In development.
Course Concept: Xinjiang is a made place, the expression of complex social relationships that have yielded what is today a region of the People’s Republic of China, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. This course is about the people, peoples, and polities, as well as the ecological and environmental factors, that have turned the space that Xinjiang occupies into the place of Xinjiang today.
The course design is modular, meaning you can follow it from start to finish or you can pick units and look at moments in an ongoing historical process; or you can pick and dig deeper into specific places that the process yields, whether the early gravesites of the Tarim Basin, or something more recent. Units address key archaeological sites, explore histories of excavation, and explain how the on-going “unearthing” of Xinjiang makes it one of the most complex places in the world today.
The course is not designed to provoke, but history and archaeology are inherently provocative. The course design recognizes and addresses the intellectual and pedagogical challenges of provocation and controversy in the study of the past in general and of Xinjiang in particular. The overriding objective is to develop new ways of addressing, and learning how to communicate effectively about, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Special thanks to the Luce Foundation grants, “Port City Environments in Global Asia” (2018-2021) and its successor “Port City Environments in Global Asia: Research and Pedagogies for Redesigning Studies of Asia” (2021-2024), which support research and curriculum development on Asia at and among the three portal campuses of NYU’s Global Network: NYU, NYU Abu Dhabi, and NYU Shanghai. Xinjiang is not a port city in the strict sense of the term, but it is portal in a more expansive sense, both historically (as crossroads of Eurasia), and presently (in the context of China’s Belt and Road Initiative), and as framework for learning.