All posts tagged: MIT

Chinese Student Responses to the Mass Internment of Turkic Muslims

Over the past two years I have spoken at dozens of universities and high schools about the internment of what is now an estimated 1.5 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims. I talk to students about the way poor minorities all over the world are marginalized by the language of criminality and terrorism, how policing and surveillance systems disproportionately affect them. I frame this by discussing the way Islamophobia has spread around the world over the past 20 years, resulting in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and, now, an attempt to “reeducate” an entire population of Muslims in northwest China. Undergraduate and high school students in the United States are typically really engaged by this. The use of technology to monitor, profile, and control Chinese Turkic Muslim populations grabs their attention. The arbitrary ranking system that has been used to determine who should be sent to the internment camps often puts them on the edge of their chairs. Telling the stories of seeing my Uyghur friends disappear makes them sad. When I’m talking with these students, I feel like they …

Streaming Mainstreaming Stories: A Day of Solidarity with Uyghurs

On April 26, scholars will hold a series of events called “Mainstreaming Stories: A Day of Solidarity with Uyghurs” at locations around the world. In twelve locations they will discuss the ongoing state of emergency in the Uyghur and Kazakh homelands. Timothy Grose (Rose-Hulman Institute, Indiana); Sandrine Catris (Augusta University, Georgia) Magnus Fiskesjö (Cornell University, New York) James Liebold (LaTrobe University, Australia) June Dreyer (University of Miami, Florida) Kristian Petersen (Old Dominion University, Virgina) Vanessa Frangville (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium Sophie Richardson (Human Rights Watch) Rian Thum (Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana) Rachel Harris (University of London, United Kingdom) Mustafa Kérim (Indiana University, Indiana) Hannah Theaker (University of Oxford, United Kingdom) A guest speaker at the University of Denver, Colorado These events on three continents will offer students and communities members a chance to hear and discuss the evidence of the mass internment of as many as 1.5 million Uyghurs and Kazakhs and the effects and implications of this mass trauma. It will also give audiences a chance to get involved in actively opposing these processes. For all of you who won’t …