Policies and discussion of academic freedom tend to be problem-oriented and defensive. They focus on harms, difficulties, and risks more than on the positive values and benefits that give freedom its raison d'& ecirc;tre. Must we see freedom solely in these negative terms, mainly as an eternal struggle against obstructions? Or could we promote and celebrate freedom in more proactive and appreciative ways-spreading stronger awareness of the many intrinsic and instrumental benefits of an academic culture in which curiosity, considerate debate, and open-mindedness flourish? This paper is an invitation to consider more carefully these more aspirational approaches, with particular reference to the development of universities in Scotland. Drawing on both adverse and positive experiences, it highlights the importance of nurturing a campus climate of shared curiosity. Noting that some of the threats to academic freedom come from self-censorship and from silences and avoidances rather than from visible and active threats, and hence are elusive and hard to address, I argue for more explicit and appreciative promotion of academic freedom, and for more careful attention to the kinds of culture in which it flourishes.

In the broad field of wellbeing research many have tried to develop specific operational definitions and measures of wellbeing. Rather than trying to force definitions of something so elusive and diverse, I have found it more helpful and persuasive to think in terms of a 'wellbeing lens', consisting of three main features: positivity, empathy, and life integration. To think about wellbeing means to consider in a positive or aspirational light what it means for lives to go well, beyond coping with stresses or making ends meet. It also means to put yourself empathically in other people's shoes, imagining how someone else might feel good or evaluative their life positively. To think about wellbeing entails looking at how the process of living well is composed. Research on wellbeing must be holistic and must look at long-term narratives, exploring how various bits of people's lives fit together and evolve through the life course.

Sociologists, planners, and activists are prone to treating society as if it were an enemy of wellbeing. This ‘disapproval addiction’ seriously inhibits our ability to understand and foster the social goods that make happiness possible. Instead of focusing mainly on social pathologies, we could instead cultivate more deliberately appreciative and aspirational approaches to social qualities. Appreciation and positive promotion of happiness and social goods could then become our core concern. This chapter proposes the deliberate and explicit adoption of a ‘happiness lens’ in social scholarship and planning so as to emphasise positivity, empathy, and integrative linkages between life domains through the life course. This lens is used to explore different kinds of claim to foster ‘social progress’: remedial; preventive; provisional; and ultimately genuine moral progress. It is proposed that this could make our social learning strategies more appreciative and our social plans more aspirational and uplifting. Conversely, and more provocatively, it is argued that we cannot claim to be ‘ethical’, or ‘progressive’, or even ‘politically engaged’ if we don’t make happiness an explicit and central concern in social research and social planning. Overall, these arguments are intended to highlight the ‘disruptive’ potential of a happiness lens.

Locating the wellbeing movement in the Enlightenment roots of the Greatest Happiness Principle, this chapter sets out the implications of using a 'wellbeing lens'. As a 'lens', or conversational steer, wellbeing or happiness has three main effects and purposes: positive ethics; appreciative empathy; and integrative holism. This lens is compared with a wide variety of other 'lenses' that inform learning and policy, such as care lens, the rights lens, the justice lens, and the equality lens. Faced with threats to survival or shortages of basic needs, it is understandable that scholars and planners adopt these pathological, remedial, and preventive lenses. But in most countries, opportunities for more aspirational approaches are improving. The 'OK line' is suggested as a reference point for considering balances and complementarities between 'pathological/remedial' approaches (focused on what is wrong with people) and 'appreciative/aspirational' approaches (emphasising what goes right). Consideration is given to the moral doubts that may inhibit adoption of the wellbeing lens - such as accusations of elitism, subjectivism, and lack of concern for the priority of suffering.

The book is concluded by noting that the current surge of interest in social wellbeing has echoes of 19th century interest that then became effectively silenced by social pathologism and cultural declinism in much of the 20th century. While there has always been some intermittent interest in wellbeing, now is the time for scholars and practitioners to combine forces to develop much more systematic, interdisciplinary, and comprehensive approaches.

Safety is normally understood as an ‘avoidance’ goal, the objective being to reduce risks and harms. Can it also be understood more positively, as an ‘approach’ goal? If so, what would that positive motivation entail, and what benefits might it bring? The world has never been safer, yet levels of stress and worry are increasing. Governments are spending heavily fighting crimes and hazards but in addition to that, we should focus on promoting aspects that make people feel safe. If the focus is on threats and crime, then the focus is on the absence of safety, not on the presence of feeling safe. And feeling unsafe is intrinsically bad even if that fear sometimes leads to sensible preventive action. Feeling safe, on the other hand, is intrinsically good. Sometimes it is instrumentally harmful to feel unrealistically safe. But, there is also some plausible evidence in support of the idea that we can make places safer by making people feel safer in them. We propose here a ‘Positive Safety Lens’ (PSL) as a complement to traditional ‘avoidance’ approaches to safety. We identify seven attributes of the PSL and discuss their potential benefits for safety research and safety promotion.

This Research Agenda for Social Wellbeing introduces scholars and planners to the importance of a ‘wellbeing lens’ for the study and promotion of social flourishing. It demonstrates the importance of wellbeing as a public good, not just a property of individuals.

