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Subordinated inclusion: Population sorting technologies as Uyghur digital confinement in Northwest China

When: —
Venue: Online

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Guest lecture for the Birkbeck Criminology Seminar Series

Contact name: Sappho Xenakis

Speakers
  • Dr Darren Byler —

    Darren Byler is a sociocultural anthropologist whose teaching and research examines the effects of surveillance on stateless populations and the role of infrastructural state power in contemporary capitalism and colonialism in China, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. His monograph, Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City  (Duke University Press, 2022), which was awarded the 2023 Gregory Bateson Award from the Society for Cultural Anthropology and the 2023 Margaret Mead Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropology Association, examines emerging forms of media, infrastructure, economics and politics in the Uyghur homeland in Chinese Central Asia (Ch: Xinjiang). Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork among Uyghur and Han internal male migrants, the book considers how the ubiquity of pass-book systems, webs of technological surveillance, urban banishment and mass internment camps have reshaped human experience among native Uyghurs and Han settler-colonizers in the capital of the region Ürümchi. His current research involves field research and in-depth interviews with technology workers, former detainees and other stateless Muslim populations affected by the infrastructural power of digital surveillance along China’s New Silk Road (In the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony , Columbia Global Reports 2021).

     

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