PhD Courses in Denmark

Course content

This course aims to provide PhD students with in-depth and critical understandings of well-being as an analytical and empirical category in humanities and social science research. Participants will explore different conceptualizations of well-being, their theoretical foundations, associated methodological approaches, and applications across various research fields. The course also aims to explore alternative or neighbouring concepts like belonging and mattering. Furthermore, the course aims to critically discuss well-being as a normative ideal and as a governance tool, and how discourses on well-being relates to (neoliberal) institutional contexts. Based on teachers’ and participants’ research, we will discuss settings particularly pointed to as critical for and/or invoked to solve problems of well-being, e.g. educational institutions and civil society organisations often understood as anchor institutions for working with well-being. The course aims to critically reflect on the interplay between people’s differentiated everyday life contexts and conditions and designs of social interventions to support well-being – as well as the theoretical concepts we use to analyze dynamics of well-being and how these concepts can become complicit in formulating interventions and norms related to well-being.
The aim of this course is to facilitate and strengthen phd-students’ critical reflexive dialogues on problems related to well-being.

Focus will be on reflections on how theoretical concepts in participants’ particular research projects

a) are positioned theoretically in relation to (other) dominant paragdimatic problem definitions regarding well-being, and

b) might influence problem definitions and representations, thus (implicitly) pointing towards particular forms of intervention.

The course springs from an interdisciplinary research collaboration on well-being in education and everyday life in the Nordic countries.