Guldana Salimjan

What China Studies Scholars Can Do about the Xinjiang Crisis

Guldana Salimjan
In 2019, at a dinner conversation with several established China scholars, I mentioned that it is dangerous for me to return to China and do further research because of the dire situation in Xinjiang. A professor from China was puzzled, ‘Why is that? I go back to my field site every year!’ I sighed but quickly explained to her, ‘Because right now the government has campaigns targeting Turkic Muslim people, and I am from one of these communities.’...
EnglishOctober 2021Politics4 min read
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Guldana Salimjan

Guldana Salimjan is the Ruth Wynn Woodward Junior Chair at the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies department at Simon Fraser University. She is the co-director of the Xinjiang Documentation Project at the University of British Columbia, and the founder of the media art project Camp Album. She also writes under the pen name as Yi Xiaocuo. Her research has been published in the journal Central Asia Survey, Asian Ethnicity, Human Ecology, and Chinoiresie – Made in China. She has contributed a book chapter in Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist Central Asia, and the volume Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi.