ROUNDTABLE The Uyghur “Re-education” Camps: What is Happening and What Can Be Done?

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ROUNDTABLE The Uyghur “Re-education” Camps: What is Happening and What Can Be Done? Mon., Feb. 18 5:00-6:30pm Fine Arts Auditorium (FA015) Indiana University-Bloomington campus In mid-2017, news began circulating about a system of extrajudicial “re-education” camps springing up across China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Nearly two years later, thanks to nonstop research and reporting by academics, journalists, and advocacy groups, China has begun responding to international criticism of the situation. After long denying the existence of the camps, in which experts estimate up to a million people are being held, in 2018 the Chinese authorities began a propaganda campaign to portray them as vocational training centers that cure “willing” participants of religious extremism. Experts outside China, however, see the camps as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide orchestrated at the highest levels of the Party-state. This 90-minute roundtable will combine academic and advocacy approaches in order to better understand the scope and scale of this ongoing crisis. Roundtable participants will combine discussion of recent developments with suggestions for concrete actions that members of the IU and Bloomington communities can take in response. The final half hour of the event will be devoted to Q&A between the audience and discussants. Moderator: Gardner Bovingdon, Associate Professor, Indiana University Discussants: Nury Turkel, Chairman of the Board, Uyghur Human Rights Project Louisa Greve, Director for External Affairs, Uyghur Human Rights Project Sean Roberts, Associate Professor, George Washington University Elise Anderson, Ph.D. Candidate, Indiana University ***** EVENT SPONSORS Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center Islamic Studies Program Institute for Advanced Study Center for the Study of Global Change and several anonymous donors