Please join us for a lecture and discussion of the “Becoming Family” project that has sent 1 million civil servants to monitor and assess Turkic Muslim families.  This talk will address the way Han civilians understand their role in “transforming” the basic existence of the Uyghur population and the implications of the re-education prison camp system that has placed over one million Uyghurs and Kazakhs in detention. 

Darren Byler is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington, where he studies emerging forms of art and politics among urban migrants in Chinese Central Asia.  He has contributed essays to volumes on Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender and The Poetics of Travel and curated collections on “Precarity” and “Literature, Writing and Anthropology” for Cultural Anthropology. In addition, he has published Uyghur-English literary translations (with Mutellip Enwer) in Guernica and Paper Republic.  He also writes and curates the digital humanities art and politics repository The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which is hosted at www.livingotherwise.com.

This event is FREE and open to the public.