February 2024 – 國立陽明交通大學人文與社會科學院

Summary
In the historical context of a crisis in biological psychiatry, psychedelic drugs paired with psychotherapy are globally re-emerging in research clinics as a potential transdiagnostic therapy for treating mood disorders, addictions, and other forms of psychological distress.

The treatments are poised to soon shift from clinical trials to widespread service delivery in places like Australia, North America, and Europe, which has prompted ethical questions by social scientists and bioethicists. Taking a broader view, we argue that the ethics of psychedelic therapy concerns not simply how psychotherapies are different when paired with psychedelic drugs, but how different kinds of psychedelic therapy shape and are shaped by different values, norms, and metaphysical commitments that amount to different forms of life. Drawing from the published literature and interviews with seven psychedelic therapists working in clinical trials in the United States, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia, this talk opens the black box of the treatments to consider the values and informal debates currently animating the therapies. Considering questions of patient autonomy, mechanisms of therapeutic action, and which therapies are best suited to pair with psychedelic substances, we examine the ethics of psychedelic therapy as a form of life. To bring this out in fuller relief, we conclude by comparing and contrasting this emergent form of life with ayahuasca use in Amazonian shamanism. The talk is based on work done in collaboration with Nicolas Langlitz.

時間/Time ：2024/2/29 星期四
地點：知行樓503
Venue:Zhi Xing Building 503,
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University -Yangming campus
語言：英文
報名表單/Registration：https://forms.gle/XuFbH7SZWxtPExSW9

講者簡介/Speaker profile
Alex K. Gearin, Ph.D., is an medical anthropologist who has researched psychedelic substance using networks and practices across the globe. His forthcoming book Global Ayahuasca: Wondrous Visions and Modern Worlds (Stanford University Press, 2024) explores the psychoactive plant brew “ayahuasca” in Asia, South America, and Australia. His work is featured in Current Anthropology, Social Science and Medicine, Frontiers in Pharmacology, JRAI, and other outlets, and he is co-editor of The World Ayahuasca Diaspora: Controversies and Reinventions (Routledge, 2017). Alex is assistant professor at The University of Hong Kong.

03/08/2024 / 03/08/2024 14:00pm – 17:00pm
Room 1, Research Center for Humanities and Social sciences, Academia Sinica, Taipei
The French Centre for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC), Taipei Office organise the following conference:

Speaker: Nicholas de Villiers (University of North Florida, USA)
Nicholas de Villiers is professor of English and film at the University of North Florida (USA). He is currently a Fulbright U.S. Senior Scholar in Taiwan at National Central University in the Center for the Study of Sexualities (2023–2024). He is the author of Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol(2012), Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary (2017), and Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang (2022), all from the University of Minnesota Press.

Abstract:
Taiwan-based filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang’s Days (2020) features his “male muse” Lee Kang-sheng’s intimate encounter with a Laotian migrant male sex worker masseur in Bangkok (Anong Houngheuangsy): a massage session with a “happy ending.” Days portrays queer sex work as a form of care work, returning to treatments for Lee’s actual neck pain first incorporated into the plot of Tsai’s The River (1997). Tsai’s latest film raises issues of diasporic and queer temporality and labor, and “bounded authenticity” in sex work (Bernstein). The poignancy of watching Lee aging and suffering from neck ailments over eleven feature films with Tsai is enhanced by the juxtaposition of Lee’s body’s fragility with the caretaking bodies of two other male actors: (1) Norman bin Atun as Rawang, a Bangladeshi migrant laborer in Kuala Lumpur who takes in Hsiao Kang (Lee), a battered homeless man without a passport, and nurses him back to health in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006); (2) the young body of Anong, whose erotic massage seems to offer more relief and comfort than the moxibustion treatment we also watch Lee receiving. Lee gives Anong a music box which plays “Terry’s Theme” from Chaplin’s Limelight (1952), a song which Tsai used before at the end of Sleep, a link between the two films that invites further analysis. Examining these practices of care in Tsai’s nearly wordless “slow cinema,” I engage approaches to queer and crip temporality and performativity of emotional labor in feminist ethics of care and studies of disability and sex work. I close with a reflection on the recent Tsai Ming-liang’s Daysexhibition at the Museum of National Taipei University of Education (MoNTUE) as a staging of queer practices of care beyond representation.

Respondent : Louis Lo (Institute of Visual Studies, NYCU)
This seminar will be held in English.
Corrado Neri, Director of the CEFC Taipei, will chair the session.

Month: February 2024

Psychedelic Therapy as Form of Life

Queer Ethics of Care in Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone and Days