Ildiko Beller-Hann receives funding from Velux
Ildiko Beller-Hann, associate professor at the Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies receives funding for the collective project "Between homogenization and fragmentation: textual practices as strategies of integration and identity maintenance among the Uyghurs of Xinjiang" from the Velux foundation.
The project is is an interdisciplinary research project in history, anthropology and literature about how the Uighurs, the Turkish-speaking Muslims in the Xinjiang region of western China, have used textual strategies to create and maintain their identity.
The texts are written by various elite groups among the Uighurs with the aim of asserting themselves as an independent ethno-religious group in the 20th and 21st century in relation to China. The Uighurs are officially recognized by the Chinese state, but the state is pushing to integrate the Uighurs into Chinese society.
The team of four researchers at the Faculty of Humanities is using three different texts - one from Uighur local history, one from fiction and one from local ethnography recorded in the period from 1980 to the 2010s. They will furthermore use a fourth text consisting of 150 manuscripts from Islamic courts from 1912 to 1949.
The project has received DKK 4,775,283 from the Velux Foundation.