Wellness. Wellbeing. Happiness. The good life. These terms circulate widely on social media, in advertising campaigns and self-help books, across workplaces and universities, and within public health, development, policy, and governance discourse. Their proliferation—and often, their commodification—sits against the backdrop of a deepening polycrisis that is at once planetary in scale and intimately felt by many students in their everyday lives. Think climate change, geopolitical instability, rising costs of living, housing, and food, precarious employment, and growing uncertainty about what kinds of futures are possible for people and planet. In the face of these intersecting crises, what can anthropology offer us for understanding what it means—and what it takes—to live well?
This question lies at the heart of The Culture and Politics of Wellbeing, a third-year undergraduate elective unit within the Anthropology program at the University of Sydney (Gadigal Country, Australia) that I designed and delivered for the first time in 2026. The unit examines how wellbeing is defined, experienced, governed, and contested across diverse social, cultural, and ecological landscapes. It draws on ethnographic case studies from around the world to understand how unequal social conditions and transformations determine individual, collective, human, and more-than-human wellbeing. Students learn how intersections of gender, class, race, and age shape disparities in access to care, resources, and recognition, and delve into the political economy of health and development, Indigenous and decolonial perspectives on wellbeing, and environmental change and its impacts on health, parenthood, and intergenerational wellbeing.
Course Design
In designing The Culture and Politics of Wellbeing, I worked with a threefold teaching philosophy. First, I wanted to invite students to critically interrogate wellbeing itself—to ask who particular visions of wellbeing benefit, what costs they entail, what violences they may obscure, and how the language of wellbeing can be commodified, instrumentalized, or co-opted by institutions, markets, and states. Second, I wished to encourage students to understand wellbeing as culturally, socially, and politically situated, exploring the diversity of ways in which living well is imagined and practiced across different sociocultural contexts, and across individual, collective, and more-than-human lives. Most importantly, the unit challenges students to identify and examine practices, relations, and possibilities that do or might enable people and communities to live well and flourish despite seemingly insurmountable odds. This is why I frame the unit to my students from day one as a kind of “anti-crisis” course—one that takes seriously the profound challenges confronting the world today but without allowing crisis to become the only lens through which we apprehend the present or imagine the future.
A thematic approach allows us to explore a different facet of wellbeing across the semester and identify connective tissues (empirical or conceptual) between these different dimensions. In the introductory session, we grapple with wellbeing’s rise as an object of anthropological inquiry, considering why it has until recently been relatively absent within the discipline’s corpus, and how it sits alongside consonant values such as happiness, dignity, and aspiration. We then examine national and global indicators, indices, and metrics through which wellbeing is measured (for instance, the Human Development Index, World Happiness Report, Happy Planet Index, and UN Sustainable Development Goal Indicators), their strengths and limitations, and alternative approaches capable of capturing its multifaceted dimensions. Week 3 explores how political, economic, and social forces shape wellbeing, and how structural violence illuminates the harms produced by inequitable systems that constrain people’s capacities to live well. Week 4 centers on Indigenous wellbeing, considering how extractive, colonial histories and ongoing settler structures shape dominant understandings of wellbeing, and exploring Indigenous approaches grounded in land, kinship, and more-than-human relations and the possibilities of decolonizing wellbeing.
We then turn to the gendered expectations, divisions of care, social inequalities, moral norms, and state policies that shape reproductive wellbeing and uneven access to care across the life course. Health continues as a major theme in the ensuing week on food, nutrition, and nourishment, which explores how cultural meanings, political-economic conditions, memories, emotions, and sensory experiences of food shape bodily health, pleasure, belonging, and moral responsibility. In Week 7, we interrogate expectations of happiness, resilience, and individual responsibility for mental wellbeing, alongside the institutions, technologies, social norms, and environmental changes that shape experiences of mental distress. This is followed by a session on intergenerational wellbeing, which delves into how care, kinship, dependence, migration, and shifting family arrangements shape possibilities for meaningful lives across the life course—from conception to childhood, and adolescence, adulthood, old age, and the afterlife.
