The Project is hosting a seminar in the DPU Research Hub ENGAGE on the 8 December 2025. Among others, Ida Ebdrup, postdoc,  will present the findings from our ongoing research on school-based wellbeing.

TOPIC

Space, Time, Materiality, and Wellbeing in Education

In this seminar we aim to discuss the analytical potential of space, time, and materiality as interrelated concepts for (re)thinking wellbeing in education. Rather than treating these as empirical categories or policy targets, we explore how spatial, material and temporal configurations and discourses operate as sites where subjectivity and affect are produced, negotiated and contested. In contrast to the understandings of educational space as a backdrop, structure, or context, our point of departure is that it is relational, discursive, material and emergent—simultaneously constraining and enabling alternative ways of (well)being and learning.

TALKS

Ida Ebdrup: How is Wellbeing Experienced and Enacted in the Landscape of the School

Drawing on the empirical work in the project “Paradoxes of Learning to be Well: Re-examining the Curriculization of Wellbeing” and deploying Bronwyn Davies' concept of 'landscape', I will explore how the school can be analysed as a dynamic field of materiality, discourses, practices, emotions and spaces where subjects are continuously produced and negotiated. The focus is on which categories of ‘thriving students’ are made possible or impossible, for whom (class, ethnicity, gender etc.) and on which terms, within the school landscape.

Nis Langer Primdahl: "Please, let me off at the next turn"

Based on my postdoctoral project on the temporal dimensions of wellbeing promotion in schools, I will discuss some implications of a temporal turn within social and cultural theory. Drawing on Doreen Massey’s critique of some aspects of the spatial turn and on Sarah Sharma’s problematization of the concept of social acceleration, I examine how time itself risks becoming

Sine Lysdahl Jensen: Navigating space(s) and place(s) in education

I will discuss the interplay between bodily experience and emotional life, how physical and spatial environments shape students’ affective and educational experiences, and how academic spaces can either enable or constrain inclusion and wellbeing in higher education.