MCLC: Wellness and Selfhood panel at AAA--cfp

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Wellness and Selfhood panel at AAA–cfp
Hi everyone,
We have a last-minute opening on our panel about Wellness and Selfhood for the upcoming AAA meetings. I'll post a rough draft of our abstract below--in short it is about trying to take seriously what's happening on the ground (in different geopolitical contexts) instead of dismissing wellness practices in a continued critique global capitalism (a critique we share, of course). We currently have papers on Crossfit in the U.S., therapeutic talk fitness in upstate New York, Yoga in Kenya, and eating in Shanghai. If you are interested in giving a paper on the panel, please submit an abstract to me at jstarr at hamilton.edu asap.
Julie Starr
Of Bodily and Anthropological Matters: Self-Improvement in the Age of Wellness
In recent years, social scientists from the global north have come out against what is constituted as ‘the wellness industry’. This term brings together diverse bodily practices from yoga and meditation, to fitness and running, to colonics, green juice and taking a vitamin regimen. The global wellness industry is said to gross X billion dollars per year. This remarkable trend in spending, we argue, should garner more curiosity as to what modes of relating to self/society these practices engender in diverse locales. What sociologist William Davies dubs “The Happiness Industry” (Verso, 2015) is often analyzed in the abstract and dismissed as the privatization or cooptation of aspirations for the good life by Capital. Instead of understanding these trends in general, this panel investigates the particularities of self-improvement in a variety of geopolitical contexts. While leftist academics André Spicer and Carl Cederström understand these bodily habits as symptoms of a global “Wellness Syndrome” (Polity, 2015) laden with individualizing undertones, our cases studies reveal otherwise.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on April 16, 2017
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