The remainder of the semester focuses on objects, morality, ecology, and repair. We consider how everyday objects and leisure activities generate a sense of security, dignity, pleasure, and hope, while also examining how wellbeing is (re)packaged and sold as a lifestyle and how people create alternative, non-market forms of care and pleasure. Religion and spirituality help us think through how people cultivate moral selves and how discipline, suffering, healing, responsibility, and self-transformation can become pathways toward meaningful or flourishing lives. The final two weeks push wellbeing beyond the human to include plants, animals, landscapes, and climates, considering what flourishing, fulfillment, and justice might mean if we were to take non-humans seriously as subjects and agents of wellbeing. In the final reflective session, we think with hope, abundance, and practices of care and repair that might enable visions of wellbeing beyond narratives of damage and deficit.
Class Activities
The teaching pedagogy of The Culture and Politics of Wellbeing combines formal instruction in anthropological concepts with student-led ethnographic inquiry, experiential activities, personal reflection, and opportunities to translate disciplinary knowledge beyond the classroom. Each class combines a mini-lecture from the instructor that introduces key concepts and debates with close engagement with required readings that are grounded primarily in ethnographic case studies, while substantial class time is reserved for discussion, questions, and a suite of interactive activities that translate abstract anthropological concepts into practical, collaborative exercises in which students learn to move between description, analysis, critique, and application.
For instance, the in-class activity “Wellbeing Policy Redesign” stemmed from a desire to get students to consider how dominant measures of wellbeing can embody culturally specific assumptions and to collectively imagine alternatives to these models. The activity also emerged directly from the week’s required readings on Māori and Inuit approaches to wellbeing, which offer strong empirical and comparative foundations for the kinds of policy alternatives that the activity encouraged students to develop. In class, I first presented the fictional strategy as if it were an ordinary government policy document, deliberately giving students time to identify its assumptions before introducing the redesign task. I then moved between groups, prompting them to push beyond simply adding Indigenous concepts to an otherwise unchanged framework and to reconsider its underlying categories, authorities, relationships, and timescales. Many students initially found the fictional strategy quite reasonable, and some were surprised by how many assumptions they uncovered once they began interrogating it. The strongest discussion emerged when groups realized that redesigning the indicators did not necessarily resolve the deeper problem of who has the authority to define and measure Indigenous wellbeing in the first place.
The “Ethnography of One Meal” in-class exercise, meanwhile, grew out of my search for a way to make the anthropological critique of nutritional measures of wellbeing tangible through students’ own everyday lives. Before class, each student was asked to photograph a meal they had eaten in the previous week. In class, students shared their photographs and then interviewed one another about where and when the meal was eaten, who prepared it, who was present, and what happened around the act of eating. I then introduced prompts that drew their attention to the histories and emotions the meal evokes, the standards through which particular foods become “good” or “bad,” sensory pleasures, and the often-invisible forms of labour that make eating possible. At the end of the activity, I challenged students to describe the same meal exclusively through calories, macronutrients, fiber, vitamins, serving size, and a health rating. Students appreciated the opportunity to think through food as a source of wellbeing in the context of their own lives, recast as ethnographic material. The photographs they shared generated rich stories about family routines, childhood memories, cultural expectations, convenience, care, pleasure, and domestic labor. The most revealing moment came when students considered what disappeared when their meal was reduced to calories, nutrients, and health ratings and then drew on this reduction to reflect more broadly on the sociocultural and affective dimensions of food beyond quantifiable indicators.
Career-readiness activities in the final weeks of the semester shift from analyzing wellbeing to asking students to articulate what their anthropological training enables them to do. I developed this activity after noticing that students can often explain what anthropology has taught them intellectually but struggle to translate that learning into the language of skills, capabilities, and professional practice. I searched for a real position in which anthropological capacities were clearly valuable and selected a Médecins Sans Frontières job description for a cultural mediator, a role involving bridging linguistic and cultural differences between asylum seekers and psychosocial staff, building relationships of trust, and adapting health promotion to different cultural contexts. I teach the activity in two stages. First, students work in small groups to annotate the job description, identifying its explicit and implicit requirements and mapping these against learning outcomes and skills they have developed through the unit, including cross-cultural communication, qualitative research, critical thinking, listening, adaptability, problem-solving, perspective-taking, and systems thinking. They then test this translation through three rounds of non-assessed mock interviews, rotating through the roles of interviewee, interviewer, and observer, with the observer providing specific feedback after each round. Students are often hesitant at first and tend to describe anthropology in broad terms, but become noticeably more confident and concrete as the rounds progress: Rather than simply claiming to be “culturally aware” or “good at communication,” they begin drawing on ethnographic listening, reflexivity, contextual analysis, and perspective-taking to explain how they might build trust or navigate different understandings of mental health. In the process, students have discovered that capabilities they had regarded simply as part of “doing anthropology” are, in fact, legible and valuable professional skills.