The two propositions in this chapter are that motivational wellbeing or positive anticipatory attitudes are part of what it means to live well (not merely antecedents to wellbeing), and that social research and planning can help to foster these goods. It is good to be motivated, and to be resilient and persistent in pursuit of worthy goals. We should deliberately try to improve the clarity of our collective knowledge about these processes, and our articulation of them in formal statements of purpose and mission. Motivational culture matters and is amenable to deliberate manipulation: social progress can be achieved in part through rethinking of the ways in which education systems, media, and celebratory culture promote or inhibit the variety of goals and ways of being successful. It should also be possible to foster more sustainable routes to wellbeing by deliberately discouraging some kinds of acquisitive and competitive motivations, while fostering ‘slower’, more frugal lifestyles that lead to time affluence and temporal wellbeing.

This chapter takes up the practical implications of recognizing the value of ‘self-transcendence’ and promoting ‘conviviality’. It offers a moral critique of the individualistic ‘true self’ ideology that has been purveyed by the ‘positive psychology’ and ‘self-help’ movements, and argues that psychological maturity requires us to pay more respect to our multiple and flexible identities as social, interactive beings. An emphasis on the value of ‘conviviality’ requires a more sceptical and flexible approach to the self and to self-actualization projects, and cultivation of a stronger interest in prosocial altruism, kindness, and volunteering. It also explores research on promotion of elusive social goods such as positive ‘social climates’, civic engagement, social participation, communitarianism, and friendliness, and on efforts to devise ways of ensuring that people can remain socially engaged and avoid loneliness despite the massive increase in solo living.

This chapter outlines what it can mean for approaches to enquiry and learning to be 'appreciative' in the sense of enhancing social value by learning from and about people's strengths, successes, and enjoyments. It is argued that appreciative approaches need to be fostered deliberately, since by default scholars and planners tend to adopt pathological or instrumentalist approaches to learning. It is also noted that a shift of attention towards learning about ultimate values must also entail more use of qualitative enquiry and more cautious use of quantification, since we must accept that important information about what we ultimately value can't be captured in numbers. A quick overview is given of emerging appreciative or 'positive' approaches in many academic disciplines and walks of life.

This chapter explores the relation between social wellbeing perspectives and the social psychology of motivation, in particular the concepts of 'self-transcendence', Maslow's 'Hierarchy of Needs', 'social motivation', and 'Self Determination Theory'. It is argued that a viable conception of human flourishing must give central place to social flourishing, recognizing self-transcendent social motivations and experiences as crucial for human happiness. For social planners, a crucial part of this argument is that social goods have intrinsic value as part of the good life, rather than merely having instrumental value as factors that cause individual wellbeing. For example, a benign 'social climate' in a neighbourhood, school, or workplace is good in itself, not just a tool to foster cooperation. It is argued that reminders about this can be 'disruptive', but that it is not 'adversarial' to do so, since everyone recognizes the ultimate value of social wellbeing.

The book argues that by cultivating intelligent forms of 'positivity' and paying attention to social goods, we can revolutionise our understanding of society. A related claim is that even in the most prosperous societies, our thinking habits remain mired in traditionalist and pathological value orientations such as obedience, survival, harm avoidance, and productivity. If we want to be persuasively and effectively 'progressive,' it is crucial that we develop systematic appreciation of wellbeing, and integrative, aspirational approaches planning focused on ultimate social goods. We should assess the value of cultural traditions, social justice, economic progress, and equality in relation to theories and evidence of how wellbeing happens. We must remember that society exists for the sake of wellbeing, and that human wellbeing is largely social. To appreciate and promote social wellbeing, we must make efforts to transcend the default remedial and instrumentalist approaches to 'social' concerns, paying more attention to relational capabilities, social pleasures, and the intrinsic value of social qualities such as trust and conviviality.

This chapter proposes 'positive epidemiology' or 'social salutogenesis' (looking at how social goods emerge or are produced through social networks and institutions) as an important counterbalance to the 'social determinants of health' approach, which has become hugely popular but is excessively pathological and unrealistically deterministic, failing to appreciate personal and collective agency in the production of health and wellbeing.

Neurourbanism looks to understand the relationship between urban environments and mental well-being and is well placed to assess the role of these environments on the urbanised and ageing global population. This study builds on research using mobile electroencephalography (EEG) to understand the impact of urban environments (busy, quiet and green urban spaces) on brain activity. Ninety-five older participants aged over 65 years undertook one of six walks in an urban neighbourhood, transitioning between two distinct environmental settings. This study explores changes in alpha (associated with relaxation) and beta (associated with attention) brain activity recorded during walking in differing urban environments. Neural activity significantly varies as participants walk between urban busy and green settings, with reduced levels of low beta activity in the green setting, suggesting attention changes consistent with Attention Restoration Theory. Levels of alpha activity significantly varied between the urban busy and the urban quiet settings, with increases in the urban busy setting. There were no significant differences in EEG activity between the urban green and urban quiet settings, suggesting that the magnitude of environmental contrast between the urban busy context and other urban settings is an important factor in understanding the effects of these spaces on brain activity.

Quality of life (QoL), synonymous with wellbeing, has grown in importance in planning and learning worldwide. It is associated with systematic learning strategies that use indicators from several domains, including mind, body, society, and environment. Normally, subjective experiences are considered, as well as objective observations, hence QoL research can be involved in the development of empathic planning and should emphasize qualitative and narrative methods. In principle, QoL assessment emphasizes outcomes, but the value of QoL is often compromised by confusion of means and ends. QoL assessment can involve attention shifts from remedial work to more aspirational planning. It requires realistic attention to cultural relativity and to contextual variety in reference standards, without necessarily compromising on aspirations toward universal standards. The developmental value of QoL learning strategies may derive as much from the learning processes as from the functional uses of the information generated.