Watch the recorded event here.
Speakers:
Abdürreşit Celil Karluk, Professor, Department of International Relations, Ankara Hacı Bayram Veli University
Alessandra Cappelletti, Associate Professor, Head of Department, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
Rune Steenberg, Senior Researcher, Palacky University
Moderator:
David Brophy, Adjunct Associate Research Scholar at WEAI; Senior Lecturer in History, University of Sydney
Prior to his arrest and sentencing in 2014, economist Ilham Tohti was one of China’s leading experts on contemporary Xinjiang. His academic work and online writings voiced a rare perspective – that of an Uyghur intellectual working within the Chinese system - on the increasingly marginal and precarious position of his Uyghur community in modern China. Ultimately, this critique proved too controversial for the party, and he is now serving a life sentence in prison for “separatism.” We Uyghurs Have No Say (Verso 2022) is a collection of Ilham Tohti’s articles and interviews, translated from Chinese into English, which chart his scholarly interventions from 2007 until his silencing. To mark its publication, this event will assemble a panel of sociologists and anthropologists of Xinjiang – some of whom studied under Ilham in Beijing – to reflect on these writings and the wider significance of Ilham’s work for our understanding of social and political developments in Xinjiang.
This event is sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.
