Call for Papers - ISSJ N° 207 - Happiness and Hyper-Modernity

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Call for Papers - ISSJ N° 207 - Happiness and Hyper-Modernity: Social Scientific Perspectives (March 2012)
The International Social Science Journal
UNESCO/Wiley-Blackwell

In recent years public discourse has become saturated with information concerning “well-being”, “health”, and “happiness.” However, contrary to classical philosophical paradigms which described “happiness” in terms of virtue, justice, “the good,” and the “good life,” contemporary perspectives on happiness move by way of a series of highly contested and problematic criteria. Happiness has been reduced to a statistical concept measured inter-alia by “quality of life,” economic growth, access to resources and technology, leisure time, and sexuality. Such conceptions are, on one hand, culturally biased and, on the other hand, laden equally with the potential to create new modes of “unhappiness.”

Moreover, happiness is often tied to various mythologies of “progress,” “accumulation,” “consumption” and ostentation while simultaneously associated with post-materialist modes of “simplicity” and the “simple life”. Following from the later construction it has become something of a cliché to speak of the affluent who reflect on the “happiness of the poor.” “Happiness” has been appropriated by market-culture and the spectacle in a mediated representational regime that sells beauty secrets, eternity, and youth. Happiness is a construct of corporate culture, “success,” and one’s “networks.”

It is furthermore imbricated in both therapeutic and new age spiritual cultures which promise relief from the dizzying pace of globalisation. The global here also challenges the state’s historic role as arbiter of its citizen’s welfare and happiness. It has also been refracted through multicultural and developmental paradigms which incessantly occupy themselves with the “happiness of Others”.

The International Social Science Journal is therefore soliciting articles on Happiness and Hyper-Modernity: Social Scientific Perspectives. Of particular interest will be articles that touch on the following themes:

1) Questions concerning the objectivization and measurement of happiness and how such processes are bound to ideological logics on both the level of the nation and the global (cross-cultural notions of happiness vs. happiness as hegemonic strategy). What purpose does the measurement of happiness ultimately serve and why impose on happiness such an operational logic?

2) Philosophical, ethical, and theoretical considerations: How is happiness constructed in academic discourse? How is happiness theorized and why? Why is happiness of any real theoretical importance?

3) Popular Culture: Happiness and the Market, Happiness and Therapeutic culture, Popular representations of happiness, Happiness and Spirituality, Happiness and Consumer culture etc.

Contributions can emerge from any discipline and theoretical orientation.

Please send abstracts and queries to S. Romi Mukherjee by 20 February 2010. Final articles expected for July 2010. E-mail: s.mukherjee@unesco.org



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