Wednesday, May 20, 2015

[HKAS Seminar] Coming of Age with "Internet Addiction": Institutional Encounters and Subject Formation of Chinese Youngsters


Title: Coming of Age with "Internet Addiction": Institutional Encounters and Subject Formation of Chinese Youngsters
Speaker: Rao Yichen
Date and time: 28 May 2015, 7:00pm
Venue: Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

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"Internet addiction" has been treated as a mental disorder in China since 2005. The past ten years have witnessed the rise and fall of a national campaign to "rescue" the 24 million "Internet addicts" in China. Some of them sat in an internet café for days or weeks without eating or drinking. Some committed suicide as a result of one quarrel after another with their parents. Some killed their parents as they "lost their sense" in the world on-line. Treatment camps for internet addiction were established across China under the mission of saving Chinese youths and their families. However, the media coverage of these institutions "disclosed" their "dark" and disruptive sides. Young people sent to these centers were said to have gone through a series of physical tortures - some were even trained to death. Based on three months' ethnographic fieldwork in a treatment camp based on different therapeutics, this talk gives an inquiry into the discipline and resistance, the institutional encounters and the subject formations of the youngsters who underwent the treatment of "internet addiction".

The lecture is conducted in English. All are welcome. (Space, however, is limited to 139 seats.)

For more information, please contact Stan Dyer on 9746 9537 or anthrohk@gmail.com.

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