Fields of Study
- Anthropology of Religion
- Religion, Culture & Politics
Areas of Interest
- Social memory
- Oral history and oral tradition
- Gender and sexuality
- Ritual and performance
- Settler colonialism
- Environmental justice
- Central/Inner Asia and China
Biography
Guldana Salimjan’s research lies at the intersections of memory, colonialism, environment, and Indigenous and settler knowledge production. Her current book project, State of Dispossession: Politics of Land and Memory on the Sino-Kazakh Borderland, draws on archival, ethnographic, oral history, and digital methods to examine how socialist collectivization, border control, forced development, and green colonialism produced a structure that dispossessed Kazakhs of their pasturelands and brought about particular forms of environmental violence in Central Asia. The book argues that Chinese nation-state-building is contingent on settler colonialism along its northwestern borderland. As a result, traditionally pastoral, nomadic peoples in the region have been severed from their lands, internally displaced and exiled across the border. This project has been supported by fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS China Studies Program.
Dr. Salimjan is interested in ways marginalized communities endure colonialism by engaging embodied, creative practices of place-making and history-making. Her writing highlights Kazakh agency involved in telling their silenced histories, commemorating ancestral spirits, resisting the secularizing effects of colonial modernity, and reclaiming lineages and territories. Her journal articles on these topics have been published in Inner Asia, Human Ecology, Asian Ethnicity, and Central Asian Survey. Her public scholarship about settler colonial violence, gender, and environment have been published in outlets such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Funambulist, and Lausan. Additionally, Dr. Salimjan is developing a digital humanities project that documents land dispossession, the weaponization of citizenship, and the colonial border regime between China and Central Asian states.
Dr. Salimjan holds a PhD in Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice from the University of British Columbia, and previously served as the Ruth Wynn Woodward Junior Chair in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University.
Selected Journal Articles
2023. “Ecotourism as Racial Capitalism.” Inner Asia, 25(1), 91-110.
2021. “Naturalized Violence: Affective Politics of China’s Ecological Civilization.” Human Ecology, 49(1), 59–68.
2021. “Mapping Loss, Remembering Ancestors: Genealogical Narratives of Kazakhs in China.” Asian Ethnicity, 22(1), 105–120.
2017. “Debating Gender and Kazakhness: Memory and Voice in Poetic Duel Aytis between China and Kazakhstan.” Central Asian Survey. 36(2), 263–280.
Book Chapters
2022. “Blood Lineage”, “Recruiting Loyal Stabilisers: On the Banality of Carceral Colonialism in Xinjiang,” “Camp Land: Settler Ecotourism and Kazakh Dispossession.” Xinjiang Year Zero, edited by Darren Byler, Ivan Franceschini, Nicholas Loubere. Australian National University Press.
2020. “Lament in an Affluent Era: Cultural Politics of Kazakh Life Cycle Songs.” In Creating Culture in (Post)Socialist Central Asia, edited by Ali Igmen, Ananda Reed, and Eva-Marie Dubuisson. Palgrave MacMillan.