Call for Proposals: Well-being and Place Conference

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: s.k.fuller@durham.ac.uk. More details about registration and accommodation will be available shortly on the conference website (www.geography.dur.ac.uk/conf/wellbeingandplace).



Dr Beverley A Searle
Research Fellow
Department of Geography
University of Durham
South Road
Durham DH1 3LE

Telephone: 0191 334 1901
Fax: 0191 334 1801

New from The Policy Press:
WELL-BEING; In search of a good life?
Beverley A. Searle
For further details visit http://www.policypress.org.uk