Speaker: Dr. David Palmer, Associate Professor Department of Sociology The University of Hong Kong

Dr. David A. Palmer is an anthropologist who studies processes of social and cultural change in China, with a focus on religion, civil society, and global circulations. He is the author of the awardwinning Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China (Columbia University Press, 2007) and co-author of The Religious Question in Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 2011; awarded the Levenson Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies). His forthcoming books include Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and Intimate Utopias: Volunteering, Individualization and Civil Society in China. His current research projects focus on local ritual traditions, transnational religious movements, and on faith-based volunteering and NGOs in the Chinese world and Asia. He leads the"Rethinking Spirituality and Religion in Asia" research cluster at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the"Spiritual Values in the Third Sector" knowledge exchange project of the HKU Faculty of Social Science's ExCEL3 third sector capacity building initiative.