Wellbeing, Space and Society

Wellbeing, Space & Society is an interdisciplinary journal concerned with the role that space and place play in shaping wellbeing across the range of spatial scales from the local to the global.


Wellbeing, Space & Society shares the same general approach to manuscripts as its companion titles, Health & Place and Social Science & Medicine. We publish papers from a range of social science disciplines, including geography, sociology, social psychology, social epidemiology, economics, anthropology and political science.


We encourage your submissions that address a problem of interest to society and illustrate the links (potential or theorized) between (aspects of) society and space and wellbeing. We are particularly interested in:

the policy implications of the research, including work informed by policy analysis

the wellbeing of places - how is that conceptualized, theorized, operationalised and translated?

the transactive nature of wellbeing along with the constitutive (or emergent) processes across the scales from the individual through the household to community, etc. that shape wellbeing

Key themes for the journal include inequalities across space that have been shaped by societal forces; inequities across social categories (gender, age, race, etc) that are spatially expressed; the shaping of wellbeing in places (a range of socio-political and/or cultural contexts such as indigenous communities or alternative forms of nation states) across a range of spatial scales from the individual to the household to the community to the region to the nation and up to the global context; and the socio-spatial implications of policy interventions at the national (e.g. welfare, taxation) or local (e.g. urban infrastructure, community resources, green spaces).


Types of papers accepted by the journal include research articles (both empirical and theoretical), reviews and short communications. We also welcome your proposals for special issues on topics that represent an unusual, even unique area that is likely to be of high interest to the journal's readership.


The journal welcomes submissions from a range of ontological and epistemological approaches and is particularly keen to receive work that demonstrates theoretical and/or methodological innovation. Methodological plurality and innovation are encouraged; interpretation of wellbeing in this context may be subjective or objective, eudonic or hedonic, and may also be at the individual and/or community levels.


We look forward to receiving your submissions that are thought-provoking, informative, innovative, illustrative, dialogue-worthy pieces that seek to understand, question, and identify approaches to enhancing wellbeing.