Professor Ma's book project, tentatively titled Intimate Institutions: Governance and Care Under the Mental Health Legal Reform in Contemporary China, examines families' involvement in the care and management of persons diagnosed with serious mental illnesses in China. It draws on 32 months of fieldwork (2008-2014) in various institutional and community settings, interviews with policymakers, and archival and medial analyses. The manuscript maps the workings of "biopolitical paternalism," a mode of governance that legitimizes the post-socialist state's population management as paternalistic intervention, and that displaces the paternalistic responsibilities onto the patients' families.
As a follow-up to this research, Professor Ma has been conducting a new project on the (re-)emergence of community mental health in China. Here she focuses on ideologies of "community" in the country's ongoing social transformation and welfare reconstruction, dynamics between social services and population management, and processes of global knowledge translation. To center the voices and experiences of people with psychiatric disabilities in service design and delivery, she has been working with stakeholders in China to develop a mental health peer support program using a community-based participatory research approach.
A third area of Professor Ma's research examines the lives and rights of people with disabilities in China, especially since the government's ratification of United Nation's Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2008. As a member of the Chinese disability community, she takes an action-oriented approach and works with local activists on a few smaller-scale projects in this area. They are studying the life histories of generations of blind individuals, the experiences with sport and physical activities among young women with physical disabilities, and the needs of rural children with disabilities and their families, among others.
Along with her scholarly research, Professor Ma has also been involved in a range of advocacy endeavors. She has worked with doctors to assess medical ethics and anti-stigma curricula. She has consulted for various development projects that seek to promote livelihood support, gender equality, social inclusion, and civil society participation for persons with disabilities. She has written popular articles advocating for disability-friendly policies and introducing disability studies in/to China. She has also facilitated the networking of disability-related NGOs, and has participated in many disability rights dialogues in and beyond the country.