NEWXUAR · A New Normal After the Camps? State–kinship Dynamics in Minoritised Communities in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region

Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is one of the most surveilled and restricted areas in the world and has recently been at the centre of intense information wars, geopolitics and propaganda. How has a decade of policing, surveillance, mass incarceration and assimilation by the Chinese state changed social life for Uyghurs, Kazakh, Hui and other minoritised people in the region?This project reveals the current situation and the changes that have occurred since the launch of the People's War on Terror in XUAR/ET in 2014. In order to provide a deep understanding of the changes from a local on-the-ground perspective, we approach it from a kinship perspective, focussing on the interaction between kinship and the state in a number of key areas of daily life. This lets us gauge the on-the-ground effects of government policies, state violence and economic transformations through accessible and not overly sensitive data.Access to the region is still difficult and conventional fieldwork is impossible due to ethical concerns of endangering those we work with. The project therefore utilises remote ethnography and other hybrid methods with particular attention to ethics, safety and data security. NEWXUAR is the first project to centre kinship and also the first to employ a systematically remote-hybrid methodology and to explicitly tackle the epistemological difficulties of the geopolitical tensions around the area and our own positionality in them head on.NEWXUAR will counter political utilisation of the region and further useful solutions. The project will also create a modern theory of kinship and the state in colonial contexts and tests remote ethnographic methodology for contexts with limited access and a high degree of risk. The project will establish a new academic standard in XUAR/ET studies, kinship studies and remote ethnographic methods.