Zhiying Ma, PhD

Zhiying Ma is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist and a scholar of disability studies. Her work in general examines how cultural, politico-economic, and technological factors shape the design and implementation of social policies, and how national policies and global development initiatives in turn impact health in/equity, vulnerability, and rights, with a focus on contemporary China.

Professor Ma’s book project, tentatively titled Intimate Institutions: Governance and Care Under the Mental Health Legal Reform in Contemporary China, examines families’ involvement in the care and management of persons diagnosed with serious mental illnesses in China. It draws on 32 months of fieldwork (2008-2014) in various institutional and community settings, interviews with policymakers, and archival and medial analyses. The manuscript maps the workings of “biopolitical paternalism,” a mode of governance that legitimizes the post-socialist state’s population management as paternalistic intervention, and that displaces the paternalistic responsibilities onto the patients’ families. 

As a follow-up to this research, Professor Ma has been conducting a new project on the emergence of community mental health in China. It explores ideologies of “community” in the country’s ongoing social transformation and welfare reconstruction, dynamics between social services and population management, and processes of global knowledge translation. She has conducted preliminary fieldwork with various service programs, and has been working with student research assistants to build a digital archive of policy documents, media reports, and scholarly research on community mental health in China.

A third project of Professor Ma’s examines China’s disability rights movement, especially since the government’s ratification of United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2008. Having grown up in China with a disability, she is concerned with how the rights discourse transforms institutions, policies, and everyday lives of persons with disabilities. She is conducting preliminary research with local disability rights activists, and envisions this project to be more collaborative.

Along with her scholarly research, Professor Ma has also been involved in a range of advocacy endeavors. She has worked with doctors to assess medical ethics and anti-stigma curricula. She has consulted for various development projects that seek to promote livelihood support, gender equality, social inclusion, and civil society participation for persons with disabilities. She has written popular articles advocating for disability-friendly policies and promoting disability studies in China. She has also facilitated the networking of NGOs that work on disability issues, and participated in many disability rights dialogues in and beyond the country.

Professor Ma holds a joint Ph.D. in Comparative Human Development and Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She received her bachelor degrees in psychology and in philosophy from Peking University, China. In 2016-2018, she was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.