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 is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at UTSC and the Department for the Study of Religion, St George, University of Toronto.
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, and oral history methods to examine how developmentalism, settler colonialism, and state violence have shaped the social and ecological landscapes of China's northwestern borderland. Engaging with the historical legacies of the People’s Republic of China’s socialist nation-building projects, she investigates how racialized and gendered governance has operated through land reclamation, ecological restoration, and security infrastructures.
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 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 has been published in a collected volume Xinjiang Year Zero (Australian National University Press) and outlets such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Funambulist, and Lausan.
Dr. Salimjan holds a PhD in Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice from the University of British Columbia. She has held fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS China Studies Program, and previously served as the Ruth Wynn Woodward Junior Chair in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University.