The Identities Research Theme Signature Lecture by Professor Anthony Elliott (University of South Australia). This lecture was delivered at the Trinity Long Room Hub on 29 April 2014.

In this provocative public lecture on the global consequences of our cultural obsession with reinvention, Anthony Elliott investigated the rise of identity transformations in the contemporary era. Elliott focused on what drives people to demand “instant self-transformation” – from plastic surgery to online therapy, from compulsive consumerism to the self-help movement. He argued that we are witnessing the emergence of a “new individualism”, and outlined the elements of a novel social theory addressing both the experimental and traumatic aspects of people’s emotional experiences of globalization.

An argument is developed that “reinvention” has become increasingly global in our own time as a result of major changes in public life in Western societies. Elliott provocatively argued that personal vulnerabilities have reached the point where people turn to do-it-yourself, instant identity-transformations in an effort to reinvent and remake themselves and thus improve their life prospects. This lecture painted an alarming social portrait of a world held in thrall to immediacy, where the identity-transformations of reinvention are fundamental to new forms of self-design and self-improvement.

Bio: Anthony Elliott is Director of the Hawke Research Institute, where he is Research Professor of Sociology, at the University of South Australia.

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/