Core Academic Lead: Dr Dorothy Butchard (d.butchard@bham.ac.uk)
Deputy Lead: Rebecca Wynter (r.i.wynter@bham.ac.uk)
How do we envision the experience of wellbeing and the systemic factors that either inhibit or facilitate it? How has wellbeing been conceptualized over time? And what can historical, political, and creative narratives about human flourishing, attachment, welfare, or comfort tell us about the private and communal sustainability of wellbeing? Can those disciplines traditionally disposed to interrogate notions of self-care, amelioration, happiness, or therapeutic rejuvenation now reimagine their own engagement with the paradigms, representations, and lived realities of wellbeing in an age characterised by personal precarity, unequal support systems, vulnerable institutions of care, economic anxiety, environmental degradation, and geopolitical division? Tackling such questions in collaborative and interdisciplinary ways, the ‘Imagining Wellbeing’ strand will bring together researchers from across the Humanities and Social Sciences, in order to address how we might rearticulate wellbeing and its ontological and sociocultural conditions of possibility.