Sustainably balancing the wellbeing of people and our planet

Bella Vivat and Annie Jeffery, co-leads of the Green Team in the Division of Psychiatry are running an online workshop on 6 July, exploring sustainability, including wellbeing, in the context of current environmental and mental health crises.

Our workshop is entitled: “Sustainably balancing the wellbeing of people and our planet: Learning from lockdowns and the intersecting climate, environmental, and mental health crises”. It is a contribution to the upcoming online international conference: DSA2022: Just sustainable futures in an urbanising and mobile world, 6-8 July 2022.

We designed our workshop to encourage and facilitate small group discussions with international delegates around the issues that particularly concern and interest us regarding sustainability, on which we are leads in our Division. These issues also overlap and interact with our research interests, Annie in mental health, Bella in spiritual wellbeing at the end-of life.

We have two colleagues from beyond UCL who will be joining us as facilitators of the small group discussions. Asmita Pasnaik is a newly qualified architect from Mumbai, who is interested in making urban space more responsive to human needs. Xandra Miguel Lorenzo is Spanish, and works in the field of domestic violence, with a special interest in how outdoor spaces can benefit women who are experiencing domestic violence, particularly during pandemic lockdowns.

DSA2022 conference organisers have thought carefully about online conferences and the issues they raise for delegate fatigue and disconnection. The organisers encourage contributors to share materials in advance, to enable delegates to reflect ahead of the conference, so that conference sessions can prioritise discussion rather than information sharing. We have collected key resources to share with delegates ahead of the workshop, for use as a springboard for further development in the small groups in our breakout rooms. We all hope the mutual exchanges in our workshop will benefit our learning as well as that of delegates, and we hope to gain rich material for further reflection and to share with our Divisional colleagues.

DSA2022 is the most recent of the annual conferences run by the UCL-based Development Studies Association. Registration is still open, and both delegates and non-delegates can sign up to attend the pre-conference webinars: DSA2022/Pre-conference webinars and conference plenaries.