Samuel Binkley

Sam Binkley is Professor of Sociology. He offers courses on the sociology of subjectivity, emotions and personal life, with a focus on power relations in contemporary society.

His research examines the social production of subjectivity through lifestyle literatures and popular texts. Drawing on Michel Foucault's notions of biopower and governmentality, but also from a range of critical theorists, he has undertaken studies of self help literature and popular psychology, lifestyle movements of the 1970s, anti-racist and multi-cultural discourses, and the affective, corporeal and emotional cultures of neoliberalism, all with an eye toward the fashioning of subjectivity in these contexts. He has authored three books; Against White Interiority: A Racial Critique of Therapeutic Reason (Palgrave), Happiness as Enterprise: An Essay on Neoliberal Life (SUNY) and Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s (Duke), and is co-editor of A Foucault for the 21st Century (Cambridge Scholars). He has published articles in such journals as Body & Society, History of Human Sciences, Time and Society, Foucault Studies, Cultural Studies, Rethinking Marxism, Subjectivity and the Journal for Cultural Research.