Rethinking Well-Being from the Margins: Exclusion, Critique, and Alternative Measures

The frameworks through which well-being and quality of life are measured globally were largely built in, and for, Western institutional contexts. They carry embedded assumptions about stable populations, formal economies, nuclear households, and liberal
democratic participation, assumptions that are neither universal nor neutral. This session invites critical examination of those foundations and the alternatives that emerge when measurement begins from different starting points.

Contributions are welcome that interrogate the Eurocentric, androcentric, or otherwise partial assumptions built into mainstream social indicators research and propose frameworks, concepts, or methodologies that centre marginalised knowledge and experience. Papers engaging with feminist, decolonial, indigenous, or post-Western approaches to well-being measurement are particularly encouraged, as are empirical studies that surface dimensions of well-being invisible to conventional indicators, including care, embodiment, informal exchange, collective survival, and resistance.

The session does not seek to simply add new variables to existing frameworks but to ask more fundamental questions: what counts as well-being, who has the authority to define it, and what would indicators research look like if it started from the margins rather than the centre. In doing so it contributes to the broader project of building a sociology, and a social measurement practice, that is genuinely global.