The JHI is pleased to announce our 2025-26 Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellows—Zhuoran (Ran) Deng, Hairong Huang and Sanniah Jabeen. They will join us from July 1 for our theme year Dystopia and Trust.
Zhuoran (Ran) Deng
Beyond the Biopolitics of Consent: A Transpacific Aesthetics of Reproductive Futurity
Comparative Literature / Women & Gender Studies / Sexual Diversity Studies
Supervisor: John Paul Ricco, UTM Visual Studies
Born and raised in China and educated in the United States, Ran Deng’s research intersects Asian/Asian American studies, political philosophy, and queer aesthetic theory.
Consent has long been implemented to establish and maintain the relationship between people. However, Deng's project poses a radical question: Do we, or can we, consent to be born? In her dissertation, she investigates the politics of consent in the context of birth, abortion, contraception, sterilization, and population control policies in the transpacific context. Putting the question of life at the center of her analysis, she hopes to explore how an aesthetic critique can expose, intervene in, and reconfigure the limits of consent, and help imagine otherwise impossible ways of inhabiting the world.
Hairong Huang
Swine Revolution: A Sentient History of Untamed Pigs in Maoist China
East Asian Studies
Supervisors: Yue Meng and Yiching Wu, A&S East Asian Studies
Hairong Huang’s interests lie in modern Chinese history, animal and environmental history, body and affect, and science and technology studies. Intrigued by the intersections of animal agriculture and political economy, she is working on a dissertation about the history of pigs in Maoist China, exploring how radical policies, scientific experiments, and everyday practices shaped human-animal relationships during the socialist era.
Hairong’s project elucidates a utopian “swine revolution” and its dystopian betrayal in Maoist China. She examines how the Maoist regime maximized pig productivity with radical policies and technological fantasies to squeeze from pigs a ceaseless supply of capital and resources to accumulate state wealth. However, the socio-ecological burdens of feeding overpopulated pigs brought dystopian outcomes, betraying the regime's socialist goal of ending oppression and scarcity. Her research explores how the “swine revolution” was a speciesist revolution, mirroring capitalist exploitation of animal life rather than promoting a radically different egalitarian program inclusive of animals.
Sanniah Jabeen
Handmade in the Age of Mass (Re)Production: The Many Lives of Ajrak
Art History / South Asian Studies
Supervisor: Kajri Jain, UTM Visual Studies
Sanniah Jabeen’s research examines how digital printing, machine replication, and mass production impact modern and contemporary South Asian arts. She has collaborated with UNESCO on craft conservation, heritage preservation, and public arts engagement projects. Additionally, Sanniah completed curatorial fellowships at the Royal Ontario Museum, Islamic Art and Material Culture Collaborative (IAMCC), The Art Museum at the University of Toronto, and the Lahore Biennale Foundation. Her doctoral research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Canada.
Her dissertation investigates how digital printing, mechanical reproduction, and large-scale production affect traditional South Asian textiles, specifically Pakistan's contemporary crafts. She explores artisan communities' adaptive strategies to shifting economic conditions, evolving craft networks, gender dynamics in textile labor, ethnic symbolism, and contested notions of authenticity within handcrafted traditions. A detailed examination of Ajrak—a block-printed and resist-dyed cotton fabric—contrasts its traditional handmade expressions against commodified, globally marketed fashion variants. Through this interplay emerges a questioning of authenticity and reliance, highlighting underlying anxieties about cultural continuity within modern industrialized contexts and the shifting dynamics of cultural representation.