Full Description
This insightful Modern Guide explores heterodox approaches to modern wellbeing research, with a specific focus on how wellbeing is understood and practised, exploring policies and actions which are taken to shape wellbeing. It evaluates contemporary trends in wellbeing research, including the sometimes competing definitions, methods and approaches offered by different disciplinary perspectives.
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Exploring the threats to wellbeing from the environments we inhabit and the situations societies create and endure, chapters particularly look at wellbeing inequalities and the experiences of marginalised groups, demonstrating the connection between wellbeing and political struggle. Provocative commentaries from leading scholars plus chapters on original theoretical developments and research studies across diverse world regions reveal wellbeing research based on situated practices, social differences and specific cultural contexts. This Modern Guide assesses the influence and impact of wellbeing research on policy and practice across a range of sectors and spaces, including: wellbeing budgeting, nature-based interventions, urban design, environmental resource management, prisons, housing, international migration, and post-conflict situations.
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This will be a useful read for scholars of human geography, social policy, urban studies, anthropology, political science and environmental economics. Policy makers will also appreciate the suggestions for improvement to wellbeing policies and practices.
Contents
Contents:
Foreword xiv
Katherine Trebeck, Wellbeing Economy Alliance
1 Introduction to wellbeing research 1
Beverley A Searle, Jessica Pykett and Maria Jesus Alfaro-Simmonds
PART I APPROACHING WELLBEING
2 Commentary to Part I: reanimating the radical possibilities
of wellbeing 23
Sarah Atkinson
3 Towards a queer epistemological framework for wellbeing
research 29
Julia Zielke
4 A Marxian approach to wellbeing: human nature and use value 51
David Watson
5 Developing qualitative, biographical research into
happiness and wellbeing: a sociological perspective 68
Mark Cieslik
6 Practicing wellbeing through community economies: an
action research approach 84
Thomas SJ Smith and Kelly Dombroski
PART II PRACTICING WELLBEING
7 Commentary to Part II: a wellbeing lens in practice 104
Neil Thin
8 Prisoners' rehabilitation and wellbeing: a psychosocial
perspective 110
Fabio Tartarini
9 Gender and wellbeing in post-war Sri Lanka 129
Fazeeha Azmi
10 Wellbeing and inclusion: a place for religion 148
Laura Kapinga and Bettina Bock
11 Children experiencing happiness in the city 164
Maria Jesus Alfaro-Simmonds
12 Housing inequalities and wellbeing: a critical analysis of
narratives from stakeholders in Luxembourg 184
Magdalena Górczyńska-Angiulli, Elise Machline
13 Woodlands and wellbeing: evaluating the 'Actif Woods
Wales' programme 205
Heli Gittins, Sophie Wynne-Jones and Val Morrison
PART III WHERE NEXT FOR WELLBEING?
14 Commentary to Part III: wellbeing: a means for informed
policy-making 227
Susan J Elliott
15 Who benefits and who suffers from international
migration? Global evidence from the science of happiness 232
Martijn Hendriks
16 Human wellbeing in environmental management 245
Kelly Biedenweg and David J Trimbach
17 Budgeting for wellbeing 266
Arthur Grimes
18 Subjective wellbeing and transformation 282
Beverley A Searle
Index
