Zielke, Julia
(2020)
MAKING THE PERSONAL POLITICAL: A Dwelling-Oriented Feminist Approach Towards Wellbeing and Wellbeing Research.
PhD thesis, University of Liverpool.
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Abstract
Overall, this thesis is concerned about what makes who feel good and function well, by offering an epistemological, methodological and theoretical framework for wellbeing research. To mobilise these ideas, throughout this thesis I build on and contribute to three sets of literatures: i) relational wellbeing is the understanding that being and becoming well is a process of unfolding possibilities with other human and non-human actors and environments across multiple scales of people, places and power (Atkinson et al., 2017), ii) feminist version of dwelling challenges the dichotic assumptions of wellbeing and dwelling (like ill/healthy, outward/inward, alone/together, nature/culture) and argues that we need to engage in the in-between spaces of these spectrums to develop wellbeing possibilities (Todres & Galvin, 2010), and iii) feminist epistemologies and theory are critical about the way that we usually produce knowledge around who is deemed healthy or functional and looks at tools to challenge these power dynamics (Ahmed, 2017). I bring these literatures in conversation with questions pertaining to mental health and wellbeing and their interface with political precarity, austerity, and home (Hall, 2018). I understand home as a nexus or site where a variety of different trajectories and scales (like the intimate, socio-material, economic, historical or political) come together, jump across one another, and are, in the process of researching them, explicitly brought to the fore in the form of personal stories and idiosyncratic experiences. The main body of this thesis comprises three articles: i) a conceptual engagement with wellbeing epistemologies, ii) an empirical study that looks into the experiences of 18 mental health service users through an an arts-based method called Story Houses, and iii) another empirical study that combines Story Houses with interviews of 14 community land trust activists, a type of social housing. My empirical findings together with the theoretical underpinnings put forward an integrative, cross-scalar framework for thinking about wellbeing in a web of wider persisting inequalities, and socio-political and environmental changes.
| Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) |
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Management |
| Depositing User: | Symplectic Admin |
| Date Deposited: | 09 Jun 2020 10:53 |
| Last Modified: | 18 Jan 2023 23:53 |
| DOI: | 10.17638/03085390 |
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| URI: | https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3085390 |
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