Thursday, April 24, 2025
12:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m. EDT
April 24, 2025
The Extraordinary in the Mundane: Family and Forms of Community in China
A Book Talk with Becky Yang Hsu and Richard Madsen
Event Series: Other Initiative Events
Join us for a discussion with Becky Yang Hsu (editor) and Richard Madsen (contributing author) on their new publication The Extraordinary in the Mundane: Family and Forms of Community in China. The book brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore the many ways people in China self-organize and create varied forms of coordination to solve important problems. Through compelling, detail-rich case studies, The Extraordinary in the Mundane shows that family structures and networks deeply shape these modes of association. Because the public-private dichotomy does not resonate with many people in China, they rely on informal social ties, not formal organizations or state agencies, to confront many challenges. Offering a glimpse into the unofficial realities that often remain off the record, this volume transcends the false dichotomy of China versus the world. The book is the result of the U.S.-China Culture and Society Research Group, which brought together a group of American and Chinese scholars to explore how citizens in both societies pursue and experience happiness.
This event is co-sponsored by the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues, Asian Studies Program in the School of Foreign Service, and Department of Sociology.
Featured
Becky Yang Hsu is an associate professor of sociology at Georgetown University, where she is also affiliated with the Asian Studies Program, the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues, and the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs. Hsu specializes in culture and sociology of religion. She is co-editor of The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness: Anxieties, Hopes, and Moral Tensions in Everyday Life (2019) and author of Borrowing Together: Microfinance and Cultivating Social Ties (2017). She served as the convener for the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues Research Group on Culture and Society.
Richard Madsen is a distinguished professor of sociology, an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Global Policy and Strategy, and the director of the U.C.-Fudan Center for Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is co-editor of The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness: Anxieties, Hopes, and Moral Tensions in Everyday Life (2019) and co-author (with Robert Bellah et al.) of the award-winning The Good Society and Habits of the Heart. His other books on China include Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (1984), China's Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society (1998), and Democracy’s Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in Taiwan (2007). He was a participant in the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues Research Group on Culture and Society.