Imagining Wellbeing – Summer Workshop 2023
How do we envision the experience of wellbeing and factors that influence it? How has wellbeing been conceptualized over time? And what can historical, political, legal and creative narratives tell us about the private and communal sustainability of wellbeing? Tackling these questions in collaborative and interdisciplinary ways, the ‘Imagining Wellbeing’ research strand in the Centre for Urban Wellbeing brings together researchers from across the Humanities and Social Sciences, to explore how we might articulate wellbeing in terms of representation, potential, and creative reimagining.
The Imagining Wellbeing Workshop for Summer 2023, co-hosted with the Centre for Digital Cultures, brought together participants to share different aspects of their work or practice and hear from others with similar interests. We aimed to cover a range of topics, including:
• Lived realities and imagined possibilities of wellbeing in the past, present and future.
• Approaches to self-care, happiness, flourishing, comfort and rejuvenation.
• Personal, political and economic anxieties, especially in urban environments.
• Relationships between digital and embodied contexts/communications.
• Inclusivity, activism and marginalised experiences of wellbeing.
• Precarity, health, unequal support systems and vulnerable institutions of care.
• Industry, labour, and conditions in and beyond the workplace.
• Climate and the impact of environmental change in city spaces.
The workshop took place as a hybrid event in person and via zoom in July 2023.
If you are interested in joining future similar events, please get in touch with Dr Dorothy Butchard (d.butchard@bham.ac.uk).