Annual Minority Research Profile Seminar 2025: Wellbeing in Minorities: Sustainability and Disruptions of Health in Non-dominant Groups

Description

            The seminar aims at unpacking and exploring the complicated and multidimensional subject of well-being in minorities. It asks what constitutes and contributes to well-being or its deficiency in non-dominant, subordinated, liminal, and marginalised groups, considering their social positioning and resources available to them. The seminar takes up particular macro- and micro-level challenges, barriers, and obstacles that minorities (might) face trying to achieve and maintain their well-being. The seminar encourages critical thinking of how wellbeing deficiency is intertwined with a minority position. It builds on a broad understanding of well-being as a multidimensional phenomenon which entails physical and mental health, tightly bound to variegated social, economic and political factors. Thus, the seminar welcomes not only the perspectives and experiences of minorities but also actors and institutions playing an active role (or possibly failing in it) in the creation and maintain of wellbeing of others.

Call for papers

The 10th Annual Minority Research Seminar: Wellbeing in Minorities: Sustainability and Disruptions of Health in Non-dominant Groups, 9-10.4. 2025, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland, invites to explore current essentials and challenges to well-being in minorities.

Wellbeing, a complicated multidimensional phenomenon, refers to physical and mental health, is usually understood as a lasting condition of distress and as absence of illness. Meanwhile, wellbeing is often challenged at best or disrupted at worst for various minorities — those who are pushed towards the peripheries of the social landscape because of their age, gender, race, language, or any other characteristic(s). These peripheral, liminal or even marginalised positions question the normative perception of the concept of wellbeing, its characteristics, resources and barriers, as it requires a critical intersectional approach to the subject analysis.

What does constitute the wellbeing in minorities? What is special about minorities’ needs in terms of well- or ill-being? Who, what and how does contribute to the minorities well-being? What are the key factors and actors for securing well-being in minorities in current circumstances? We welcome scholars working in the fields of Minorities, Social Sciences, Gender Studies, Well-being and Health studies, Medical Humanities, Arts, and others, to discuss wellbeing in minorities. We would like to inquire aforementioned issues and to debate the actual and potential entanglements of minority positionings and well-being shortages and deficiencies, i.e. when and why belonging to a minority hinders individuals and groups’ well-being, and  when and why ill-being leads to minoritisation.

Please, submit the abstract of your presentation (max. 200 words) and a short bio (name, affiliation, contact details) to anna.sjodal@abo.fi or by filling out the online form by the 30 of November 2024. All applicants will be notified about the decision by the 15 of December 2024 via email.

Unfortunately, the seminar organisers are not able to cover aby travel or accommodation costs for speakers of accepted papers, but speakers will be offered lunches and a seminar dinner, and coffee will be served during breaks for all the participants.

Sincerely
The Minority Research Profile, Åbo Akademi