Two lecture series at Cal State San Bernardino will present a talk by Sarah Dauncey, professor of Chinese society and disability at the University of Nottingham, beginning at 10:30 a.m. Pacific Time, Friday, April 19, on Zoom.

Dauncey’s talk, “Emotional Subjects: Citizenship, Identity and the Emotional World of Disability in China,” is being presented by the university’s Disability Studies Lecture Series and the Modern China Lecture Series.

Register online to obtain the Zoom link for the presentation. The program is free and open to the public.

In her talk, Dauncey will draw on her understanding of para-citizenship – a new concept built around sociological theories of citizenship and identity – to reveal the highly emotional world of disability-making and disability-living in China.

She looks not only at how traditionally accepted or institutionally determined notions of personhood and normalcy, the factors that determine the boundaries of citizenship, are often challenged through encounters and interactions with disability, but also how emotions play a fundamental role in the ways persons with disabilities are included in or excluded from the dominant discourses of what makes an “ideal” citizen in China today.

Dauncey is the author of “Disability in China: Citizenship, Identity and Culture,” a comprehensive exploration of disability and citizenship in Chinese society and culture from 1949 to the present. She is a China specialist with 30 years of experience visiting and studying China. She joined the faculty at Nottingham’s School of Sociology and Social Policy in 2016 after serving as deputy head and director of teaching at the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies.

The Disability Studies Lecture Series, which was launched this academic year, provides access to world-class scholarship and expertise in the vital multi-disciplinary field of critical disability studies. The aim of the series is to increase disability literacy in our communities and to enrich our own scholarship, creativity, and activism by engaging with new ideas in disability theory, history, culture, and the arts. The next program in the series will be May 3, “In Conversation with artist, activist, and scholar, Dr. Sunaura Taylor” of the University of California, Berkeley.

The Modern China Lecture Series was initiated in January 2014 to promote awareness of important issues related to China for those on the CSUSB campus and in the community. Since then, it has presented more than 100 lectures, workshops, film screenings and roundtable forums featuring China scholars from UC San Diego, UC Riverside, the Claremont Colleges, UCLA, USC, UC Irvine, Columbia, Oxford and other institutions have visited the CSUSB campus to share their expertise and opinions.

The next scheduled speaker in the Modern China Lecture Series is Jane Chin Davidson, CSUSB professor of art history, who will share her presentation at 2:30 p.m. May 8, in person and on Zoom.