Ben Mauk, Journalist, Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting Grantee

Johanna Ransmeier, Associate Professor of History and the College, University of Chicago

One duty of journalism is to hold powerful actors to account by bearing witness to their mistreatment of vulnerable populations. Firsthand eyewitness testimony is a special form of evidence that can be brought to bear on these efforts. Eyewitness accounts are inherently limited -- accounts are subjective, memories are fallible -- but are also uniquely powerful in their immediacy and the sense of lived experience they can impart. In this presentation, Ben Mauk will discuss the value of eyewitness accounts of human rights atrocities in Xinjiang, China, and the process of using those accounts to expose the hidden mass internment drive of minority Chinese citizens. He will discuss his own journalistic projects on Xinjiang for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, the London Review of Books, and other publications, which have included magazine writing, oral history, interactive media, and an animated virtual reality documentary. He will also discuss the use of misinformation and propaganda to discredit independent journalism about Xinjiang and the importance of narrative journalism as one kind of evidence to counter state narratives.   University of Chicago Department of History Professor, Johanna Ransmeier, will serve as Discussant.  This virtual webinar is part of the 2022 University of Chicago Summer Institute for Educators (SIE): The Global Rise of Disinformation in Times of Conflict and is co-sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies, the University of Chicago Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies, and the University of Chicago Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and presented in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. It is made possible through generous support from Title VI National Resource Center Grants from the U.S. Department of Education and the Global Voices Program at International House.