Why does our network focus on the state?
Central to this project is the necessary and challenging task of rethinking and critiquing the role and conceptualisation of state, sovereignty, and collective action, in politics today. It maintains that without such work we cannot begin to reconstruct a collective alternative vision to our unequal neoliberal world. Such a re-conceptualisation demands that whilst we question and remake what the term wellbeing could mean, we simultaneously harness and re-direct the growing interest in wellbeing into an alternative institutional framework for feasible theoretical and policy solutions that offers to strengthen democracy and protect it from the threat of authoritarian populism.
Although Viktoria and Clare devised the concept of ‘the wellbeing state’ independently, it was subsequently discovered that the concept of a wellbeing state, as a reworking of the Welfare state, was coined in March 2022 in a report of the UK House of Lord’s COVID-19 Committee, and in collaboration with the What Works Centre for Wellbeing. The HoL report called for further work to investigate the idea, but no further research has yet been published into the concept. This network provides an opportunity to develop a concerted, radical, and transformative response to this call by bringing together academic research with emerging policy work (through partnerships beyond academia including Shelter, and Autonomy).
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