Sarah Tynen

Sarah Tynen: A first-hand account of China’s drive to detain Uighurs

Anonymous — Sat, 23 May 2020 19:09:44 +0000

Sarah Tynen: A first-hand account of China’s drive to detain Uighurs Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 05/23/2020 - 13:09

'I still have nightmares about it ... I lost a lot of friends who I’ll probably never see again. I don’t even know if they’re alive or dead.'

Sarah Tynen still remembers a near miss from her days as a young graduate student doing research in the city of Urumqi, China.

Tynen, a geographer at ��Ƶ Boulder, was visiting a friend when the knock came. Tynen’s friend, whom she refers to by the pseudonym Munewwer, was a Uighur, a member of a Muslim ethnic group native to northwest China. A local government official was at the door to check her identification documents.

Sarah Tynen (right) documented the plight of the Uighurs for her thesis project. Top photograph is of the Ürümqi marketplace. Both photographs by Sarah Tynen.

In the summer of 2016, Munewwer was in a dangerous spot: Authorities in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region were just beginning to ramp up a series of oppressive policies targeting people like her. The woman also hadn’t registered her newborn baby with the local government.

“Don’t breathe,” thought Tynen, who received her PhD from ��Ƶ Boulder in 2019 and is now the university’s graduate program manager.

Luckily, Munewwer’s baby, sleeping just a few feet away from Tynen, didn’t cry out, and the official left without inspecting the apartment. But for the researcher, the memory stuck.

Just a few months later, the Chinese government began detaining Uighur men and women with a speed that Tynen hadn’t thought was possible. Today, scholars and media organizations estimate that at least 1 million Muslims are now being held without trial in internment camps across Xinjiang.

Tynen’s own research, captured in a series of recent papers, explores the more intimate consequences of those actions—such as the “culture of fear” instilled by frequent police inspections of Uighur homes. She’s interested in how authoritarian actions can trickle down to shape peoples’ everyday lives, and how human beings push back in small but sometimes powerful ways.

Photograph of the Ürümqi police station. Ürümqi is the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China's far northwest. (Sarah Tynen)

They are lessons, she said, that are relevant far beyond Xinjiang.

“My goal is to show that this isn’t just about camps,” Tynen said. “My research is also about the way that China treats its minorities and the way that we treat our marginalized populations here in the U.S., affecting their ability to have their own ways of life and their own livelihoods.”

Melting pot

Tynen originally traveled to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, in 2014 with a modest goal in mind—to study the impacts of real-estate development on the city. Pinned between deserts on the route of the old Silk Road, the city is home to not just Uighurs and Han Chinese, but Mongolians, Russians, Kazakhstanis and more.

“I trained jujitsu while I was there, and in any given class, there were always at least five languages being spoken,” Tynen said. “It was a melting pot.”

That all changed in early 2017. While discrimination against Uighurs in Xinjiang was nothing new, that year the regional government began rounding up men and women in unheard-of numbers—often for offenses as trivial as praying in public or talking about fasting for Ramadan. China contends that its actions are necessary to combat Islamic extremism.

As an American citizen, Tynen was in a relatively safe position. But one by one, her Uighur friends disappeared. “They would tell me ‘I have to go to my hometown’ or ‘I have to go study,’” she said. “That was code for ‘I have to go, and I won’t be coming back.’”

One of them was anthropologist Rahile Dawut. In December 2017, the prominent Uighur academic, and one of Tynen’s mentors, left her home in Urumqi to travel to Beijing for work. No one heard from her again, and her present whereabouts are unknown. Tynen later helped Dawut’s daughter to launch a campaign to free her mother.

Campaign card for missing anthropologist, Rahile Dawut.

Tynen worries that China’s actions in Xinjiang may be a prelude to something far worse—genocide.

“I still have nightmares about it,” she said. “I lost a lot of friends who I’ll probably never see again. I don’t even know if they’re alive or dead.”

In her own research, Tynen interviewed 66 Han Chinese and 98 Uighur people. Their stories revealed the more subtle, bordering on mundane, toll of state oppression.

