Darren Byler, who has been in a Post-Doc position with the Center for Asian Studies working on the China Made Project has won a prestigious fellowship with The Henry Luce Foundation.
Darren's Research for the fellowhip is outlined in the following abstract:
Thinking with Violence: Narratives of Reeducation Camps & Infrastructural State Power in Northwest China
Beginning in 2016, Chinese state authorities implemented a counter-terrorism law that placed hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in a "pre-criminal" category. This, in turn, led to their detainment and "reeducation" in internment camps. This research will show how the detainability of Muslims was produced through legal narratives and how this discursive frame and related surveillance infrastructures resulted in forms of state power and legal indeterminacy that produced patterns of experience for targeted populations. Drawing on approximately 100 interviews with former detainees and others who have recently fled from China as well as thousands of internal government documents, it probes beneath the banal everydayness of this discourse and material environment to consider the capacities humans have to refuse or denarrativize their existence, opening up space for thinking with violence.
The Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in China Studies seeks to maintain the vitality of China Studies in the US and Canada through fellowships and grants designed primarily for scholars early in their careers.
Early Career Fellowships support scholars in preparing their PhD dissertation research for publication or in embarking on new research projects.
This program is made possible by a generous grant from The Henry Luce Foundation, with additional funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
We are very happy to congratulate Darren!