Terra Incognita : Degrowth, community and performance

10.32920/ryerson.14665266 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Alexandra Simpson

Keyword(s):

Personal Growth ◽

Good Life ◽

Access Point ◽

The Good Life ◽

Social Actors ◽

Social Justice Movements ◽

Terra Incognita ◽

And Performance ◽

Justice Movements ◽

Collective Authorship

We live in a world in which economic and personal growth is a prerequisite to being human. The alternative lies in what has yet to be explored. Confined by what we are told and know as the “good life”, we must make a choice; will we degrow on our own initiative or will we continue until the biosphere forces us to stop? This paper is written in support of the performance documentary, TERRA INCOGNITA and the formation/creative process of the Terra Incognita Collective (TIC). It will explore the environmental, social and psychological impacts of a growth-oriented culture through a degrowth lens. Furthermore, this paper will explore art as an access point to high consumption cultures and artists as important social actors within environmental and social justice movements. Terra Incognita, its audiences and artists, explore growth histories through embodiment and collective authorship.

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The Transformative Self

10.1093/oso/9780199970742.001.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Jack Bauer

Keyword(s):

Personal Growth ◽

Good Life ◽

Narrative Identity ◽

Life Stories ◽

Life Story ◽

Cultural Beliefs ◽

Dark Side ◽

The Good Life ◽

Human Flourishing ◽

Literature History

Everyone wants a good life. Some try to create a good life by cultivating personal growth. They have a transformative self. This book explains how people form a transformative self, primarily in their evolving life stories, to help cultivate growth toward a life of happiness, love, and wisdom for the self and others. It introduces an innovative framework of values and personhood to strengthen and integrate three main areas of study: narrative identity, the good life, and personal growth. The result is a unique model of humane growth and human flourishing. Each chapter builds on that framework to explore topics central to the transformative self, such as how cultural beliefs of a good life shape our narrative identity; how narrative thinking shapes cultural and personal beliefs of a good life; how cultural master narratives shape our ideals for personal growth; how growth differs from gain, recovery, and other positive changes in the life story; how happiness, love, wisdom, and growth serve as superordinate goods in life; how the hard and soft margins of society thwart and facilitate personal growth; the dark side of growth; and the lengthy development of authenticity and self-actualizing. This book synthesizes scholarship from scientific research across several subfields of psychology to philosophy, literature, history, and cultural studies. It offers a creative and scientifically grounded framework for exploring three of life’s perennial questions: How do we make sense of our lives? What is a good life? and How do we create one?

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Embracing Psychological Science for the “Good Life”?

Can Science and Technology Save China? ◽

10.7591/cornell/9781501747021.003.0003 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 50-68

Author(s):

Li Zhang

Keyword(s):

Good Life ◽

Modern Science ◽

Well Being ◽

Chinese Society ◽

Urban Residents ◽

The Good Life ◽

Social Suffering ◽

Social Actors ◽

Psychological Science

This chapter explores how the notion of “science” or “the scientific” is invoked by Chinese psychological experts and practitioners in their efforts to translate, brand, and apply certain branches of psychology and psychotherapy to Chinese society. It explains how the popular pursuit of well-being and the “good life” in contemporary China is inseparable from the claims of modern science and Western biomedicine. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork research among Chinese psychologists, counselors, psychiatrists, and urban residents in Kunming from 2010 to the present, the chapter offers an in-depth account of how and why the so-called “science of happiness” is surging in Chinese cities and how it is embraced by different social actors. This wave occurs under the banner of “psychological science” that some experts claim is able to effectively ease personal and social suffering.

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The Joyful Life: An Existential-Humanistic Approach to Positive Psychology in the Time of a Pandemic

Frontiers in Psychology ◽

10.3389/fpsyg.2021.648600 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 ◽

Author(s):

Brent Dean Robbins

Keyword(s):

Positive Psychology ◽

Personal Growth ◽

Good Life ◽

Well Being ◽

Central Place ◽

Future Research ◽

The Good Life ◽

Global Pandemic ◽

The Face ◽

Autobiographical Narrative

In the midst of a global pandemic, psychology has a duty to identify dispositional or character traits that can be cultivated in citizens in order to create resiliency in the face of profound losses, suffering and distress. Dispositional joy holds some promise as such a trait that could be especially important for well-being during the current pandemic and its consequences. The concept of the Joyful Life may operate as bridge between positive psychology and humanistic, existential, and spiritual views of the good life, by integrating hedonic, prudential, eudaimonic and chaironic visions of the good life. Previous phenomenological research on state joy suggests that momentary states of joy may have features that overlap with happiness but go beyond mere hedonic interests, and point to the experience of a life oriented toward virtue and a sense of the transcendent or the sacred. However, qualitative research on the Joyful Life, or dispositional joy, is sorely lacking. This study utilized a dialogical phenomenological analysis to conduct a group-based analysis of 17 volunteer students, who produced 51 autobiographical narrative descriptions of the joyful life. The dialogical analyses were assisted by integration of the Imagery in Movement Method, which incorporated expressive drawing and psychodrama as an aid to explicate implicit themes in the experiences of the participants. The analyses yielded ten invariant themes found across the autobiographical narrative descriptions: Being broken, being grounded, being centered, breaking open, being uplifted, being supertemporal, being open to the mystery, being grateful, opening up and out, and being together. The descriptions of a Joyful Life were consistent with a meaning orientation to happiness, due to their emphasis on the cultivation of virtue in the service of a higher calling, the realization of which was felt to be a gift or blessing. The discussion examines implications for future research, including the current relevance of a joyful disposition during a global pandemic. Due to the joyful disposition’s tendency to transform suffering and tragedy into meaning, and its theme of an orientation to prosocial motivations, the Joyful Life may occupy a central place in the study of resiliency and personal growth in response to personal and collective trauma such as COVID-19.

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PERSONAL ASPIRATIONS, THE “GOOD LIFE” AND THE LAW

Deakin Law Review ◽

10.21153/dlr2005vol10no1art267 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 33-47 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

TIM KASSER

Keyword(s):

Personal Growth ◽

Consumer Culture ◽

Good Life ◽

Well Being ◽

The Good Life ◽

Legislative Agendas ◽

The Law ◽

Ecological Behaviour

[Many of the messages conveyed and laws created by capitalistic, consumer culture encourage the pursuit of goals for wealth, image and status. Sub- stantial research shows, however, that when individuals focus on such “ex- trinsic” goals, they report lower personal well-being and engage in more problematic social and ecological behaviour than when they are oriented towards “intrinsic” pursuits for personal growth, affiliation, and community feeling. Legislative agendas that are designed to increase “time affluence” and protect children from commercialisation are discussed as example ac- tivities lawyers could pursue to help increase intrinsic and decrease extrin- sic aspirations.]

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