Joanne Smith Finley

Sinologist, anthropologist and political scientist specializing in Uyghur Studies, she is a Reader in Chinese Studies at Newcastle University in the UK. She has published on the identity evolution of Uyghurs in Xianjiang, northeast China, and in the diaspora, as well as their resistance strategies. She is the author of The Art of Symbolic Resistance: Uyghur Identities and Uyghur-Han Relations in Contemporary Xinjiang (Brill Academic Publishing, 2013), and has co-edited books for Routledge, among other publications. She has also researched the political and persecution measures inflicted by the country as state terrorism, the consequences of the protection of Islam, and the cultural genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Following this line, her latest publication is «Tabula rasa Han settler colonialism and frontier genocide in "re-educated" Xinjiang» (HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2022). She is an expert witness on Uyghur asylum cases in the UK, Europe, USA and Canada, and advises various organizations, government departments and think tanks. She collaborates with international media such as Chinafile magazine and Society+Space, with investigative journalists, documentary filmmakers and radio and television broadcasters.