Socializing Medicine: Health Humanities and East Asian Media

The Lecture

This event engages with the newly published volume Socializing Medicine (Hong Kong University Press, 2025), foregrounding the complex intersections of medicine, health, and East Asian media across cinema, television, and digital platforms. 

Socializing Medicine examines how mass media have operated as both instruments of biopolitical control and imaginative terrains for rethinking care—shaping medical knowledge, public health discourse, and access to healing. Contributors situate these dynamics within broader structures of imperialism, Cold War geopolitics, and neoliberal capitalism, while also advocating for more accessible and equitable health practices. 

Emerging in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the book offers timely and urgent reflections on how media infrastructures mediate global health narratives and control mechanisms. Interweaving archival research, audiovisual analyses, and theoretical insights from the field of Health and Medical Humanities, contributors reveal the multifaceted ways in which mass media—from photography and film to television and live streaming—have been deployed as a tool for controlling medicine and health, privileging those with power and authority since the early twentieth century. Adopting anti-colonial and anti-capitalist perspectives, the volume also gestures toward alternative understandings of medical culture through media productions that envision more just, accessible, and collective futures of care.

The Speakers / Editors

Ling Zhang is Associate Professor of cinema studies at the State University of New York, Purchase College and a 2024-25 Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden. She holds a PhD in cinema and media studies from the University of Chicago. Her research explores film sound and acoustic culture, Chinese-language cinema and digital media, documentary, and the Cultural Cold War. She is completing her monograph Unruly Sounds: Chinese Cinema and Transnational Acoustic Culture, 1929–1949 and co-edited Socializing Medicine: Health Humanities and East Asian Media (Hong Kong University Press, 2025). Her work appears in journals and anthologies including Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Journal of Popular Culture, Film Quarterly, Comparative Cinema, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Asian Cinema, and Journal of Chinese Women’s Studies. She is developing her second book, Sounding Wayward Journeys: Traveling Films and Media in China and the World, 1949–1989.

Pao-chen Tang is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sydney. His writings have addressed questions of the nonhuman in reciprocity with film aesthetics. A representative example is his 2025 monograph The Animist Imagination in East Asian Cinema (Amsterdam University Press; open access). He is currently working on a second book that examines how the ongoing neo-industrialization of the Chinese manufacturing sector has given rise to a new conceptualization of technology in contemporary Chinese cinema—most visibly in set and prop design. A recent essay on the sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth, published in Screen, forms part of this new project.

Yuqian Yan is an Assistant Professor at Zhejiang University. She holds a Ph.D. in Cinema and Media Studies, jointly with East Asian Languages and Civilizations, from the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on early Chinese cinema, the materiality of moving images, health humanities, and documentary film, with particular interest in the intersection of visual culture and embodied experience in modern China. She is a co-editor of Socializing Medicine: Health Humanities and East Asian Media. Her current book project, Reassembling the Ancient: Costume Films in the Republic of China, 1921–1941, explores how ancient China was reimagined and materialized through the modern medium of cinema.

Bo Wang (respondent) is a researcher, artist and filmmaker, currently a lecturer at LUCAS, Leiden University. He is finishing his PhD dissertation on the discourse of the machine in post-socialist China at Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. As an artist and filmmaker, he has exhibited widely and is a recipient of major international art and film awards.

Jeehey Kim (joining online) is a writer, researcher, and curator focused on the history of visual culture in East Asia. The associate professor of the art history program at the University of Arizona, Kim earned her doctorate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. In 2023, she published Photography and Korea (2023), the first book on the history of Korean photography in English. She is currently at work on a book about funerary portraiture in East Asia.

Registration (required)

You can join us online or in the IIAS Conference Room. Registration is required due to limited seating and to receive the Zoom link. Please use the web form on this page.