Science, Technology, and Medicine Seminar 2021-22 Series: CHINA’S PEDIATRIC HOSPICE CARE VOLUNTEERS AS “SEEDS”: NEGOTIATING CURIOSITY AND TEAMWORK IN THE PANDEMIC ERA

DATE: October 26, 2021 (Tuesday)
TIME: 2:00pm-3:30pm (HKT)
VENUE: CPD-2.18, Centennial Campus, HKU

 seminar posterAbstract:

This talk explores several issues facing volunteers serving in China’s nascent pediatric hospice care. Hospice care is a set of multi-dimensional care practices provided by health professionals and volunteers, with the goal of helping a terminally ill individual experience a peaceful, comfortable, and dignified death. As an indispensable component of hospice care, volunteers are bound by neither familial nor professional responsibilities. Their presence highlights why and how human beings alleviate the suffering of strangers and bear witness to processes of dying and death, which often involves profound physical, socio-psychological, and spiritual uncertainties and challenges. This talk shares preliminary results from an ongoing medical anthropology research project conducted with adult volunteers, full-time NGO employees, social workers, and medical practitioners taking care of terminally ill children (and their families), whose deaths are often difficult for eyewitnesses to accept. It analyzes volunteers’ practices from 2016 to the present in Beijing and Shanghai and examines what conditions might enable their participation to be sustainable at the individual, interpersonal, and socio-cultural levels. Specifically, this talk discusses the role of three volunteer practices, namely satisfying personal curiosity about life and death, providing care in teamwork, and nurturing themselves as “seeds” of hospice care. Finally, within the short history of pediatric hospice care in China, Covid-19 has brought a sudden but probably long-lasting shadow, placing many volunteers—and even volunteer service as a whole—in a shaky position. This research has been indelibly shaped by the pandemic in terms of both its methods and content; thus, it concludes with a reflection upon some of the long-term implications for pediatric hospice volunteers as they learn to co-live with the virus.

Speaker: Miss Tianyi YAN

Tianyi Yan is a second-year MPhil candidate at the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine of the University of Hong Kong. She obtained her MA in Anthropology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and has served since 2018 as a palliative and hospice care volunteer in Beijing. Currently, she is conducting a research project on China’s pediatric hospice care volunteers with the goal of understanding volunteers’ moral experience and promoting sustainable practices.

Discussant: Professor Amy Y.M. Chow

Amy Y. M. Chow is a Professor with the Department of Social Work and Social Administration and the Head of Department, The University of Hong Kong. She is the Director of the Jockey Club End-of-Life Community Care Project and the Master of New College of the University. With the background of registered social worker specialized in bereavement counseling, she is the founder of the first community based bereavement counseling centre in Hong Kong. She is also the Chairperson of the International Workgroup on Death, Dying and Bereavement and the former Secretary of the Association for Death Education and Counseling. Recently, she received the Association for Death Education and Counseling 2020 Research Recognition Award.

Moderator: Dr. Laura Meek (HKU)

Registration Link:

https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=78554

This in-person event will be capped at 10 due to Covid-19 restrictions. Registration is on a first come basis. For enquiries, please contact Mr. Adrian Kam by email at adkam@hku.hk or by phone at +852 39172867. You may also visit our website: https://chm.hku.hk/