Mon. Dec 11th, 2023

Common Alternatives

Creating Futures Beyond Capital and Carbon

The Well-living Lab

The current dominance of technocratic, expert-driven, top-down notions of and approaches to “Well-being” has left little room for saving the idea and reintegrating it into truly transformative projects and policy shifts. It is time to think of a new notion that would liberate us from the Eurocentric, individualistic, economistic, class-blind, gender-blind, color-blind, and ecology-blind perceptions of well-being and quality of life. The Well-living Lab, drawing on the experiences and alternative ideas generated by the transformative grassroots and community movements, paves the way for the development of a new notion and approach to promoting and evaluating communal/social quality of life.

Project I: Reimagining Quality of Life Post-COVID19

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What is this project about?

This project reimagines ‘quality of life’ in the post-COVID19 context by challenging its conventional concepts. Conducted in partnership with New Economy Network Australia (NENA), the project will survey and map innovative approaches to defining ‘quality of life’, as pursued by NENA’s affiliated organizations working to transform Australia’s economic system to achieve ecological well-being and social justice. Drawing on the results of the survey, followed by in-depth and focus group interviews of a sample of such transformative forces, we will develop an alternative socio-cultural construct, as a new ‘conceptual platform’ to strategically engage with broader communities and policymakers to plan and proceed toward just and sustainable futures. The interdisciplinary approach of the project will lead to conceptual advances essential for the construction of a new indicator framework.

This project aims to produce an alternative conceptual framework for influencing policy, public debate, and research addressing quality of life and social progress. The goal will be achieved by empirically exploring and critically examining how transformative notions of ‘good life/well-living’ are constructed at the grassroots level.

👉READ MORE ABOUT THE PROJECT HERE👈