China Sajadian

Student Fellow

China Sajadian is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation is an ethnography of agricultural labor, circuits of debt, and gendered relations of hierarchy and interdependency among Syrian refugee-farmworkers in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. She situates her contemporary analysis within histories of migration from Northeastern Syria and the historical political economy of agrarian transformation in the region. She holds a BA in Government from Smith College and an MA in Anthropology from Columbia University. Her research has been awarded grants by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Orient-Institut Beirut, the Committee on Globalization and Social Change, and the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She has taught courses on the anthropology of religion, Middle East studies, and introductory anthropology at Brooklyn College.

Participating Years

2020–2021

The Agrarian Question Today

In the context of what appears to be inexorable urbanization, it is just as clear that agrarian questions are deeply enmeshed in the political, social, economic, and cultural challenges of contemporary existence. How have newer regimes of capital, particularly those associated with agri-business and food conglomerates, both formed and fractured agricultural communities?