Media

HKU weekly notice (from June 3 to June 8, 2013)

31 May 2013

 

Seminar: Community-based Interventions for Late-life Depression in China

Speaker:

Dr. Lydia LI, Associate Professor of Social Work
School of Social Work, University of Michigan, USA

Depression is prevalent but under-recognized and under-treated in older adults worldwide. The problem is more serious in China due to the scarcity of mental health services and stigma associated with using these services. This talk will describe three intervention projects to test the feasibility and effectiveness of collaborative depression care at the neighborhood level in China. The first project focused on providing depression treatment and management in primary care clinics in urban China. The second aimed to enable workers of community centers to educate their residents about late-life depression, perform depression screening and support at risk older adults to receive treatment. The third project targets rural elders with comorbid depression and hypertension. It integrates the care provided by village doctors with that delivered by a lay worker from the village’s Aging Association, supervised by a psychiatrist consultant. Given the trend of population aging in China, it is imperative to develop new approaches to deliver mental health services to older persons. Collaborative depression care model that integrates primary care and neighborhood organizations holds promise and is consistent with the administrative and cultural context of China.

Dr Lydia Li’s research areas include social support in later life, stress and adaptation of family caregivers, dynamics of formal and informal care, health trajectories of home care elders, and late-life depression and suicide. She has a keen interest in cross-cultural research. Her most recent work involves community-based interventions for late-life depression in China.

Date: June 3, 2013 (Monday)

Time: 12:30pm to 2pm

Venue: Room 532, 5/F, Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Language: English

Registration required. For enquiries, please contact Ms Ariel Poon by email at arielpoon@socwork.hku.hk or by phone at 3917 2099.

Lost in China? Law, Culture and Identity in Post-1997 Hong Kong

Speaker:

Professor Carol Jones, Professor, Department of Law, Social Sciences & Communications, University of Wolverhampton.

Pre- and post-handover, Hong Kong constructed a mondo juralis, a ’walled space of legality’ around itself to preserve its freedoms, the rule of law and its ‘way of life’. However, this wall was always just one step away from implosion and since 1997 has been breached in significant ways, raising fears that the ‘looming disorderliness’ of mainland China will infiltrate Hong Kong’s social and political life. The physical border with the mainland has become more porous, a zone of transgression and pleasure but also of crime, contamination, danger and disappearance.

With its traditional defences now weakened, and in the face of the mainland’s attempts to re-assimilate the SAR, Hong Kong faces the prospect of becoming ‘lost in China’. But new ‘symbolic’ boundaries are being created in an upsurge of what Cohen calls ‘boundary-maintaining practices’ (A.P. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community.1985). Communities are more inclined, Cohen argues, to reassert their boundaries symbolically when under pressure to modify their structural forms to comply with those elsewhere. As the structural bases of boundary become blurred, so the symbolic bases are strengthened.

This presentation looks at how the ‘mainlandisation’ of Hong Kong law, culture and identity has proceeded since 1997, but also at how the process of re-colonisation is being resisted as Hong Kongers construct new symbolic barriers to prevent their society becoming ‘lost in China’.

Date: June 3, 2013 (Monday)

Time: 3:30pm to 5pm

Venue: Rm 929, Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Language: English

For enquiries, please contact Ms Connie Ko by email at connieko@hku.hk or by phone at 39172309.

Hong Kong’s ‘State of Exception’: The Operation of Emergency Regulations 1949-1971.

Speaker:

Professor Carol Jones, Professor, Department of Law, Social Sciences & Communications, University of Wolverhampton.

In his 2005 book, State of Exception, Agamben discusses how, during a political crisis such as a state of emergency, state of siege or civil war, the state confers on the executive the power to issue decrees having the force of law, thereby suspending the normal constitutional and legal order. Such a ‘state of exception’ is an ambiguous ‘no-man’s land’ between public law and political fact, between juridical order and life. This ‘state of exception’ is supposed to be a time of exceptional and imminent danger or crisis. When the crisis is over, the normal legal and constitutional order should be resumed.

