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This past Spring produced a bumper crop of Asia-related PhDs in the Geography department. Yang Yang, Sarah Tynen, and Caitlin Ryan all defended their dissertations featuring research in China and Kyrgyzstan.

Yang Yang’s dissertation, titled Seeking Knowledge Even Unto China via Alternative Routes: Grassroots Muslim Connections, The New Silk Road, and the Hui in Xi’an, China, examined Islamic revival in China with a focus on urban Hui Muslims’ experiences in northwestern China. Yang explored how Hui Muslims incorporated new orientations and practices from global Islamic discourse in their everyday lives as they negotiated their ethno-religious identity within the secular Chinese state. Her research was aimed at providing a better understanding of the Muslim community in China and how Islamic revival cannot be viewed as either monolithic or necessarily confrontational to the state. Based on long term ethnographic fieldwork in the Hui Quarter in the city of Xi’an, her dissertation focused on three different case studies in the forging of locally produced transnational connections between the Hui and the external Muslim world. These included the adoption by the Hui of Muslim wedding styles from South and Southeast Asia, grassroots Hui charitable groups and their reference to the Iranian “wall of kindness” project, and Hui participation in the government-sponsored annual Hajj to Saudi Arabia. She also examined the gendered aspects of these local-transnational connections, emphasizing the roles that women played in each of the three case studies.

Sarah Tynen’s dissertation, Uneven State Territorialization: Governance, Inequality, and Resistance in Xinjiang, China, is a study of governance and tactics of resistance in the context of ethnic relations and state territorial modes of control. Popular media coverage of the visible aspects of state power tend to overlook the invisible and nefarious aspects of the everyday violence of the nation-state. Tynen used long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Xinjiang, conducted from 2014-2017 and including interviews and documents, to study some of the more invisible aspects of political power. Her dissertation addressed questions of nationalism and ethnic conflict. In developing a case study of the Uyghurs, her work on China’s peripheral minority borderlands also shed light on issues of policy and governance in China’s core regions as well. From four empirical angles, she concentrated on bureaucracy in urban community centers (shequ) as a mode of governance; policing the poor in the city; quiet opposition to police; and development discourses of Han Chinese migrant workers in a frontier development zone.

Caitlin Ryan’s dissertation, Urban Transformation, Conflict and Everyday Life In Osh, Kyrgyzstan: From Socialist Legacy to Territorializations of History and Memory, is a study of how two violent conflicts in the city of Osh (in 1990 and 2010) are framed and remembered. Her research explored how the Kyrgyzstani state, international development actors, and city residents interpret and narrate the events of the two conflicts, and how they make use of different historical sensibilities to think about, act in, and intervene upon urban space. Caitlin’s dissertation demonstrates that international development groups frame their projects around an understanding of the 2010 conflict in Osh that focuses on ethnic tension between the city’s Uzbek and Kyrgyz residents. In doing so, these groups also see the 1990 conflict as a precursor to the events of 2010, even though the causes of the 1990 conflict are poorly documented. Through an in-depth review of secondary literature on the region’s history, Caitlin’s research attempts to complicate these framings. She highlights the role that uneven development and an urban housing crisis played in the 1990 conflict--issues that have received little attention in most analyses of the 2010 events. Caitlin also draws attention to the intertwined politics of space and identity, the history of uneven development between urban and rural spaces, and citizens’ recent efforts to carve out spaces in the city where they belong. Using mobile and participant-led methods of data collection, Caitlin also considers how Osh’s residents themselves think about the relationship between history, memory and neighborhood space. Caitlin Gave a talk for the CAS Luncheon series recently.