Hongye Bai och Santiago López Rodríguez Receive Research Grants from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond

Hongye Bai’s project investigates the Mongolian linguistic and cultural activities organized by Mongol intelligentsia groups – including Mongolian speech contests, online poem recitation activities, weekly discussions at Mongolian book clubs, and cultural immersion tours in pastoral regions. China’s ideological transformation from a multi-ethnic nation to a unified Chinese state essentially consisting of one people speaking one language (Mandarin Chinese) has led to a significant shift in ethnic policies in the last few years. The arrival of assimilationist ethnic policies across frontier regions has begun to pose a serious threat to the maintenance of minority languages, cultures and identities, including those of Mongols in Inner Mongolia – an ethnic minority region in northern China. This project contributes to our understanding of indigenous knowledge production process and identity performance in the context of Chinese nation building as well as the shifting state-minority and centre-periphery relations. Read more about Hongye's project here. 

Santiago López Rodríguez’s project will analyse the documents of the political and diplomatic representatives who were in charge of giving the orders and issuing visas and the memoirs and testimonies of those refugees who were forced to embark on a journey through the Pyrenees. While the Iberian Peninsula was one of the best ways to escape Europe during the war, the relationship between the dictatorial regimes in this area and the Holocaust has gone unnoticed. This project aims to analyse the changes in refugee policies carried out by Spain and Portugal during the Second World War and give more insight into the role of the humanitarian organisations in both countries, as well as deepen and give new perspectives on the neutral states’ responses in the context of the Second World War. Read more about Santiago's project here.