Joanne Smith Finley

Joanne Smith Finley is a Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies in the School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University, U.K. Her research interests include the (trans)formation, hybridization, and globalization of identities among Uighurs in Xinjiang, China; strategies of symbolic resistance in Xinjiang (including alternative representations in Uighur popular music); the gendering of ethno-politics in Xinjiang; and gender in Xinjiang and the Uighur diaspora in the context of Islamic revival. She is the author of the monograph The Art of Symbolic Resistance: Uyghur Identities and Uyghur-Han Relations in Contemporary Xinjiang (Brill Academic Publishing, 2013). It is an ethnographic study of evolving Uighur identities and ethnic relations over a period of 20 years, from the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union through the 1997 Ghulja disturbances and the 2009 Urumqi riots to 2011. Smith Finley is co-editor of two volumes: Situating the Uyghurs between China and Central Asia (Ashgate, 2007) and Language, Education and Uyghur Identity in Urban Xinjiang (Routledge, 2015), and she is guest editor of a forthcoming Special Issue (2019) for Central Asian Survey, titled: “Securitization, Insecurity and Conflict in Contemporary Xinjiang.”