Cultural Industries and New Media Reading Group
I would like to invite interested PhD students and colleagues at Birmingham City University and beyond to a reading group I run.
The Cultural Industries and New Media Reading Group, part of the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research at Birmingham City University, explores and discusses new books about cultural work, cultural industries and new and social media. Every three months we meet to discuss chapters of a chosen text. The next meeting is at 4.30pm on the 26th May 2016 in the Woodman Pub, Birmingham.
The book we are discussing is Ulrich Brockling’s The Entrepreneurial Self, more details below:
“Ulrich Bröckling claims that the imperative to act like an entrepreneur has turned ubiquitous. In Western society there is a drive to orient your thinking and behaviour on the objective of market success which dictates the private and professional spheres. Life is now ruled by competition for power, money, fitness, and youth. The self is driven to constantly improve, change and adapt to a society only capable of producing winners and losers.
The Entrepreneurial Self explores the series of juxtapositions within the self, created by this call for entrepreneurship. Whereas it can expose unknown potential, it also leads to over-challenging. It may strengthen self-confidence but it also exacerbates the feeling of powerlessness. It may set free creativity but it also generates unbounded anger. Competition is driven by the promise that only the capable will reap success, but no amount of effort can remove the risk of failure. The individual has no choice but to balance out the contradiction between the hope of rising and the fear of decline.”
If you would like to take part, please pick a chapter (or chapters) that you would like to read and discuss, and let me know so I can send the relevant chapter(s) to you. You can see the full table of contents here.
If you would like to join this reading group, please email me karen.patel@bcu.ac.uk with the chapter name(s) you would like to review.