Special Issue – Daniel Nehring, Anja Röcke & Suvi Salmenniemi (Eds.): Debating Self-Optimisation: Practices, Paradoxes, and Power.
Recent decades have witnessed a burgeoning of discourses and practices that aim to optimise personal life, teach individuals how to cope with problems and difficulties, and cultivate inner peace and self-care. Self-tracking, awareness-workshops, self-help literature, cosmetic surgery, fitness programs, meditation, coaching, and empowerment groups are but a few examples of such self-optimisation practices. They also constitute a sizeable consumer market that promotes ideas of becoming better, happier, and more resilient, and they offer a broad range of technologies and services for achieving this.
The overarching goal of this special issue is to dig deeper into the dynamics of self-optimising practices to advance understanding of this multifaceted phenomenon that is increasingly woven into the fabric of present-day societies. With the aim of gaining greater insight into this emergent academic field, this special issue addresses the phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective, bringing together scholars from sociology, anthropology, and critical and cultural psychology and thus bridging attendant strands of research.