On October 7–8, 2021, The OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts (CHRA) co-organized a virtual workshop on the ethics of sharing images from the Uyghur region (in present-day northwest China) with photographer and artist Lisa Ross. CHRA sponsored the workshop, providing funding and logistical support as part of its annual programming. The workshop took place at a time of tremendous violence against individuals in this region, and with the very existence of Indigenous cultures in northwest China facing a heightened precarity.
Spanning two days, the workshop invited participants to discuss and share the valuable image archives created during the past three decades and made up of photographs from across the Uyghur region. These include private photo archives, images rendered and collected for investigatory purposes, and visual materials from advocacy campaigns. The workshop brought together twenty participants to think together about how to deal with the rich archive of visual material of, or by Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyzs and members of other Indigenous groups from the territory the Chinese government formally defines as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Province. Participants included scholars, artists, and writers who have expertise in the Uyghur region, visual culture, and/or human rights, including five participants from the Uyghur diaspora.
Collectively, participants considered how these archives can possibly be brought together on a larger open source platform, while accounting for the high stakes of such a project, particularly in terms of the imperatives of protecting individuals. Each participant shared one image or set of images, and a narrative stating the ethical stakes of the selected image(s). The workshop concluded with the group’s consensus to contextualize and categorize images, developing a risk assessment apparatus and compiling guidelines from human rights organizations when showing images. After holding the two-day workshop, the group broadly agreed on two actionable goals: to create a list for ethical concerns to address when publishing images from the Uyghur region, and to initiate a peer review process for such images to discuss and evaluate the publication of such images in light of considering potential harms or values.
This workshop was open to students at CHRA as well as invited faculty and students from across the Open Society University Network.
