Workshop: Whose Well-Being?

The EUI project “WE BE: States of WEll-BEing and the measurement of healthy lives” analyses common features and differences in national well-being traditions, policies and practices; transnational well-being indices; and well-being definitions across disciplines. Based on WE BE results, the digital workshop on 9 December from 12:00 to 14:15 CET discusses WE BE project findings along three guiding questions: Who defines well-being? Who measures well-being? Who is affected by these concepts and measures of well-being?

WE BE’s main objective is to understand whether common or distinct well-being concepts emerge and how national translations relate to globally framed paradigms of well-being. Research on well-being concepts and metrics supports this analytical focus, highlighting the territoriality and subjectivity of well-being: each community may weight index dimensions differently; surveys obtain territorial insight but prescribe, through the examples in the question, the definition of provisions such as cultural facilities or ‘public spaces’; national comparisons tabulate policies but not the underlying community and history. More granular understandings and measures of territorial well-being therefore call for case studies of the histories, meanings, and practices involved in wellbeing, for the contexts themselves, and for others to learn from.

The WE BE project takes up this demand for contextualisation and focuses on two main dimensions:

1) transboundary commonalities and political economy factors underpinning disciplinary conceptualisations of well-being and global well-being metrics;

2) translation of these concepts and metrics into national policies and practices in well-being.

It does so in three distinct research steps:

• A systematic review on disciplinary well-being conceptualisations asking what well-being conceptualisations are set in the literature, from what disciplines, with what nuances?
• A data set of well-being indices stock-taking who establishes global discursive and metrological authority in measuring well-being, and the geopolitical and political economy distributions of these actors.
• National case studies: analysing what contextualised meanings, practices, measures, and actors in well-being constitute a national well-being fabric absent from academic literature and global indices.

Workshop participation

The workshop will take place on 9 December 2025, 12:00-14:15 CET online on Zoom 

Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89902532137?pwd=hav02ZAA78ubObxI89dRLMqzCWhWsn.1
ID: 899 0253 2137
Code: 095260

Further information

Call for participation in WE BE:

WE BE welcomes expressions of interest from researchers to develop case studies of well-being in their national contexts or in specific policy domains based on a shared WE BE case study research questionnaire. There are no geographical limits to the contexts studied.

Terminologically, well-being is taken as a starting point, drawing on the broad use of the term in English. The call for case studies actively invites researchers to use the terms and concepts that capture being and living well in their respective cultural, linguistic, and national contexts. 

A research questionnaire will be provided to assist the developers of the case study and support the comparability of findings across contexts. While WE BE is unable to offer financial assistance, the research team is glad to collaborate and share research infrastructure, insights and practices, including WE BE’s research template development, and results of WE BE’s systematic review of well-being conceptualisations. The WE BE Global collaborative research groups currently includes 29 researchers and their case studies from five continents. The final outcome of the collaborative research will be a journal special issue to be published in 2026.

Interested researchers are invited to write to the Principal Investigators, indicating the national context that they would like to address. Please use the subject line WE BE Case Study Expression of Interest and send your expression of interest to Gaby Umbach. 

Core WE BE project team: Attila Bartha, Bogna Kietlińska-Radwańska, Petra Krylova, Jaromir Harmáček, Gergely Stegner, Mira Tiwari, Gaby Umbach, Raffaele Ventura

Find more information on WE BE: https://www.eui.eu/research-hub?id=states-of-well-being-and-the-measurement-of-healthy-lives 

The WE BE project received seed funding via the EUI Widening Programme call 2025. The EUI Widening Europe Programme initiative aims to foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.

Contact

For further questions, please reach out to Mira Manini Tiwari, Research Associate Knowledge, Governance, Transformations, and Robert Schuman, Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute under the following email: miramanini.tiwari[at]eui.eu