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This volume draws together the work of a diverse range of thinkers and researchers to address the question of happiness critically, using a wide variety of theoretical and empirical methodologies. Broadening the discussion beyond what might be considered highly individual and insular conceptualizations of happiness, often based on purely positivist approaches to the subject, authors raise questions about the nature of individual and collective anxieties that might underpin the current emphasis on happiness and the ideological or governmental ends that may be served by the framing of happiness in psychology and economics. With attention to how individuals understand and pursue happiness in their daily lives, Critical Happiness Studies highlights different theoretical paradigms that demonstrate the role of power in producing specific conceptualizations of happiness and, consequently, how they frame individual self-understanding or subjectivities and (re)shape political problems. The collection makes available critical, theoretical, and methodological resources for addressing a powerful set of cultural, political, and scientific discourses that have loomed large since the closing decade of the 20th century. A call for the establishment of a body of work in critical happiness studies, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities interested in the age-old problem of happiness.

This book articulates a qualitative stance, drawing inspiration from the Danish psychologist Steinar Kvale's work. The qualitative stance involves a point of departure where the social world is described before theorized, understood before explained, and seen as concrete qualities rather than abstract quantities. It focuses on the cultural, everyday, and situated aspects of human thinking, learning, knowing, acting, and ways of understanding ourselves as persons, while at the same time striving to be scientific. International authorities on qualitative inquiry, education, psychology, and philosophy each develop different aspects of the qualitative stance by engaging with three distinct themes: The first centers around qualitative studies on learning, studied as a social phenomenon of human beings in changing social practices. The second theme is a critique of current educational practices and the postmodern consumer society, arrived at through careful descriptions of subjectivity and contemporary social relations. The third theme is about the development of new ways of thinking about qualitative inquiry.