Well-being and Place: an International Conference

 

7th -9th April 2009, Durham University, United Kingdom

 

Organised and hosted by the Centre for the Study of Cities & Regions and the
Social Wellbeing and Spatial Justice research cluster of the Department of
Geography at Durham University in collaboration with the University’s
Wolfson Research Institute.

 

Keynote speakers

Andrew Simms, Policy Director, New Economics Foundation

Professor Tim Blackman, Director, Wolfson Research Institute, Durham University

 

Call for papers

Over the last ten years the targets of policy have expanded beyond the
purely material and economic to embrace more subjective dimensions of human
flourishing.  Amongst a range of terms that have entered policy debates,
‘well-being’ has perhaps gained the greatest currency, incorporating both
physical and cognitive elements and applied across individual and collective
scales of analysis. It is clear that the definition, experience and
determinants of well-being will vary in different kinds of places. However,
the complex ways in which place and well-being interact remain relatively
under-researched and under-theorised.

 

This conference will draw together research that explicitly links well-being
and place. It will advance knowledge and stimulate future directions that
are both creative intellectually and timely for contemporary policy debates.
The organisers would like to include research from a range of different
scales of analysis, across different substantive domains and from both
policy-linked and more explorative approaches. The concept of place can be
interpreted broadly from geographical locations (urban, rural, city,
nation), everyday settings (home, work, school, street, leisure centres) and
different scales (individual to international).

 

We welcome contributions from the academic and policy communities that focus
on the relationship between well-being and place, broadly defined. The
themes for the sessions will include:

 

·         Home and well-being

·         Theory, methods and ethics of well-being

·         Transitions:  well-being across this life course and the next

·         Therapeutic places and unhealthy spaces

·         Busy with a purpose; the importance of doing nothing

·         Well-being in motion:  flows, networks, relations

·         and others

 

Abstracts (200 words) for paper presentations and proposals for panel
discussions can be submitted up to 30th November 2008. Please send to Sara
Fuller: [log in to unmask] More details are available on the
conference website (www.geography.dur.ac.uk/conf/wellbeingandplace).