Today's #Olympics2022 hero spotlight is placed on #Uyghur scholar Adil Ghappar [Kariz] whose condition and well-being have been unknown since 2017.
I met Adil in 2014 having been introduced to him by Rahile Dawut. I was under his wing at Xinjiang Normal University as I taught a short-term course in his department.
Adil remained extremely witty and optimistic despite tighter restrictions on his research. He already published a monumental contribution to understandings of the richness of Uyghur religious rituals and expressions
We maintained email contact during the year & met in Urumchi during the summers to discuss research and life. He was working on a way to conduct research on Uyghur networks (mehelle, mosque community, bazaar, & mazar) without drifting into "sensitive" topics
@EricTSchluessel my colleague, friend, and mutual friend of Adil, reported his strange and sudden disappearance from academia in summer 2017. On June 28, I wrote him, but, for the first time, did not receive a reply.
Even though the CCP has tried to silence our friend Adil, we can make surethe repetition of his name reverberates throughout these games and until his well-being is known.
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Today, I'm shining @NBCOlympics#OlympicGames spotlight for the first time @shahitbiz on my friend Ekber Ebeydullah, who has been detained since 2016
I met Ekber in Beijing in 2010. He was studying at university after four years in the Xinjiang Class boarding school. He is extremely bright, fluent in four languages (Uyghur, Turkish, Chinese, and English).
After graduating, he went to Turkey for post-graduate studies. Upon returning home in 2016 for a relative's wedding, he was detained. A mutual friend told me the news summer 2017 in Urumchi. Like many others, his crime was being #Uyghur.
Today @pen_int highlights detained Prof. Rahile Dawut--one of the world's foremost scholars on Uyghur religious cultures. This thread begins to show just how important her work is (and why the CCP feels so threatened by this scholarship)
Prof Dawut's scholarship reaches many corners of Uyghur pious expression, but she is perhaps best known for her trailblazing work on sacred shrines, which are called mazar in Uyghur
Prof Dawut established deep trust among religious communities in the Tarim Basin, recorded their histories, practices, and published them for Uyghur and international audiences
Twitter is buzzing about Jiang's interview with @CNN. I've never interviewed Jiang, but here is what I can corroborate by the Chinese sources. 1: police were sometimes armed, and detainees were commonly hooded during transport
Some officers reported that they assisted in the detentions of hundreds of people each day
Many of these officers came from neidi (inner/eastern China) as part of the Aid Xinjiang 援疆 program. Their posts typically lasted three months
@GFPhilosophy I’m not sure who you are. But my wife’s sister is here so I’m kinda doing my own thing. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. What would you like me to explain? Why 土炕改造 is different in Uyghur communities from neidi?
@GFPhilosophy it's late, i want to go to sleep, so I'm going to assume that is the question. First, we cannot equate سۇپا with 土炕, although Chinese conflates the two. Supa is often the site for religio-social rites such as name-giving ceremonies and circumcisions. not the case in 内地
@GFPhilosophy although 土炕改造 is used in the 新疆民生 source I posted, it isn't it's own policy in the region. Rather it's part of the 三新活动. In Uyghur communities, authorities require families to tear down 拆除 or tear apart 拆 the supa. I.E., it cannot remain
After pausing for May [sorry, just ran out of gas], Scholar Profiles is back! This month: David Stroup @davidstroup, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Chinese Politics at @UoMPolitics who specializes in #Hui (i.e., Chinese Muslim) ethnicity.
I recently read his 2020 article, “‘Why don’t you go to the mosque?’: the problem of epistemic deference in researching everyday ethnicity in Hui Muslim communities.” cambridge.org/core/journals/…
This month’s spotlight is being sent not a moment too soon. So much attention is being directed at undeserving "scholarship" on the #Uyghur region, that groundbreaking work is (maybe) going unnoticed. Enter Sär Tynen @sbtynen, a post-doc @Akademie_ved_CRcolorado.edu/geography/sara…
Tynen received their PhD in geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder and has published in several peer-reviewed journals including @Pol_Geog_Jl, @Geopolitics_Jl, @spaceandculture as well as edited volumes on urbanization Asia. Their book is under contract @ibtauris
I’ve been an admirer of Sär’s work for quite some time, but most recently read their 2020 @CA_Survey article “Dispossession and displacement of migrant workers: the impact of state terror and economic development on Uyghurs in urban Xinjiang” tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…