Tania Li

I am a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. My research concerns land, labour, capitalism, development, politics and indigeneity with a particular focus on Indonesia. I aim to bring my research into dialogue with scholars in multiple fields (eg geography, planning, law, environmental studies) and with activists and policy makers who are curious about how their interventions work out on the ground.

The books I have written tackle these themes in different ways. They are Malays in Singapore: Culture, Economy and Ideology (1987); Transforming the Indonesian Uplands: Marginality, Power and Production (edited, 1999); The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development and the Practice of Politics (2007); Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia (with Derek Hall and Philip Hirsch) (2011); Land's End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier (2014); and Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia's Oil Palm Zone (with Pujo Semedi, 2021).

Land's End won two book prizes: the senior book award of the American Ethnological Association and the George T. McKahin Prize, Association for Asian Studies. The latter also awarded Honourable Mention for Plantation Life. My books and many of my articles have been translated into Indonesian where they are used in university teaching and public debate.