Bøker av Annelies Kamp

The idea of «wellbeing» is increasingly prevalent in global policy contexts. Yet, as the chapters in this collection demonstrate, any understanding of wellbeing is contextual: what wellbeing is depends on where and how we listen and speak, the concepts at our disposal, the humans and nonhumans with whom we engage, and the focus of their, and our, aspirations. Many of the chapters in this collection reflect the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, which, in 2019, introduced a wellbeing approach to public policy that attracted the attention of global policy makers and other stakeholders. In this collection, commentators both from within and beyond Aotearoa take an expansive stance in discussing the concept of wellbeing and its myriad possibilities. The authors speak from an array of disciplines to present and critique ideas about how wellbeing can be understood and pursued across the life course.

In the face of today's complex policy challenges, various forms of 'joining-up' - networking, collaborating, partnering - have become key responses. However, institutions often fail to take advantage of the full benefits that joining-up offers. In this book, the author draws on ethnographic research into learning networks in post compulsory education and training in the state of Victoria, Australia, to explore why this might be the case and presents an argument for rethinking how joining-up works in practice. Throughout the book, Deleuzian concepts are engaged to forge a 'little complicating machine', one that involves the reader in rethinking the limits and possibilities of collaborative agendas. The chapters draw on diverse disciplinary discourses to construct a conceptual journey that includes the rationale for collaborative agendas, the means by which we seek to understand and govern them, the possibilities of knowing them as 'small worlds', the role played in them by social capital, and the nature of network sociability they demand. Overall, the book aims to provoke new connections for the reader, and new ways of thinking about networks, collaboration and partnerships - ways of thinking that are in tune with the agenda itself.