Dr. Guldana Salimjan is an Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Chinese Research (CCR), the Institute of Asian Research at UBC’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. Dr. Guldana Salimjan is the Ruth Wynn Woodward Junior Chair of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Department at SFU. Guldana completed her PhD at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia in 2018. She conducts interdisciplinary research with a focus on ethnicity, nationalism, gender, place, memory, and belonging in Chinese Central Asia. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on ethnic and gender politics in China, history and memories in Global Asia, and feminist research methods.

Her current book project focuses on the intertwined relations between gender, memory, and history under precarious political processes. Based on ethnographic analyses of Northern Xinjiang, China, Guldana tells a story of several generations of Kazakh women’s struggles against the backdrop of Mao era socialist revolution and contemporary ethnic politics in China. Check out her website.

Dr. Salimjan is also co-directing the Xinjiang Documentation Project with Dr. Timothy Cheek at UBC School of Public Policy and Global Affairs which systematically documents the ongoing mass incarceration of Turkic Muslims.