Release 'self' issue M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture

[Felicity Meakins]

M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture
<http://www.media-culture.org.au>

Published by School of English, Media Studies and Art History, University of
Queensland, Australia 4072

Edited by Kate Douglas and Felicity Meakins
Feature Writer: Michael Clyne

Announcement of Release: 'SELF'

Me? "I" am everywhere. The 'self' permeates contemporary culture. Through
capitalist individualism and conservative politics, 'self' must be
considered first above the needs of the group - "looking after no. 1". In
therapeutic, religious and consumerist discourses of self-improvement,
self-help or self-actualisation, 'self' is obscured; an entity which needs
to be sought and found, changed or accommodated, an entity which one needs
to become "in touch with". Within these permutations "self" carries the
assumption of its own existence, as either a stable, unchanging entity or as
a contextually sensitive and dynamic identity.

Feature:

Michael Clyne "Saving Us From Them -- The Discourse of Exclusion on Asylum
Seekers"

1. Performances and the Public Self

Sandy Carmago "'Mind the Gap': The Multi-Protagonist Film Genre, Soap Opera,
and the Emotive Blockbuster"

Deidre Heddon  "Performing the Self"

Angel Lin "In "Modernity and the Self: Explorations of the (Non-)
Self-determining Subject in South Korean TV Dramas"

Andy Miller "What is Real? Where Fact Ends and Fiction Begins in the Writing
of Paul Theroux"

Mark Peterson "Choosing the Wasteland: The Social Construction of Self as
Viewer in the U.S."

2. The Self and the Physical

Paula Gardner "The Perpetually Sick Self: The Cultural Promotion and
Self-Management of Mood Illness"

Nadine Henley "The Healthy vs the Empty Self: Protective vs Paradoxical
Behaviour"

Kerry Kid "Called to Self-Care, or to Efface Self? Self-interest and
Self-splitting in the Diagnostic Experience of Depression"

Derek Wallace " 'Self' and the Problem of Consciousness"

3. Representing Selves, Consuming Selves.

Matt Adams "Ambiguity: The Reflexive Self & Alternatives"

Gabrielle Dean "Portrait of the Self: Victorian Technologies of Identity
Invention"

Lelia Green "Who is Being Helped When We Help Our Self?"

Simone Pettigrew "Consumption and the Self-Concept"

Ianto Ware"Conflicting Concepts of Self and The Michigan Womyn's Music
Festival"

What this collection of articles succeeds in doing is to demonstrate that
the self is multitudinous and changing, along with the various stakeholders
invested in these selves. Just as philosophers, social scientists,
behavioural and medical scientists have been investigating the existence and
significance of individual consciousness, self-perception, self-promotion
and other notions of "the self" for centuries, the research included in this
feature demonstrates the continuing need to do so.