Assembling wellbeing: bodies, affects and the ‘conditions of possibility’ for wellbeing

ABSTRACT

Wellbeing is a loaded term in youth sociology, due to its associations with individualising narratives which call on young people to manage the effects of structural disadvantage or hardship through personal practices such as ‘cultivating resilience’. This article extends relational approaches in youth sociology to develop an understanding of wellbeing as assembled and patterned by the diverse socio-material conditions of young people’s lives, including stress, abuse, trauma, financial hardship, friendships, families, work, study, and landscapes. I draw on case study examples and photographic images from a study of young people’s ‘everyday embodiments’ to illustrate the rich, non-individual and more-than-human dynamics by which wellbeing assembles. This conceptualisation may be useful for scholars of youth who take a critical view of the traditionally individualised and psychologised remit of ‘wellbeing’, and wish to thoroughly interrogate the socio-material and affective dynamics which mediate the conditions of possibility in young people’s lives. The reframing of wellbeing along embodied and affective lines contributes new understandings of the ways structural circumstances and events in young people’s lives reverberate in the body and mediate how the world is experienced, and the possibilities for living which result.

KEYWORDS:

• Wellbeing
• affect
• embodiment
• visual methods
• youth

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Criticisms of discourses informing approaches to youth wellbeing have emerged from the cultural contexts of Australian and British perspectives in youth sociology.

2 A full discussion of the broader demographic details is provided in Coffey (2019, 2020). Participants were recruited through posting paper fliers around a campus that houses both university and technical college study, on personal and institutional social media sites, and through ‘snowballing’ through asking participants to pass on study details to friends they thought might be interested. Participants self-selected to participate by contacting the researcher, and were then provided with an information statement and consent form. The project was approved by the Author’s institution’s Human Ethics Committee. Interviews were conducted by the author and took place at the University and Tafe campus. Interviews were mostly outside at picnic tables or benches when the weather allowed, or in an empty office space. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. All participants gave informed consent.

3 More-than-representational analysis, here, involved initial thematic analysis through reading transcripts and identifying themes associated with wellbeing, the body, and the circumstances of young people’s lives. Analytic ‘techniques’ also extended beyond conventional interpretive frameworks by also exploring the affective intensities of the research encounter, through paying attention to embodied sensations and processes of being affected at all stages – in the research encounter, in reading and writing-with the data.

4 The broader findings of this project, (Coffey 2019, 2020) show that health and wellbeing are not ‘individual matters’, formed primarily through participants’ own practices or behaviours. Rather, the possibility of experiencing health or wellbeing depended on the broader circumstances of young people’s lives, which were largely beyond their immediate control. The common stories which featured across participants’ narratives described how wellbeing is negotiated alongside conditions of hardship related to socio-economic disadvantage, relating to the combined stressors of study, work, and money; and the availability of material and relationship supports, such as through family and friendships.

5 I use this term to connect with Adkins and Lury’s (2009) call for a sociology of ‘the sensate empirical’, ‘a sociology that can deal with uncertainty, chaos, complexity and multiplicity’ (p.18). This is particularly needed for the study of a phenomena as complex, messy, and entangled in socio-material and embodied processes as wellbeing.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Newcastle Australia [grant number Women in Research Fellowship, 2018].