This presentation examines the years 1949-1971 when Hong Kong appears to have been in a perpetual ‘state of exception’. During these years, the government repeatedly suspended ordinary law, employing extensive powers under the Emergency Regulations to censor the media, impose curfews, banish subversives and detain people without trial. Over a prolonged period of time, this ‘piling up’ of such powers turned ‘emergency’ into ‘normalcy’ and made repression ‘ordinary’. The paper looks how the colonial administration legitimised this prolonged departure from the founding myth of Hong Kong as a society based on ‘British Rule of Law’, and ask what, if anything, this episode tells us about the ‘state of exception’.

Date: June 5, 2013 (Wednesday)

Time: 3:30pm to 5pm

Venue: Rm 929, Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Language: English

For enquiries, please contact Ms Connie Ko by email at connieko@hku.hk or by phone at 39172309.

Mission: Christian Agency and the Making of a Chinese Merchant Diaspora

Speaker:
Dr. Nanlai Cao
Research Assistant Professor
Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong

This study reports some findings from my RGC-funded project on transnational Christian networks originating in rural Wenzhou, Southeast China, and linking China to Europe. It recounts the dual process of how multidirectional international business migration contributes to the global spread of a highly indigenized Chinese Christianity and how transnational Chinese draw on Christian agency to recreate a territorial culture in diaspora. Specifically, I show how a group of Wenzhou migrants, mainly as merchants and traders, while being haunted by memories and realities of migrant illegality, have managed to bring their version of Christianity along with a household-based economy from their rural hometown to Paris, France, and established an institutional niche for their diasporic and religious practices. The ethnographic study examines structural convergences between their religious and business activities based on shared histories of marginalization and subjugation in the context of state-produced legality, and suggests that it is through the constant (re)negotiation of boundaries between market and non-market relations that members of this Chinese merchant diaspora are able to maintain their premodern communal solidarity and moral legitimacy in the global market economy.

Nanlai Cao received a PhD in Anthropology from The Australian National University in 2008. He is the author of Constructing China’s Jerusalem: Christians, Power, and Place in Contemporary Wenzhou (Stanford University Press, c2011) and coeditor of Reconstituting Boundaries and Connectivity: Religion and Mobility in a Globalizing Asia (Special issue of The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 1/2013).

Date: June 6, 2013 (Thursday)

Time: 4pm to 5:30pm

Venue: Room 201, 2/F, May Hall, HKU

Language: English

For enquiries, please contact Ms Yvonne Chan by email at ihss@hku.hk

Commit to Act, Commit to Change: Walk the Mile with Survivors of Sexual Abuse

Recent reports reveal that incidents of sexual harassment and violence are on the rise. Moreover, increasingly vulnerable populations are being targeted for such abuse Despite these occurrences, such abuses are seldom reported. Where complaints are lodged, most victims are likely to withdraw the complaint, from the process of giving evidence and sometimes, even from support groups they join to seek solace. For the few that remain on course to seek justice, the system fails them with the outcomes being less than satisfactory in terms of offering closure, protection, and justice. This trend is suggestive of the critical gaps in Hong Kong’s efforts to tackle such abuse.

This year’s Spring Workshop brings together experts from multiple stakeholder groups to examine the realities and challenges of prevention, protection and punishment of these offences in a range of contexts, including schools, the workplace, and homes.

Date: June 8, 2013 (Saturday)

Time: 9:30am - 1:30pm

Venue: A901, Cheng Yu Tung Tower, HKU

For registration, please send email to Ms Flora Leung at fkleung@hku.hk. For enquiries, please contact Ms Leung by email by phone at 3917 2941.

Education Seminar Series (9) ─ “Between Free Education and Private Tutoring: Dilemmas and Choices for Parents”

Speaker: Professor Mark Bray and Dr Ora Kwo, Faculty of Education, HKU

The seminar, in Cantonese and English, will include discussions on:

• What are the driving forces for payment beyond free education?

• What is best for my child?

• What are the opportunities for partnership?

Date: June 8, 2013, Saturday
Time: 2:30pm
Venue: Rayson Huang Theatre, HKU

Languages: Cantonese and English

For enquiries, please call: 2859 2529 or contact Ms Connie Sze by email at eduert@hku.hk