Culturing Psychotherapy, Transforming Selfhood in Urban China

Professor Li Zhang will talk about selfhood in urban China at the University of Washington.

Broadly speaking, Li Zhang's research concerns the social, political, and cultural repercussions of market reform and socialist transformations in contemporary China. Her earlier work traces the profound reconfigurations of space, power, and social networks within China's "floating population" under late socialism and globalization. Recently, she has completed her second book that examines the social and spatial implications of housing privatization and the making of the new middle classes in urban China. She has also co-edited a volume with Aihwa Ong, which explores how social technologies of privatization and neoliberalism articulate with diverse areas of life and politics in China. Her current new research project explores the "inner revolution" brought by the market transition through examining an emergent psychotherapy and psychological counseling movement in Chinese cities. She is interested in how Western psychological formulations of the person through talk therapy articulate with local cultural notions of a socially embedded self and neoliberal notions of self-management.