Becoming Otherwise: STS Inroads into Techniques of the Better Self - I: Potential

Abstract

This panel explores the influential landscape of practices of personal change and radical self-transformation. Practices and techniques for self-improvement are part of encounters and ways of operating in healthcare, education, professional development, life coaching, therapy, spiritual practice, movements like the quantified self, etc. Various instantiations share a staged ‘will to goodness’ and an emphasis on the possibility of change, foregrounding an inward turn to learn how to become a happier, healthier, wiser and sometimes also a wealthier version of oneself.

Much existing literature in the social sciences attempts to grapple with the ubiquity of ’the psy-complex’ by analysing the phenomenon as (yet) another manifestation of neoliberal regimes. We wish to move away from such an analytical cul-de-sac and craft stories that do not hinge on unilateral critique or explanatory frameworks. Drawing on STS’ capacity to re-frame the issues under study as well as to reinvent itself, we propose to ignite an STS-inflected examination of ‘techniques of the better self’ that poses novel questions, mobilises inventive empirical methods, and opens up interstitial spaces between critique and justification. What is involved in lived instances or trajectories of ‘becoming otherwise’? What do these allow us to learn about, for example, limits, sameness/difference, choice, care, divisions, subjectivities? In order to address these questions, the panel encourages a wide range of contributions that attend to the teaching/learning, using, incorporating or evaluating techniques of the better self.

Chair

• Catelijne Coopmans, Department of Thematic Studies - Technology and Social Change, Linköping University

Individual Presentations

• Becoming Otherwise: Bettering the Self, Bettering STS? - Sara Bea, Linköping University, Technology and Social Change; Steve Woolgar, Linköping University

• Neuropsychoanalysis and Foucault: Reevaluating Psy-Discipline Practices of the Self - John Blatzheim, Rice University

• Optimization as a Metaphor in Self-Tracking / Quantified Self and Beyond - Agnieszka Krzeminska, Leuphana University of Luneburg; Dorthe Kristensen, University of Southern Denmark

• Stopping Becoming Otherwise: Psychedelics as a Technology for Regaining the Self - Claudia Schwarz-Plaschg, University of Vienna

Session Organizers

• Sara Bea, Linköping University, Technology and Social Change

• Catelijne Coopmans, Department of Thematic Studies - Technology and Social Change, Linköping University

• Else Vogel, Department of Thematic Studies - Technology and Social Change, Linköping University

• Steve Woolgar, Linköping University