Dr. Guldana Salimjan wins research fellowship from American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and Luce Foundation

By Casey McCarthy

Dr. Guldana Salimjan has won a 2022-2023 Early Career Fellowship in China Studies from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Henry Luce Foundation. The highly-competitive fellowship is provided to a select group of approximately twelve junior faculty members from across North America each year. The award recognizes Dr. Salimjan’s interdisciplinary research focused on Kazakh land epistemology, gendered memory, and settler colonial politics in China.

The research fellowship will support Dr. Salimjan to complete a scholarly book titled State of Dispossession: Voice of Belonging and the Colonial Politics of Land in Pastoral Xinjiang. In State of Dispossession, Dr. Salimjan will draw parallels between Kazakh disenfranchisement caused by Chinese frontier development and the seizing of land for environmental initiatives, and similar “green grabs,” experienced by Indigenous communities around the world. Through this examination, Dr. Salimjan's book will generate questions about green colonialism and environmental justice, as well as reconsiderations of Uyghur and Kazakh relations to the land as Indigenous knowledge practices.

Dr. Guldana Salimjan is currently the Ruth Wynn Woodward Junior Chair of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Department at Simon Fraser University. This prestigious award from the Luce/ACLS Program in China Studies represents the opening of the next chapter for Dr. Salimjan, as she concludes her position with Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies this summer.