In a paper published in April, the geographer explored the plight of women who moved to Urumqi from more rural, and sometimes conservative, areas of Xinjiang. In many cases, these women saw the city as a place of opportunity—where they could find work, while choosing to wear jeans or a headscarf, or both. During Tynen’s time in Urumqi, however, the government evicted many of those same women from the city, sending them back to their old lives.

Local authorities also banned Uighurs from receiving guests in their homes. That same custom, Tynen said, provides these men and women with an important connection to their cultural and religious heritage.

“Uighurs believe that by hosting guests, they are sharing Allah’s love,” Tynen said. “That was something that stood out for me, personally, because people who were lacking in material wealth were so incredibly generous in giving me food or a place to stay.”

Keeping on

Even as authorities demolished entire Uighur neighborhoods in Urumqi, many city residents strived to maintain some sense of normal. A common maxim was “taqabil turush,” which roughly translates to “keep on keeping on.”

“Writing my dissertation was really a healing experience ... I was able to get their stories out there"

One Muslim man that Tynen knew, for example, kept a half-full bottle of Pepsi in his backpack during Ramadan so that people wouldn’t think he was fasting. Another woman bought a hat to inconspicuously keep her head covered in spaces where hijabs were prohibited.

And, Tynen said, people reveled in tiny escapes from China. Uighurs drank Turkish coffee, listened to Turkish music in cafés and ate Halal in secret to assert their identities.

“That was the most surprising thing to me about Xinjiang,” Tynen said. “Even among the terrible things that were happening, we still had a lot of fun. We went to dance clubs. We partied.”

By the end 2017, police were stopping Tynen more often to check her documents. Rattled, she left Urumqi in October.

Tynen hopes that she will be able return one day. For now, she is focusing on sharing the experiences of the people she met during her time in the city.

“Writing my dissertation was really a healing experience for me,” Tynen said. “I was able to get their stories out there.”

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Geography PhD Theses Presentations

Anonymous — Fri, 26 Apr 2019 16:30:34 +0000

Geography PhD Theses Presentations Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/26/2019 - 10:30

April 26 is the last colloquium of the semester. It features three different graduating PhD students doing short presentations of their theses.

Spaces of Diaspora Policy
by Aaron Malone

This paper examines the transnational / translocal landscapes of migrant organizing and state diaspora policies. Examining early diaspora engagement practices, Smith and Guarnizo (1998) debated transnationalism from above and from below. With diaspora policies rapidly spreading, I examine what kinds of spaces are being created and how this transnationalism from above interacts with grassroots and informal patterns from below. I build from the critical development literature, which argues that participatory programs create “invited spaces” that mostly reinforce the status quo, in contrast to the rarer autonomous spaces of radical challenge or grassroots alternatives. Focusing on Mexico’s famous diaspora policy, the 3x1 Program, I go a step further to argue that the institutionalized interactions between the state, migrant organizations, and migrants have created a landscape of autonomous, invited, and “simulated” spaces – the final category recognizing that the financial resources made available through the diaspora program have motivated attempts to fabricate and falsify trans-local migrant organizations. These “phantom” or simulated migrant organizations further complicate the transnational landscape, raising important questions about participation, agency, and the dynamics between states and migrant organizations in the era of diaspora policy.

Land grabbing at the legal crux: Forced displacement and land restitution in Colombia
by Max Counter

Colombia’s armed conflict has entailed industrial-scale land theft, foreshadowing the Inter-American Court of Human Rights historic 2005 judicial designation of “land grabbing” as a human rights violation. “Land grabbing”, as the violent dispossession of rural, afro-descendent and indigenous populations’ land for agro-industrial and mining use, has served as a central heuristic for understanding Colombia’s armed conflict. Against this background, and focused on Colombia’s 2011 “Victims’ and Land Restitution Law”,this paper looks “beyond” land-grabbing in two facets. First, it examines land restitution as a means of undoing violent patterns of land grabbing. Secondly, it questions how violent patterns of displacement might be legally rectified without presupposing that those who currently own dispossessed land necessarily obtained property through land grabbing processes. Examining land restitution in Colombia’s Magdalena Medio, I detail the legal measures used to prosecute legacies of land grabbing, as well as the controversy arising when those powerful legal measures are trained upon relatively small, “good faith” owners of once-dispossessed land. This paper approaches land restitution as an important means of undoing violent patterns of land concentration, yet cautions against presupposing that all patterns of violent displacement can be understood through a land-grabbing analytic. Land may be dispossessed using overt, coercive violence or, following critical scholarship from Diana Ojeda and others, through subtle forms of “everyday dispossession” (despojo cotidiano). How land restitution programs detect and manage these distinctions bears upon post-conflict legal land regimes’ precarious capacity to either ameliorate, or potentially exacerbate, violent legacies of forced displacement.

