China Sajadian

China Sajadian’s research brings together critical agrarian studies, feminist political economy, migration studies, and economic anthropology. Through historically-grounded ethnographic fieldwork, she studies the gendered politics of displacement in the Middle East, with a focus on agricultural life and labor.

Her first book, Debt and Refuge (Stanford University Press, 2026), is an ethnography of Syrian refugees who have long-standing ties to Lebanon as seasonal farmworkers. Based on two years of immersive fieldwork at the Lebanese-Syrian border, the book analyzes why and how countless numbers of these farmworkers-turned-refugees went into debt throughout the Syrian conflict and Lebanon’s devastating financial collapse. In contrast to humanitarian portrayals of refugees as uprooted victims awaiting asylum or return, Sajadian locates their predicaments within a longer history of gendered migration, uneven development, and cross-border familial ties. Linking together the politics of mass displacement, mass indebtedness, and our global food system, the book makes a case for radically rethinking forced migration as an agrarian question of labor and feminist question of social reproduction, as debt at every scale of life governs how people move throughout the world.

Sajadian is a 2025 recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. Before coming to Vassar, she was an Eveillard Postdoctoral Fellow at Smith College. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship, the Max Weber Foundation, the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, the Mellon Committee on Globalization and Social Change, and a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. Her writing has been awarded prizes by the Association for Feminist Anthropology, the American Ethnological Society, the Society for Economic Anthropology, the Syrian Studies Association, the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies, the Koonja Mitchell Memorial Prize in Women’s Studies, and the Bernstein & Byres Prize in agrarian studies.

At Vassar, Sajadian teaches courses about migration and displacement, revolution and war, economic anthropology, anthropological theory, labor, gender, and the Middle East. She is a member of the steering committees for Africana Studies, Migration and Displacement Studies, and International Studies. Alongside her scholarly work, she is also deeply committed to promoting social justice through the arts and has served on the board of the Friends of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin Refugee Camp since 2016.