.
Throughout his career, he has woven together roles as a curriculum designer, trainer, OSINT practitioner and convener of regional collaborations. From programmes that empower community journalists in Cox’s Bazar to cross-border symposiums that map transnational misinformation, his work demonstrates a consistent principle: research must be actionable, and action must be informed by rigorous evidence.
For institutions, funders and academic committees seeking a practitioner who combines scholarly depth with programmatic impact, his record shows an ability to design, implement and teach interventions that address the complex, interlocking challenges of information disorder, civic resilience and ethical storytelling.