Uneven State Territorialization: Governance, Inequality, and Survivance in Xinjiang, China
by Sarah Tynen

Ideological and material state power result in the experience of uneven state power that affects people’s lives, especially at the scale of the body, household, market, and neighborhood. State power is both repressive and uneven, as well as ideological and material, in working at the level of the neighborhood and everyday life. The strikingly visible aspects of Chinese state power in Xinjiang overlook the invisible and nefarious aspects of the everyday violence of the nation-state. I use long-term ethnographic fieldwork to study some of the more invisible aspects of state power at the scale of the body, home, and market, such as the community (shequ) bureaucracy and development discourses. In drawing on observations of tight state control, I ask the question: How does a government rule with coercion or consent, and how do people respond? In exploring this question, I provide a examples from Xinjiang to show how state building and dispossession occurs in China and the effects that this has on everyday life for ethnic minority and majority groups. Specifically, I look at the effects of state power, especially how the multiplicity and complexity of state power is experienced when it comes to people’s daily tasks. I examine how individuals create social space in heavily regulated and securitized state space. State control permeates people’s lives in disruptive ways, which shows the everyday violence of the cultural politics of the nation-state. Meanwhile, Uyghur cultural performances at scales of the body and household reflect affiliation with the Muslim world that disrupt the national Chinese imaginary and the false assumption of territorial control as an all-encompassing static container.

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American Association of Geographers Preview: Student Talks

Anonymous — Fri, 06 Apr 2018 22:46:23 +0000

American Association of Geographers Preview: Student Talks Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/06/2018 - 16:46

Four Geography graduate students will present a preview of the talks they will give at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) meeting in New Orleans April 10-14, 2018:

Sarah Tynen: State Territorialization through Bureaucratic Control: Authoritarian Governance at the Neighborhood Level in China

By building on the concept of territory as a contested social relation that challenges the state-society dichotomy, this paper explores state territorialization practices as crucial components in shaping everyday life. In particular, it asks: How do citizens experience state bureaucratic power at the neighborhood level in their everyday lives? What is the role of community participation in garnering regime legitimacy? The research draws on 24 months of ethnographic and interview data in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwest China. The findings show that the conflict between state control and social membership revolves around the negotiation for territorial control, especially when it comes to struggle for power over minority bodies in nationalist space.

Aaron Malone: Diaspora Bureaucracy? Formalizing emigrant engagement and the evolution of Mexico’s 3x1 Program

Recent decades have seen rapid growth of diaspora strategies – efforts by migrant-sending countries to engage their emigrants abroad, under the assumption they can contribute toward development goals. There has also been a formalization of diaspora engagement efforts and the emergence of new agencies and programs. I examine how the formalization and bureaucratization of diaspora-state engagement has influenced relations between migrants, migrant organizations, sending communities, and sending-area governments. I focus on the example of Mexico’s 3x1 Program, a matching grant scheme through which the Mexican government partners with migrant organizations to build infrastructure in migrants’ hometowns. The 3x1 Program’s institutionalization has created gaps between policy and practice, yielding numerous unintended consequences. I show how these issues emerged across multiple levels. Most fundamentally, the basic assumptions built into the policy model romanticize migrant organizations and create unrealistic expectations for their involvement. Secondly, the mechanics of program operations also create mismatches between mandated processes and practical limitations the stakeholder groups face. These problems are known to officials, yet change to the program has been minimal over its fifteen years of operation. The contradictions and issues in the functioning of the 3x1 Program provide insights into Mexico’s relationship to its diaspora. Though presented as a community development program, the practical goals seem to center on a ceremonial embrace of migrants and a strategic strengthening of hometown-focused migrant organizations abroad, while the actual development projects are mostly left to hometown mayors and business-as-usual processes.

