Inventing the mind: Colonial psychology and minority script reforms, 1950s-1960s

My research explores how studies of the human mind have affected greater state policies concerning the reform of ethnic minorities? languages and scripts in the People?s Republic of China in the 1950s and 60s. After the PRC was founded in 1949, hundreds of psychologists and linguists made their ways into the fringes of the nation and established ?Psychological Committees? next to ?Language and Script Committees.? They engineered new scripts for the minorities and launched large-scale literacy campaigns. Examining the orthographic tumult in Xinjiang when the Arabic script of the Turco-Muslim minorities was first Cyrillized in 1956, then Romanized in 1964, and then re-Arabized again in 1982, my research investigates how psychological research informed the implementation of script reforms.