Chinese and Cross-Cultural Health Humanities

Anchor

Prof. LO Ming Tung, Head of Department of Chinese Language and Literature and Director of Centre for Chinese Cultural Heritage

Introduction

This is an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research field that focuses on the relationship between arts, humanities, health, and well-being. The concept of health is studied in relation to (i) language, discourse, and narrative; (ii) literary representations; (iii) philosophy and (applied) ethics; (iv) religion and spirituality; (v) gender studies, and (vi) creative writing and performing arts (e.g. music and visual arts).

Upcoming Event

Chinese and Cross-Cultural Heath Humanities Lecture Series : Why is this Pandemic Unprecedented?

Lecture Series : Music-Neuro-Programming: SEA Meditation for Health and Wellbeing

Music-neuro programming is a process of harnessing the power of music-meditation to reprogram the subconscious mind to achieve health, wellbeing, and life transformation goals. Dr. Koen explains why many of the obstacles to health, wellbeing, and goal-achievement lie in the subconscious mind and function like “bugs” or “viruses” in the “mental software” running on the “operating system” of the subconscious mind. Dr. Koen presents key conceptual models, methods, and select case studies exploring how the SEA Meditation practice can bridge the conscious and subconscious mind to achieve health and wellbeing goals.

Date	Mar 26, 2021 (Fri)
Time	2:30 - 4:00pm
Speaker	Dr. Benjamin Koen (The Department of Music, HKBU)
Registration	https://hkbuhk.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_24EfybcPyv1RKUS

News

New Book: "Building Chinese Bioethics in the Time of COVID-19"

2020年，新冠肺炎病毒在全球爆發，威脅公眾健康、打亂生活節奏、衝擊社會經濟。病毒沒有種族，也沒有國界，人們在共同面對這一瘟疫大挑戰時，健康價值固然重要，與此同時，倫理道德和人類價值如平等、自由、公正等同樣不能忽略。

本書收錄二十多篇，由兩岸三地的學者撰寫的重大議題文章，從基礎倫理、防控倫理、法律倫理、醫療倫理、責任倫理、關懷倫理六個角度，探討如何在大疫當前的困境下，建構中國生命倫理學。書中提出多個引人反思道德傳統、倫理精神和價值取向的問題，如防控措施與個人權利應如何平衡？

Previous Events and Projects

Lecture Series : Why is this Pandemic Unprecedented?

One of the most heard words to describe the COVID-19 pandemics is “unprecedented.” But in fact, it doesn’t even make the top 10 list of fatalities among all the epidemics in human history. Why is this time so different? This talk will look at the changes in our perception that makes this epidemic indeed unprecedented. There is a misconception of medicine due to the increased availability and effectiveness of technology, but scientific knowledge is not really as certain and definitive as the media portrays and usually takes years of research to arrive at a consensus. Globalization and the accessibility of communication and social media makes the situation much more immediate.

Date	25 Jan 2021 (Monday)
Time	2:30 - 4:00pm
Speaker	Prof. Joseph Tham, UNESCO Chair in Bioethics and Human Rights

COVID-19 Vaccine: Hopes, Hypes and Fairness

As the global COVID-19 epidemic continues to take a heavy toll on human lives, public health and the economy, hopes are high that the unprecedented pace of new vaccine development may help bring an end to the epidemic. This talk will be in two parts. The first part takes a critical look at where the hopes lie, the basis of positive expectation, cautions and yet to be resolved questions on the new COVID-19 vaccine(s). The second part considers ethical issues as related to new vaccine development and its allocation when available, focusing on fairness and responsibilities.

Date	1 December 2020 (Tuesday)
Time	2:30 - 4:00pm
Speaker	Dr. Derrick Au, the Director of the Centre for Bioethics at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Chairman of the Bioethics Course Committee of the Faculty of Medicine, CUHK

Is Music Joy ? Retrofitting Ancient Music

Joy seems an unlikely paradigm for music theory, Yet it was fundamental to music theories from different parts of the ancient world. Today, joy is not fundamental to music theory; if anything, much philosophical thought on music veers towards the tragic. This talk considers the relationship between music and joy, and in what sense a theology of joy might help in recovering joy as a music theoretical paradigm today.

Date	12 November 2020 (Thu)
Time	2:30 - 4:10pm
Speaker	Prof. Daniel Chua, Chair Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Music, University of Hong Kong

Individual and Well Being: The Representations of War Trauma in Classical Chinese Poetic Tradition

Funded by Initiation Grant for Faculty Niche Research Areas (FNRA-IG), HKBU (24 months, HK$ 934,968)

Chinese dynastic history alternated between periods of stability and growth and those of civil war, some of which lasted for decades and caused widespread destruction to all levels of society. Poetic accounts about the experiences of war shared many themes with other literary genres – the horrors of death and destruction, the pain of loss and displacement, human vulnerability, and nostalgia of the past – but through lyrical voices and highly stylized language that set them apart from prose accounts. Though the periods of war were intermittent, wartime poetry was a part of a broader continuous poetry tradition where earlier texts and literary conventions played a role in shaping the poetic accounts of war, while wartime poetry, in turn, was an important factor in pivoting new developments in the history of poetry.

Poetry in the Chinese classical tradition, including both shi and ci, has properties that make them unique grounds to explore the interactions between trauma and literary language. The genres give pre-eminence to unite the emotive, the sensory, and the rational dimensions of experience in highly stylized language, mediated by the poetic subject. Thus, Chinese poetry about the experience of war and its aftermaths pushes the limits of literary trauma theory and test its fundamental assumptions.

The current project differs from past scholarship by treating wartime poetry as a genre from the perspective of psychic trauma, which allows us to pursue our inquiry on the cross section between psychoanalytic, literary, and cultural studies down the line of literary historical perspective. We will focus on the poetry from the fall of the Northern Song, the Yuan-Ming transition, and the Taiping Rebellion. In each of these periods, we ask the following questions on the relationship between war, trauma, and literature:

What are the ways in which poetry-writing contribute to psychic healing and regrowth, both individually and on the communal level?
How has the traumatic experience impacted the writing of poetry, and in turn, if traumatic experience is made accessible and communicable through literary language, to what extent and in what ways does the medium affect the representation and transmission of trauma?
What material effect would the choice of poetic genre – along with its set of literary conventions and expectations – have on writing of traumatic experience?
How has the writing of trauma in each of these periods influenced the development of poetry?

「創傷與記憶：中國文學發展的心靈書寫」國際學術研討會

Date	2^nd and 3^rd November 2019 (Sat & Sun)
Time	09:00-18:30
Venue	SWT501

與會學者：盧鳴東教授、陳漢文教授、胡曉明教授、田曉菲教授、寇志明教授、錢南秀教授、卓清芬教授、曹明升教授、汪春泓教授、張玲教授、蔡元豐教授、徐永明教授、林傳濱教授、陳瑞贊教授、鍾志偉教授、張宏生教授、李艷豐教授、章琛教授、呂家慧教授、劉深教授