Rethinking Youth Wellbeing ― Critical Perspectives

This volume offers a critical rethinking of the construct of youth wellbeing, stepping back from taken-for-granted and psychologically inflected understandings. Wellbeing has become a catchphrase in educational, health and social care policies internationally, informing a range of school programs and social interventions and increasingly shaping everyday understandings of young people. Drawing on research by established and emerging scholars in Australia, Singapore and the UK, the book critically examines the myriad effects of dominant discourses of wellbeing on the one hand, and the social and cultural dimensions of wellbeing on the other. From diverse methodological and theoretical perspectives, it explores how notions of wellbeing have been mobilized across time and space, in and out of school contexts, and the different inflections and effects of wellbeing discourses are having in education, transnationally and comparatively. The book offers researchers as well as practitioners new perspectives on current approaches to student wellbeing in schools and novel ways of thinking about the wellbeing of young people beyond educational settings.

Katie Wright is an Australian Research Council Fellow (DECRA) and lecturer at the University of Melbourne. Her major research interests concern the role and effects of psychological knowledges and therapeutic discourses in social change, cultural life, and educational contexts. Current research projects include a study of public inquiries into childhood maltreatment, a cultural history of adolescence and schooling, and an investigation of past and present understandings of youth mental health and wellbeing. Recent publications include The Rise of the Therapeutic Society: Psychological Knowledge & the Contradictions of Cultural Change (2011).

Julie McLeod is Professor, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2012-2016). She is Deputy Director of the Melbourne Social Equity Institute and an editor of the journal Gender and Education. Her research areas include gender and education, social inequalities, youth identity, and curriculum history. She is currently working on a history of adolescence and citizenship education (1930s-1970s), a history of school design and pedagogical innovation and a new project is on youth identity and educational inequality since 1950. Recent books include Researching Social Change; Qualitative Approaches (2009), and Making Modern Lives: Subjectivity, Schooling and Social Change (2006).