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MH Conversations and Connections Series – Lunchtime Seminar
Title: Disease as Metaphor in Sinomedical Film, Literature, and Culture
Date: 16 October 2025 (Thursday)
Time: 12:30 – 1:45 pm HKT
Venue: 3SR-SR3 = Seminar Room 3 (Room 402), 4/F, HKUMed Academic Building, 3 Sassoon Road, Pokfulam
Registration Link: Click Here
Abstract:
Illness moves between the visible and the invisible like a shadow of the body, a figure in a story, a sign of something larger than itself. This conversation brings together award-winning sci-fi author Stanley Chen Qiufan, medical doctor Professor Emmanuel Cheung, and medical anthropologist Professor Alex Gearin to reflect on the symbolic meanings of disease in Chinese cultural worlds. We will look at sinomedical film and literature to explore how disease becomes a metaphor that gives form to experiences of suffering and healing as well as to questions of memory, meaning, society, and collective existence. The discussion will explore how metaphors of illness continue to influence the ways bodies and societies are imagined and cared for.
Speakers:
Mr Stanley Chen
Sci-fi writer/ Assistant Professor, School of Arts and Social Sciences, HKMU
Chen Qiufan (a.k.a. Stanley Chan) is an award-winning Chinese speculative fiction author, translator, creative producer, and curator. He is now the assistant professor of School of Art & Social Sciences of HKMU, serving as the deputy president of Chinese Writers Association Science Fiction Committee, Berggruen Institute Fellow, Visiting Scholar at Yale University MacMillan Center. His works include the novel Waste Tide and, co-authored with Dr Kai-Fu Lee, the book AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future.
Prof Emmanuel Cheung
ICU physician/ Clinical Assistant Professor of Practice, Critical Care Medicine Unit, HKUMed
As an intensive care physician, Emmanuel also has a keen interest in medical ethics and the humanities. He currently wears several professional hats, serving as a Clinical Assistant Professor of Practice at the Critical Care Medicine Unit, HKUMed, an Honorary Specialist at the Adult Intensive Care Unit of Queen Mary Hospital, and a Research Fellow at The University of Hong Kong’s Centre for Medical Ethics and Law. His academic pursuits focus on post-intensive care syndrome, end-of-life care, and bioethics education. He juggles the worlds of clinical medicine and the humanities in his quest to define the professional identity of a physician, presumably before a robot takes the job.
Prof Alex Gearin
Medical anthropologist/ Assistant Professor, Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit, HKUMed
Alex K. Gearin is a medical anthropologist whose research explores how illness, healing, and altered states of consciousness are narrated and experienced across cultures. His recent monograph Global Ayahuasca (Stanford University Press) examines how emotional and sensory dimensions of psychedelic medicine practices intersect with modernity and globalization. More broadly, his research investigates how patients and practitioners use metaphors and stories to navigate suffering, disease, and altered states of consciousness. He is Assistant Professor and Deputy Director of the Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit at HKUMed.
Welcome to join us!
Enquiry: Please contact Mr Edison Cheng (mehu@hku.hk).