Theresa Siebach

Theresa holds a master’s degree in Cultural Studies from the University of Leipzig and worked as a research assistant during her studies. Afterwards she received funding in form of a research proposal scholarship from the Gutenberg Graduate School of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Mainz. Her research interests include cultural sociology, digital media, popular culture, and memory culture.

 

 

 

Project: “Caring for Yourself in Times of Crisis” – Self-Care as a Media Discourse Phenomenon between Affirmation and Social Criticism (WT)

My PhD project seeks to investigate the ambivalent meanings of “self-care” in media discourse, which tend to oscillate between legitimate individual coping-strategy in times of permanent/multiple crisis and critical assumptions about (neoliberal) self-optimization. In doing so, I am interested in how self-care is characterized and problematized in this critical discourse and how in this context, primarily feminist-intended conceptions of self-care are justified and reclaimed as political counter-practice. I will focus on analyzing the specific imaginations and interpretations of “the self” and society that can be found both in general articulations of self-care as necessity and its critical reception, mostly referring to a perceived state of deficit, exhaustion, and collective suffering. Through the lens of the sociology of knowledge and emotion, the project asks how these findings (and feelings) are significantly justified by means of time-diagnostic observation and how sentimental narratives and ideas are effective here.

 

Fellowships & Grants

2022: Research Proposal Scholarship of the Gutenberg Graduate School of the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Mainz