Our mission at the Binks Hub is to co-create research for human flourishing. And as we move into our second year of work, we’re keen to explore further different academic, practice and artistic perspectives on the concept of ‘human flourishing’.
To help us shape our vision of what human flourishing might look like – and how we might get there – on the 6th June, we invited artists, practitioners, community organisations, policy makers and academics into a shared space for a series of lectures, discussions, and creative exercises to examine a number of key questions:
- How do different disciplines – both inside and outside academia – understand human flourishing?
- What does it mean to promote human flourishing?
- What role might research and knowledge exchange have in developing our understanding of and interventions around human flourishing?
As our co-director Dr Autumn Roesch-Marsh put it at the event, central to all of this is a question about “playfulness and joy”; about how research can be fun, and how we can meet people where they are.
We were thrilled to hear from Professor Andrew Sayer, poet John Glenday, former CEO of the Grassmarket Community Project Jonny Kinross, and Christina McMellon and Isla Jamieson-MacKenzie from the TRIUMPH network as speakers at the event, with notes from their presentations summarised below.
Professor Andrew Sayer: On flourishing
Andrew Sayer opened by asking “When do we see that word [flourishing] used? It’s not as common as something like happiness […] What does flourishing mean, then? Vivacity. Variety. Abundance. Energy and activity. All very upbeat things. The flip side is that someone who is not flourishing is not doing the things that they’re able to do.”
On an individualistic approach, we might consider flourishing to involve pursuing the things that we think are worthwhile, absorbing and fulfilling, and having good relationships with others – in other words, developing commitments and concerns. These commitments and concerns are essential to our identity; they are what give us meaning.
But taking this individualistic approach can easily morph into upbeat motivational speak – as if it’s up to you to flourish, and if you don’t, that’s your fault.
It’s important we don’t forget that flourishing depends on what’s available and accessible to you – what Andrew referred to as the social dimensions of flourishing. For him, there are three aspects to this:
(1) Interpersonal relationships: vulnerability is part of being human – we’re all dependent on others, and good care is a condition of wellbeing and flourishing.
(2) Institutional settings: We spend much of our time in institutions, from nursery to the workplace. Or take schools, for example – these need to be well-funded and offer broad opportunities beyond the academic curriculum.
(3) Structural inequalities: The more unequal a society is – for example, in terms of what people get and what their jobs allow them to contribute – the more unequal individuals’ chances to flourish will be. We tend to inherit the advantages and disadvantages of our parents.
So what do we need to flourish? Not endless economic growth, but a more supportive and environmentally sustainable society – with things like good quality public services, including health and social care and an educational system that supports all-round development, and much greater equality so that everyone can participate in society on a par with others.
Jonny Kinross: A practice-based perspective on flourishing
Jonny Kinross spoke to us from the perspective of a practitioner – but also from his experience of living in some of the most traumatised, vulnerable, and abused communities.
For Jonny, the three most important things we need to flourish are:
- Somewhere to live
- Something to do
- Someone to love
Somewhere to live…
Search Institute identified 40 positive supports and strengths that young people need to succeed.
Half of the assets focus on the relationships and opportunities they need in their families, schools, and communities (external assets). The remaining assets focus on the social-emotional strengths, values, and commitments that are nurtured within young people (internal assets).
In Jonny’s 30 years of community youth work, he says he has never come across young people who had these assets. And when it comes to internal assets, it’s a lot about what’s been internalised – what you learn over years and years and years.
Preventing adversity, buffering adversity and fostering resilience is when people live with more hope than fear.
Something to do…
It’s absolutely crucial that people have meaning, purpose, opportunities to contribute and belong. Jonny says: “At the Grassmarket, when we asked people to help us, people would often say they’d never been asked to do this before. I can’t overstate how important something meaningful to do is.”
For Jonny, that’s the power of social enterprises – they offer people something meaningful to do.
Someone to love…
This isn’t just about being loved – but about it being a reciprocal relationship. In order to flourish, people must be able to love someone else. And where people aren’t valued and connected, we get this awful experience of loneliness and isolation.
