Self and Society: Anxiety and the Social Self

Catalog description

How do social performance and social groups provoke, shape, and structure our experience of anxiety? How does anxiety and its management shape our self-understanding as social agents? Has the experience of anxiety changed in relation to changing social conditions? We will explore how anxiety has been defined in clinical terms and contrast contemporary diagnoses with other ways it has been understood historically. We will explore anxiety from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including existentialism, psychoanalysis, and classical social theory. We will also explore contemporary social anxiety in relation to COVID-19, ecological catastrophe, performance on social media, and social class.