Date: Monday, September 15, 2025

Time: 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM

Location: LIB1113

Speaker: Dr. Zhiying Ma, Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice

Abstract

This talk introduces my new book, Between Families and Institutions: Mental Health and Biopolitical Paternalism in Contemporary China (Duke University Press, 2025), which examines how psychiatry, law, and policy intersect to shape mental health governance and family practices in China. Drawing on over 30 months of ethnographic research, the book develops the concept of “biopolitical paternalism” to analyze how state power to manage perceived behavioral risks is legitimized as care yet structurally displaced onto families, producing new forms of vulnerability and contestation. It illuminates how intimate relations both reinforce and unsettle institutional logics, and why families remain central to the politics of health and citizenship in China and beyond.

Building on this work, I will also briefly discuss my current project on developing peer support services with people with serious mental illnesses in China. Using community-based participatory research, this initiative trains and employs peer supporters as paraprofessionals, challenging paternalistic service structures while fostering new forms of identity and solidarity. Together, these projects highlight the tensions and possibilities at the heart of mental health governance: between control and care, family and institution, expertise and lived experience. They also suggest how participatory practices can open pathways toward more just, inclusive, and sustainable forms of community mental health.

Bio

Dr. 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, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and Global Studies Program. She holds a joint Ph.D. in Comparative Human Development and Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She received her bachelor’s degrees in psychology and philosophy from Peking University, China. In 2016-2018, she was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Junior Fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.