Title: ‘It’s a hotline!’: attachment and detachment in a suicide prevention organization in Hong Kong

Speaker: Gabriel Liu (University of Cambridge)

Date: Friday, 21 March 2025

Time: 1:00-2:30pm

Mode: In-person

Venue: Room 213, Humanities Building, New Asia College, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Abstract:

Drawing on 15 months of fieldwork in the Charlies, a suicide prevention organization in Hong Kong,  this  talk  reflects  on the nature of the work performed by the organization’s 24/7 hotline for distressed callers. It argues that connection and detachment are two sides of the same coin. I  describe  the ways in which the Charlies presents a narrative of constant availability and seemingly tireless connection to callers. This narrative foregrounds the indisputable good of connection, an imperative that reinforces the organization’s authority to prescribe what constitutes meaningful support. Yet, I contrast this portrayal with  the  indispensable  distance  the organization maintains from callers. This distance is necessary to ensure that it is callers themselves who will make life-and- death decisions to safeguard their authority over their  own lives.  It   also   ensures   an   equitable   distribution   of  scarce organizational resources.  Meanwhile,  the  ways  in which callers adversely respond to the limits imposed on their interaction with the organization become acts of protests that attempt to negotiate whose terms of care should prevail. In conditions of what I call “organizational ambivalence”, care surfaces as the ways in which the authority over someone’s (be it others’ or their own) well-being becomes negotiated and contested.

Bio:

Gabriel Liu is a candidate on the PhD in Social Anthropology at the University  of Cambridge. He works at  the intersection  between  anthropology  and law. His research interests include themes of care, organizations and ambivalence.