Extreme Reinvention: The Rise Of Makeover Culture

TASA Public Lecture 2006 is being presented by Professor Anthony Elliott.

Hosted by the Flinders University Sociology Department.

In this provocative public lecture on the social consequences of makeover culture, Anthony Elliott investigates what drives people to demand instant self-reinvention - from plastic surgery to online therapy, from compulsive consumerism to the self-help movement. He argues that we are witnessing the emergence of a "new individualism", and outlines a novel sociological perspective on people's emotional experiences of globalization.

The lecture will focus on the debate over globalization, with particular stress on the consequences of global transformations for the self and identity. Contesting mainstream explanations that view today's craze for reinvention as a result of the cult of celebrity, Elliott argues that an "ambient fear of globalism" haunts the new individualisms surfacing in the polished, expensive cities of the West. Surviving the new individualism, he suggests, is central to the tasks of a public sociology.

Anthony Elliott is Professor of Sociology at Flinders University . He was formerly Chair of Sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury , UK . Professor Elliott's writings have been translated in ten languages, and his recent books include Critical Visions: New Directions in Social Theory (2003), Social Theory Since Freud (2004), Subject to Ourselves (2nd Edition, 2004) and, with Charles Lemert, The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalization (2005).

RSVP to Convenor: Dr Debra King (deb.king@flinders.edu.au)