Monday, Feb 27^th, 2023, 11 am – 12:30 pm

Zoom ID: 945 1031 2161; Passcode: 0227

Guest Speaker: Zhiying Ma, Assistant Professor, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, University of Chicago

Moderator: Mengqi Wang, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Duke Kunshan University

*This is a Cultures and Movements Major Promotion Event, and is jointly sponsored by Office of Undergraduate Studies and Center for the Study of Contemporary China.

Abstract

This talk examines the development of mental health care in China from the perspective of my ethnographic and engaged research. In the market reform era, psychiatric hospitalization has increasingly dominated the landscape of services for people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses, and most inpatients are hospitalized against their will by their families. Drawing on 32 months of fieldwork, this talk first explores how families’ involvement in mental health care is shaped by psychiatric institutions and the state’s recent mental health legal reform. I argue that families’ involvement reflects a growing biopolitical paternalism in China, which constitutes people as subjects of risk management, legitimizes the state’s policy of population management as a form of paternalistic intervention, while displacing actual responsibilities of being paternal onto families and other private agents.

Against this backdrop, community mental health has received increased interests and investments in China over the past decade. The second part of the talk briefly introduces this development and the need for community mental health to center recovery and service users’ voices. I then discuss my ongoing engaged work respond to this need by developing peer support services with stakeholders through a participatory approach. The talk ends with the implications of mental health care arrangements on health justice, as well as the potentials for adapting peer support and participatory methods to other areas of disability rights in China and beyond.

Bio

Zhiying Ma is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, as well as a faculty affiliate of the University’s Center for East Asian Studies and Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist and a scholar of disability studies. Her work in general examines how cultural, politico-economic, and technological factors shape the design and implementation of social policies, and how national policies and global development initiatives in turn impact health in/equity, vulnerability, and rights, with a focus on contemporary China.

Professor Ma holds a joint Ph.D. in Comparative Human Development and Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She received her bachelor degrees in psychology and philosophy from Peking University, China. In 2016-2018, she was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.