Number 019
Professor Chung-jen Chen , “ Politics of Aging and Ethics of Caring: Rethinking Dementia in East Asia ”

【Date and Time】28 November 2025 (Friday) 17:30-19:00
【LANGUAGE】English (no interpretation)
【HOW TO PARTICIPATE】
IN-PERSON: Room 312, 1st Floor, Faculty of Law and Letters Building No. 1. The University of Tokyo
ONLINE ZOOM: ID: 829 280 0028
Passcode: 854145

Host/ Grant: Scientific Research (C)－The Anthropocene and British Romantic Literature: Exploring Planetary Imagination for a Vulnerable (“Weak”) Earth
Joint Host: Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, and Tokyo College

＊This event is part of both "Death & Life Studies and Practical Ethics Lecture Series"

【Speaker】
Professor Chung-jenChen （Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University）

【Abstract】
As East Asia becomes home to some of the world’s most rapidly aging societies, dementia has emerged not only as a medical issue but as an ethical and cultural question. This talk examines how aging and memory loss in East Asian contexts—Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and China—reflect collective anxieties about dependency, dignity, and belonging. Drawing from my forthcoming edited volume Aging, Memory, and the Ethics of Care: East Asian Perspectives on Dementia and Cultural Politics (Routledge), it explores how literary, cinematic, and documentary narratives of dementia reveal moral economies that shape care, vulnerability, and intergenerational responsibility.

The lecture traces a genealogy from the nineteenth-century pathology of old age to today’s narratives of dementia, showing how the vulnerable body—whether infected or aging—becomes a site of moral regulation and meaning. Focusing on indigenous ethical idioms such as jishuku(self-restraint) in Japan and xiao (filial piety) in Confucian societies, it highlights alternative grammars of duty, silence, and relational ethics that challenge Western paradigms of autonomy. Through case studies from Japanese social realist cinema, Korean melodrama, and Taiwanese documentary, the talk argues for a critical medical humanities attuned to the emotional and philosophical textures of care in East Asia.