Critical Happiness Studies by Hill, Nicholas; Brinkmann, Svend; Petersen, Anders;

Short description:

This volume draws together the work of a diverse range of thinkers and researchers to address the question of happiness critically, using a wide variety of theoretical and empirical methodologies.

Long description:

This volume draws together the work of a diverse range of thinkers and researchers to address the question of happiness critically, using a wide variety of theoretical and empirical methodologies. Broadening the discussion beyond what might be considered highly individual and insular conceptualizations of happiness, often based on purely positivist approaches to the subject, authors raise questions about the nature of individual and collective anxieties that might underpin the current emphasis on happiness and the ideological or governmental ends that may be served by the framing of happiness in psychology and economics. With attention to how individuals understand and pursue happiness in their daily lives, Critical Happiness Studies highlights different theoretical paradigms that demonstrate the role of power in producing specific conceptualizations of happiness and, consequently, how they frame individual self-understanding or subjectivities and (re)shape political problems. The collection makes available critical, theoretical, and methodological resources for addressing a powerful set of cultural, political, and scientific discourses that have loomed large since the closing decade of the 20th century. A call for the establishment of a body of work in critical happiness studies, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities interested in the age-old problem of happiness.

Table of Contents:

Critical happiness studies: an invitation

NICHOLAS HILL, SVEND BRINKMANN AND ANDERS PETERSEN

PART I Fantastical happiness: an impossible ideal

1 Happiness, a moralistic fantasy

CARL CEDERSTRÖM

2 ‘Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof’: understanding the pursuit of happiness as ideology

ANDERS PETERSEN

3 ‘The sickness unto health’: self-reification, self-love, and the critique of happiness in contemporary life

ALASTAIR MORGAN

PART II The political and social effects of happiness

4 Hijacking the language of functionality? In praise of ‘negative’ emotions against happiness

EDGAR CABANAS AND EVA ILLOUZ

5 Happiness and the new politicization of subjectivity

GRANT DUNCAN

6 Happiness: a societal ‘imperative’?

LAURA HYMAN

7 ‘It’s the soul that needs the surgery’? The social life of (un)happiness

NICHOLAS HILL

PART III Resources for critical happiness studies

8 Living well and living right: aesthetic and ethical dimensions of happiness

SVEND BRINKMANN

9 Sociology, biographical research, and the development of critical happiness studies

MARK CIESLIK

10 Drowning in liquidity: Zygmunt Bauman on happiness, ambivalence, and security

JORDAN MCKENZIE

11 Complicating the happy cure: psychoanalysis and the ends of analysis

COLIN WRIGHT