In sum, human flourishing can only truly be achieved where everyone, not just the few, are given the conditions to flourish: where we all have somewhere to live, something to do and someone to love.
John Glenday: Poetry and human flourishing
John Glenday recently worked with our co-director Autumn on a Poetry for Wellbeing toolkit. He read some of his wonderful poems, interspersed with his thoughts and experiences on the links between poetry and human flourishing.
He began by sharing: “For me, the joy of poetry is that it allows me to relate to other people in the time I have.” For John, the benefit of poetry to flourishing is its ability to support our emotional and personal needs, to link the physical and emotional worlds, to represent the dynamic between the individual and society.
In his words: “So, what does poetry do? I say it exists to keep us human. How? By refusing to look at the big things and taking us down to the individual level.”
In relation to his own experience, John told us, “A major aspect of poetry for me has been a stress relief thing. I used to memorise poems and recite them on the way home from work as a way of de-escalating.
“I’ve run quite a few workshops in the past, mainly with mental health groups, prisons, children, the homeless – and in every case, poetry reminds us that we are human beings.
“And if we engage with others in writing poetry, we give them the opportunity to remind us that they are human beings, too.”
Christina McMellon and Isla Jamieson-MacKenzie: Flourishing in TRIUMPH and beyond
TRIUMPH stands for Transdisciplinary Research for the Improvement of Youth Mental Public Health, a research hub that conducts co-produced research with young people.
Christina McMellon is a researcher with the network, and Isla Jamieson-MacKenzie is a member of the network’s youth advisory group. Together, they came up with a list of the things they think of as “flourishing”:
- Living our best lives
- Working and spending time together
- Challenging structural limitations
- Working towards, reaching and/or exceeding our goals
- Having fun
- Developing as people and in our relationships
Isla spoke powerfully about her own experiences through the network: “I attended the first residential at seventeen after a mental health crisis point, dropping out of a toxic educational environment – and was shocked afterwards to see a photo of myself laughing. Within a day at the residential, I’d made connections with people who on paper weren’t that similar to me.
“Now, four years later, I have a lot more confidence. I never thought I’d had a job, and now I have four or five. I never thought I’d have friends, and now me and some of the other TRIUMPH network are going to get matching tattoos.
“I don’t think you can measure flourishing by getting a job and being more confident. Those are by-products of the support and social connections at TRIUMPH, of being told that I could do new things while still being myself.
“Recently we’ve been thinking about TRIUMPH coming to an end, and it gave us an opportunity to think about how we’ve changed as individuals and as a group. It’s been four years of spending time together, laughing together, that have made us a group and given us a social identity.”
Isla and Christina also spoke about what the group had identified as essential for a mentally well society for young people:
Christina noted that across the group of 60 young people, all of them were campaigning on mental health issues, and all of them wanted a society that wasn’t focused on productivity and work.
In terms of how to take this forward, the TRIUMPH group have put together a call to action:
- Recognise the societal changes that young people prioritise as being most important to their mental health.
- Involve young people in the decision-making process and design of new services or initiatives to address these priorities.
- Support young people to feel confident and empowered to involve themselves in local decision-making processes around governments and local authorities – and in parallel, ensure that governments and local authorities are committed to listening to and acting on the views of young people.
- Ensure that research on young peoples’ mental health is impactful and that there are appropriate pathways to rapidly translate new research findings into real-world action
What next for our work on flourishing?
This isn’t the end for our thinking and research around human flourishing. Following the discussions on the day, we’ve been working creatively as a team to produce a collage (facilitated by artist Jean McEwan) bringing together the various strands of thought from the day to help us articulate our thinking around what human flourishing means.
Our wonderful Binks Hub student intern, Brigid, has also been interviewing artists, practitioners, and academics about flourishing to feed into the conversation, which we’ll be sharing here over the coming weeks.
Thanks so much to our speakers, to Jean McEwan for her facilitation on the day, and to Willy Gilder for capturing such beautiful illustrations of the event (used in the featured image for this blog post) – as well as to all who attended on their day for such thoughtful questions and discussions.
