Summary
Recent decades have seen a boom in the appeal of various therapeutic practices, such as self-help literature, life coaching, mindfulness, ‘alternative’ healing and self-tracking. While there is now a wide body of social scientific literature on the psychologization of everyday life and its entanglement with neoliberalization, there is a notable gap in understanding how people engage and live with these practices. This volume addresses this gap and taps into ways in which people incorporate therapeutic practices into their everyday living, focusing particularly on material, spiritual and political aspects. It introduces the notion of ‘therapeutic assemblages’ and investigates how human and non-human actors, systems of thought and practice are assembled and interwoven in therapeutic engagements. In focusing on the lived experience of therapeutic practices, this volume elucidates the diverse forms, meanings and embodied effects of therapeutic engagements in different settings, as well as their potential for both oppressive and subversive social change.
Published by Routledge in 2020. For further information, and to buy the book, click here.
An open access e-book version of the book is available here.
An open access e-book version of the book is available here.
Content
Editors: Suvi Salmenniemi, Johanna Nurmi, Harley Bergroth and Inna Perheentupa
- Introduction (Salmenniemi et al.)
- Affective assemblages: Therapeutic knowledge production in and through the researcher-body (Marjo Kolehmainen)
- The meditator as self-healing scientist? On the ‘universal’ body–mind laboratory of mindfulness training (Ilmari Kortelainen & Steven Stanley)
- Life coaching as a way of (neoliberal) life in emotional capitalism (Ariel Yankellevich)
- Datafied therapeutics in control society (Harley Bergroth & Ilpo Helén)
- Technological affordances and the lure of self-disclosure (Felix Freigang)
- The ideological dilemmas of the office fun culture (Virve Peteri)
- Therapeutic politics: Social change and resistance in alternative health practices (Johanna Nurmi & Suvi Salmenniemi)
- Feminism as a political and therapeutic technology (Inna Perheentupa)
- On the slow hybridization of the traditional and the modern in therapeutic practices (Marja-Liisa Honkasalo)
- ‘Losing my religion’: The not-so-strange alliance between the therapeutic and Christianity within the Church of Norway (Ole Jacob Madsen)
- Ethnography of the therapeutic in Eastern Christianity (Tatiana Tiaynen-Qadir)
- Saving the post-Soviet soul: New therapeutic religiosity and post-Soviet migrants (Julia Lerner)