Assessments
The unit’s assessments are designed around crafting connections: between anthropological concepts and lived experience, between scholarly knowledge and the everyday worlds students inhabit, and between students themselves as members of a shared learning community. For instance, an auto-ethnographic reflection assignment asks students to select a location, environment, activity, object, person, memory, or event that they see as procuring them with a sense of wellbeing and to describe in detail what they have chosen, including their personal experiences, thoughts, and emotions, before using concepts and ideas from the unit to examine how and why it produces wellbeing and what particular forms of wellbeing it enables. The aim here is to move back and forth between the conceptual and the personal, with ideas encountered in lectures and readings becoming tools for making sense of students’ own lives, and lived experience becoming material through which ideas can be explored, complicated, or questioned. The deliberately creative and experimental design of the assessment also expands the forms through which students can make these connections. Students are strongly encouraged to write through journal entries, poetry, dialogue, or other first-person forms and to incorporate photographs, film, audio, or other multimodal materials, encouraging them to attend to dimensions of wellbeing—memory, emotion, sensory experience, attachment, place, materiality—that may be difficult to capture through conventional academic prose alone.
A complementary assessment that also helps foster connections is the weekly discussion post. Posted on Canvas throughout the semester and visible to all students, these posts explicitly encourage students to engage with their peers’ comments, allowing one student’s interpretation, question, example, or uncertainty to become a prompt for another student’s thinking. Students can also use the posts to raise outstanding questions or points of confusion about the week’s topic, meaning that uncertainty itself becomes something that can be articulated and worked through collectively rather than concealed or resolved individually. They are further invited to connect readings and weekly topics to relevant real-world events and to share links and other resources, enabling students to bring material they encounter outside the formal curriculum into the group’s discussion.
The unit’s reading list is deliberately curated to model diversity within the production of anthropological knowledge itself, balancing canonical and field-defining texts with recent work by emerging scholars and substantial representation of women, BIPOC, and Indigenous scholars. Anthropology remains the intellectual core of the curriculum, but the readings also deliberately cross disciplinary boundaries, bringing anthropology into conversation with influential work in sociology, feminist and queer theory, cultural studies, philosophy, Indigenous studies, public health, environmental studies, and human rights. Sara Ahmed’s feminist critique of happiness, for instance, sits alongside anthropological work on digital mental health and solastalgia, while scholarship on multispecies justice and Indigenous planetary wellbeing broadens the disciplinary and conceptual vocabulary available to students.
Geographical breadth is equally deliberate: Students encounter ethnographic material from Bhutan, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Inuit communities in Canada, Guatemala, West Papua, Brazil, Peru, Japan, Malaysia, Hawai‘i, and elsewhere, exposing them to radically different understandings and practices of living well. At the same time, the reading list intentionally addresses experiences likely to resonate with students’ own lives—including food and eating, friendship, objects and consumption, happiness and emotional life, environmental distress, and young people’s use of digital mental-health technologies—giving students multiple points at which to connect anthropological scholarship on wellbeing to familiar and everyday experiences, relationships, anxieties, and practice.
Student feedback, both solicited and unsolicited, is helping me identify and think through several tensions that sit at the heart of the unit’s design. How, for instance, do we teach wellbeing anthropologically without reproducing the idea that wellbeing is something individuals should simply optimize, consume, or take personal responsibility for achieving? How do anthropologists hold critique and hope in productive tension in their research, especially against realities of ongoing structural violence—and how can an “anti-crisis” ethos ensure that sustained attention to these conditions does not culminate in either paralysis or erasure? When it comes to connecting anthropology to students’ lives, how do we design activities and assessments that invite personal reflection without making the disclosure of intimate, difficult, or traumatic experiences feel necessary for either participation or academic success? And as we design our curricula, how do we bring diverse cultural and Indigenous understandings of wellbeing into conversation without reducing them to interchangeable “perspectives” or extracting them from the historical, political, and colonial relations in which they are embedded?
It is precisely these tensions that The Culture and Politics of Wellbeing seeks to keep alive—not necessarily or primarily with the aim of reassuring students that everything will be well, but rather of exposing them to granular ethnographic accounts of wellbeing despite it all, offering them the conceptual tools to think through wellbeing’s complexities, and providing them with safe and shared space for collective thinking in which despair need not have the final say.