Interviews with Exiles: Ethics, Poetics, and Afterlives

Since the upsurge in state repression in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in 2017, Uyghur, Kazakh and other Turkic Muslim exiles have been at times overwhelmed by approaches from journalists, rights organisations, activists, and anthropologists who have asked them to act as witnesses to the violent upheavals of their homeland, often by recalling traumatic memories of harassment, detention, and the rupture of family ties.

This panel brings a much-needed critical and reflexive lens to the methodologies, encounters, and engagements involved in ethnographic and other forms of interviews with exiles, and the consequences for interviewee and interviewer which flow from the production and circulation of interview-based texts and media items within this difficult terrain.

The speakers are Rachel Harris (SOAS University of London), Rune Steenberg (Palacký University Olomouc), and Zarina Mukanova (Palacký University Olomouc).

Join the lecture via MS Teams: meeting ID: 349 999 575 708, password: 9ZXX5D.