Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
Panic!: The Silk Road of Pop
- Thursday, January 30, 2025 / 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM (PST)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 2K digital projection (54 minutes)
- With Sameer Farooq (director) and Rayhan Asat (human rights advocate)
Along the ancient Silk Road, music has become one of the hottest commodities of the twenty-first century. In Xinjiang, on the distant northwest edge of China and in the heart of central Asia, music has permeated every corner of the vast province. Yet around the music lies a troubling reality: the region’s Uyghur Muslims are watching their culture dwindle as they contend with growing Han Chinese settlement.
The Silk Road of Pop follows Ay, a young music fan, as she takes the viewer on a tour of the underground Xinjiang music scene. Spontaneous and reflective, Ay shares the challenges she faces as a young Uyghur Muslim woman in China. Doubtful about her life choices and curious about the world beyond Xinjiang’s borders, she turns to music for answers. Featuring traditional musicians, hip-hop crews, rock stars, and dynamic music fans, The Silk Road of Pop taps into the rhythmical zeitgeist of what it means to be young and Uyghur in China, showing how music becomes a liberating element for a minority trying to assert its identity within a repressive environment.
This special event will feature a screening of The Silk Road of Pop, followed by a brief recorded Zoom conversation with human rights advocate Rayhan Asat that provides an update on the situation in the region since the film’s production. Filmmaker Sameer Farooq will then join moderator Jia-Ching Chen (Global Studies, UCSB) for a live post-screening discussion.
This event is free but a reservation is recommended in order to guarantee a seat.
Biographies
Human rights advocate Rayhan Asat
Rayhan Asat is a senior legal and policy advisor and the China project lead at the Atlantic Council Strategic Litigation Project. She is an internationally recognized human rights lawyer, international law scholar, and advocate of Uyghur heritage. She works closely with civil society, diplomats, lawmakers, and businesses to address human rights concerns, especially the atrocities in Xinjiang and has testified before the Canadian House of Commons, European parliaments, the UK House of Commons, the Lithuanian Parliament, and the US Congress. She has written for prominent publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, The Hill, and more. In October 2022, Rayhan was honored in Vox’s inaugural FuturePerfect50, a list of fifty visionary agents of change who are working to build a more positive future.
Filmmaker Sameer Farooq
Sameer Farooq is a Toronto-based artist of Pakistani and Ugandan Indian descent. With a versatile approach that shifts between photography, documentary film, sculpture, and anthropological methods, he investigates strategies of representation to expand the ways through which museums have looked at the past. He works to redress the role of exhibition and collection-based practices by building community-based models of knowledge production. Farooq has held exhibitions at institutions around the world, including the Toronto Biennial of Art, Venice Architecture Biennale, Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, Fonderie Darling in Montréal, and more. Reviews dedicated to his work have been published by Art Forum, The Art Newspaper, Canadian Art, The Washington Post, BBC Culture, Hyperallergic, and Artnet.
Moderator Jia-Ching Chen (Global Studies, UCSB)
Jia-Ching Chen is an urban, development, and environmental studies researcher and Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Currently, his interests are in China’s role in shaping the global green economy and the spread of Chinese planning expertise through its international development activities. He also has professional experience in social movements, organized labor, participatory planning and architecture. He holds a professional Master of City Planning (MCP) degree from UC Berkeley and is an Environmental Fellow of the Robert & Patricia Switzer Foundation. Dr. Chen received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in City & Regional Planning with a designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies and outside fields in Geography and Anthropology. Before joining UCSB, Dr. Chen was Assistant Professor of Environmental Governance and Urban Systems in the Department of Geography at the Pennsylvania State University.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.
CWC Presents: Panic!
The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2024-25 feature series Panic! explores the complex relationship between media, an anxious public, and the turbulent currents of social, cultural, and moral panic. The series will examine how such panics have appeared on screen over the decades, but also consider how the screen itself—as technology, as gathering space, and as a site of fantasy and desire—becomes the object of reactionary backlash. Panic! will be a yearlong showcase of the films, discourses, and cultural practices that have tested the limits of public acceptability, and that have much to teach us about the cycles of panic that define our own political moment.
CWC Docs
The Carsey-Wolf Center is committed to screening documentaries from across the world that engage with contemporary and historical issues, especially regarding social justice and environmental concerns. Documentaries allow filmmakers to address pressing issues and frame the critical debates of our time.
CWC Global
Media are global by nature; they express culture just as much as they transcend borders. The CWC Global series is dedicated to showcasing media from around the world. This series features screenings and events that place UCSB in conversation with international media makers and global contexts across our deeply connected world.