Special Issue
Debating Self-Optimisation: Practices, Paradoxes, and Power (ed. Daniel Nehring, Anja Röcke, and Suvi Salmenniemi)

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. The contributions focus on the societal tensions and contradictions to which self-optimisation responds; on the dynamics of power, domination, and empowerment linked to it; and on its transnational and global dimension. Through ten contributions by leading international scholars from across the social sciences, this special issue traces the historical emergence of self-optimisation and the diverse forms of knowledge that have shaped and contributed to it, it reflects on the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in related discourses and forms of experience and practice, and it advances the development of self-optimisation as a key concept for social research.