Worldbuilding and Wellbeing

Worldbuilding and Wellbeing is on at the University of Birmingham on Wednesday 21 October, running from 2pm to 4pm. It's a free session that looks at worldbuilding — the act of imagining and constructing an entire fictional setting from the ground up — and how it connects to wellbeing, play, community, and ethics. The session invites you to explore different approaches to those things and to think about the imaginative potential of worldbuilding and play for ethics, wellbeing, belonging, and community.

It's put on by Imagining Wellbeing, one of the research programmes of the Centre for Urban Wellbeing at the university, and it forms part of the AHRC IAA funded project Worldbuilding and Ethical Game Design. The Centre for Urban Wellbeing was set up in 2020 to support interdisciplinary, community-engaged research informed by global evidence to address urban wellbeing inequalities. It brings together academics from across the university working in physical, social and mental wellbeing, ageing, behaviour change, political and cultural economic theory, environmental and health sciences, digital technologies and urban planning. Its main research areas are Community Health, Wellbeing Economies, Community/Policy and Power, Imagining Wellbeing and Sustainable, Liveable and Resilient Cities.

If you're not in the city, you can still join in: the session is available online via Zoom as well as in person. The physical venue is the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT. It's free to attend, but in-person places are limited, so you'll need to register in advance. It runs for two hours, from 2pm to 4pm.