Office: MC 208 C
Phone: 902-457-6504
Email: ian.tian@msvu.ca
Ian Liujia Tian (PhD, University of Toronto) is an Assistant Professor of Global Equity Studies. Their research focuses broadly on queer/trans of color critique, queer Asian studies, queer/feminist science and technology, and Asian Canadian studies. They are particularly interested in queer/trans pleasure and survival produced in the interstices of transnational capitalism in East/Southeast Asia and its diasporas. Those interests extend to the technological and infrastructural forms that undergird these economies and shape racial, gender, and sexual subjectivities.
Dr. Tian is currently working on their first monograph entitled Pleasure Production: Surviving Love and Labour in China’s Global Fast Fashion, an ethnography of migrant, gender and sexual non-conforming garment factory workers’ cruising practices. The book offers a new lens to elucidate how embodied sensations and intimate relations, such as pleasure, entangle with global capitalism’ differences-making at the intersection of class, space, urban/rural differences, gender, and sexuality.
Outside of academia, Ian is active in racialized queer community and migrant workers organising, which has yield to a co-edited book Asian Canada is Burning. Further, they are passionate about ballroom culture in China and in East/Southeast Asia, which is the basis of their second book project, tentatively entitled Sinophone Renditions.
SELECTED ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS:
Books and Edited Volumes:
Pleasure Production: Surviving Love and Labour in China’s Global Fast Fashion (Manuscript in Preparation).
2025 Asian Canada is Burning: theories, methods, pedagogies, and praxes. Brill. With Torres, R. and Chau, Coly.
Peer-reviewed Articles:
2024 “What’s Left of China?’’ Dialogues in Human Geography, Online First.
2023 ‘‘Being Too Asian: Migrant Student Time and Resistance within the Canadian University.’’ TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 47: 119-131.
2023 ‘‘Unpacking racism during COVID-19: narratives from racialized Canadian gay, bisexual, and queer men.’’ Int J Equity Health 22, with Grey, C., Skakoon-Sparling, S. et al.
2023 ‘‘Divine Queer Sorrow, or Beyond Mythical Reparation.’’ TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 46: 260-279.
2022 ‘‘Critical Socialist Feminism in China: xingbie (gender), the State and Community-based Socialism.’’ Rethinking Marxism 34, no.4: 519-537.
2021 ‘‘Space of Feminist Hope: Notes from two acts.’’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
2021 ‘‘On Rescuable and Expendable Life: bioavailability, surplus time, and the queer politics of reproduction.’’ Journal of Canadian Studies 54, no.2-3: 483-507.
2020 ‘‘Perverse Politics, Postsocialist Radicality: Queer Marxism in China.’’ QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 7, no.2: 48-68.
2019 ‘‘Graduated In/visibility: reflections on Ku’er activism in (post)socialist China.’’ QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 6, no.3: 56-75.
Peer-reviewed Chapters:
2025 “Infrastructure and/as Mediation: China 2098’s Affective Politics.” In Techno-Orientalism Vol II, edited by David Roh, Greta Nui, Betsy Huang and Christopher Fan. Rutgers University Press (forthcoming July 2025).
2024 “Remaindered Commons: Notes towards post-socialist futures.” In Spatial futures: Difference and the Post-Anthropocene, edited by Eaves LaToya, Heidi Nast, and Alex Papadopoulos. London: Palgrave.
SELECTED PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIPS:
2022 “Will you take on the challenge? Combatting racism in our communities will require all our efforts.” Engage, with Daniel Grace and Cornel Gray.
2022 “Logistics Workers’ Strikes and Social Reproduction in China.” Midnight Sun.
2021 “Socialism from the Grassroots: new directions of Leftist Organizing in post-socialist China.” Upping the Anti 22: 93-110. Republished by Lausan
2020 “Vampiric Affect: The Afterlife of a Metaphor in a Global Pandemic.” Social Text Online.