Joseph Tuccillo: Emergent Social Vulnerability: Linking Hazards of Place to Individual Vulnerabilities

Within the spatial sciences, social vulnerability--or the potential for individuals, groups, or households to be harmed by a hazard event or disturbance--is often viewed as a place based construct. It is assumed that the vulnerability of places (neighborhoods, cities) can be measured through aggregate characteristics linked to socioeconomic hardship. Yet measures of social vulnerability constructed from aggregate data mask understanding of how individuals are themselves vulnerable. While there is ample evidence that different places have different levels of social vulnerability, without attention to individual context, it is not at all clear how to efficiently translate aggregate-level vulnerability metrics into policy or operational response. We argue that social vulnerability emerges from the social interactive properties of place. If one could understand vulnerability from an individual level, one could craft policies that address the specific vulnerabilities of the people in a place whilst still accounting for the collective (area-level) concerns. Moreover, viewing vulnerability as an emergent construct allows us to target vulnerable individuals within affluent (less vulnerable) places. In this paper we develop a new way of thinking about vulnerability based on measuring vulnerability at the individual level (using survey responses from the US Census), statistically geo-locating individuals to census tracts, then ranking tracts based on their composition of vulnerable individuals. Two test cases for Denver, Colorado and New York City are evaluated. We believe this method is a significant theoretical and methodological advance that enables new ways of incorporating data-intensive science into policy making and public sector operations.

Siddharth Menon: Kuccha-Pakka: Gender and the Materiality of Concrete in Rural India

Rural houses in the Kangra valley of Himachal Pradesh are undergoing rampant transformation from age-old kuccha ways of building using mud and bamboo, to contemporary pakka ways of building using concrete and steel. Is this change in material infrastructure of building understood equally by all household and community members? When is change in materiality of built space understood as a “gain” rather than a “loss” for rural communities in Kangra? My fieldwork in this region using participant observation and focus groups, reveal a unique gendered understanding of change in material infrastructure of built space. Furthermore, there seems to be an uneven spread to the incremental order of this change, altering some spaces first and some spaces much later. Are all spaces in a house treated equally by this material transformation from kaccha to pakka? Why do some spaces of a house remain kaccha much later than the rest? What does the materiality of this change tell us about the gendering of these spaces? By drawing on Harvey (2015) and the infrastructure turn, I hope to critically look at the process of transformation in material infrastructure of rural houses in District Kangra, Himachal Pradesh while focusing primarily on the gendered understanding of this process. I argue that it is the inherent materiality of this new pakka material infrastructure, particularly concrete, that provides us with a divergent understanding of this transformation while also affecting the spatial ordering of it.

Hosted by Colleen Reid

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Sarah Tynen Awarded DDRI Grant

Anonymous — Tue, 05 Apr 2016 06:00:00 +0000

Sarah Tynen Awarded DDRI Grant Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 04/05/2016 - 00:00

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Geography and Spatial Sciences Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement (DDRI) grant for 2016-2017 was awarded to Sarah Tynen for her research project, "State and Society in China: Negotiating Governance, Migration, and Citizenship".

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Sarah Tynen Receives NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program Award

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 03:24:28 +0000

Sarah Tynen Receives NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program Award Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/02/2014 - 21:24

The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) helps ensure the vitality of the human resource base of science and engineering in the United States and reinforces its diversity. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions. Fellows benefit from a three-year annual stipend of $32,000 along with a $12,000 cost of education allowance for tuition and fees (paid to the institution), opportunities for international research and professional development, and the freedom to conduct their own research at any accredited U.S. institution of graduate education they choose.

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Sarah Tynen Receives EAPSI Grant

Anonymous — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 02:32:41 +0000

Sarah Tynen Receives EAPSI Grant Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/24/2013 - 20:32

Sarah was awarded the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute grant funded by the National Science Foundation. Sarah will be hosted by Professor Wang Hongyang in the Urban Planning and Design department at Nanjing University. She will use the grant to support her summer field research for her MA thesis.

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