Journal article 65 views
Re-Thinking Self-Optimisation: Power, Self, and Community in the Global South
,
Talia Esnard,
Dylan Kerrigan
Historical Social Research, Volume: 49, Issue: 3, Pages: 269 - 297
Swansea University Author:
Daniel Nehring
Full text not available from this repository: check for access using links below.
DOI (Published version): 10.12759/hsr.49.2024.32
Abstract
Our objective in this article is to expand established sociological conceptualisations of self-optimisation. We do so through an analysis of the complex histories and institutional uses of self-optimisation in the Anglophone Caribbean, with a particular focus on Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. Self...
| Published in: | Historical Social Research |
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| ISSN: | 0172-6404 0172-6404 |
| Published: |
Mannheim
GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
2024
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| Online Access: |
Check full text
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa67861 |
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| Abstract: |
Our objective in this article is to expand established sociological conceptualisations of self-optimisation. We do so through an analysis of the complex histories and institutional uses of self-optimisation in the Anglophone Caribbean, with a particular focus on Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. Self-optimisation, as a recent concept in sociological enquiry, has been bound up with research on therapeutic cultures in the Global Northwest and, to a significant degree, with critiques of neoliberal forms of power and governance of the self. Through two case studies, we move beyond this relatively narrow frame of reference in socio-geographic and historical terms. First, we look at the role of self-optimisation in the plantation system of economic production and political domination in colonial Jamaica. We then consider the contemporary role of discourses of entrepreneurship and self-optimisation in the organisation of gendered social inequalities in Trinidad and Tobago and the broader Caribbean. In doing so, we contribute, first, to the analysis of institutionally situated modes of subjectivity and underlying dynamics of social power in the Anglophone Caribbean. More broadly, second, we move debates on self-optimisation beyond their current focus on the Global Northwest and explore how self-optimisation may be bound up with the social, political, and economic organisation of power in the Global South. |
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| Item Description: |
https://www.gesis.org/hsr/abstr/49-3/11nehring-et-al |
| Keywords: |
Cultural sociology; globalisation; colonialism; post-colonialism; sociological theory |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Issue: |
3 |
| Start Page: |
269 |
| End Page: |
297 |