We are encouraged from all sides to view our lives as being full of choices. Like the products on a supermarket shelf, our careers, our relationships, our bodies, our very identity seem to be there for the choosing. But paradoxically this seeming freedom to choose can create extreme anxiety, and feelings of inadequacy and guilt. Choice explores how capitalism’s shrill exhortations to ‘be oneself’ can be a tyranny which leads to ever-greater dissatisfaction and how the insistence that choice is a purely individual matter obstructs social change.

Drawing on diverse examples from popular culture – from dating sites and relationship self-help books, to our obsession with imitating celebrities’ lifestyles – and fusing sociology, psychoanalysis and philosophy, Professor Renata Salecl examines the move from a rights to choice discourse in modern Europe, and how the latter is rarely based on simple rational decision with a predictable outcome.

Renata Salecl is Visiting Professor at BIOS centre at the London School of Economics and at Birkbeck College School of Law. She is also a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a Recurring Visiting Professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York.

To view the flyer for this event please see: The Shift from Rights to Choices in Post-Socialist Europe