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This paper is a lightly edited transcript of Sarah's Inaugural Professorial Lecture on April 25, 2018. It draws on primary research in Zambia but also reflects on the promotion of wellbeing in the UK. There are three main points. 1. The need to recover a key promise of the focus on wellbeing, to move from seeing people as objects of policy to recognising them as subjects of their own lives. 2. This means understanding wellbeing as grounded in relationships, not held within the individual. A model of relational wellbeing emerging through the interaction of personal, societal and environmental structures and processes is offered. 3. Recognising people as subjects raises the question of what kind of subjects they are. The paper argues that wellbeing advocates primarily construct people as psychological subjects. The research in Zambia suggests instead that we should view people as moral subjects. This does not mean that people always get things right, but that for most people, much of the time, trying to do so matters. The paper closes by suggesting some implications of a relational approach to wellbeing for policy and practice.

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a powerful and widely used approach in inference of population history. However, the computational effort required to discriminate among alternative historical scenarios often limits the set that is compared to those considered more likely a priori. While often justifiable, this approach will fail to consider unexpected but well-supported population histories. We used a hierarchical tournament approach, in which subsets of scenarios are compared in a first round of ABC analyses and the winners are compared in a second analysis, to reconstruct the population history of an oak gallwasp, Synergus umbraculus (Hymenoptera, Cynipidae) across the Western Palaearctic. We used 4233 bp of sequence data across 7 loci to explore the relationships between four putative Pleistocene refuge populations in Iberia, Italy, the Balkans, and Western Asia. We compared support for 148 alternative scenarios in eight pools, each pool comprising all possible rearrangements of four populations over a given topology of relationships, with or without founding of one population by admixture and with or without an unsampled 'ghost' population. We found very little support for the directional 'out of the east' scenario previously inferred for other gallwasp community members. Instead, the best-supported models identified Iberia as the first regional population to diverge from the others in the late Pleistocene, followed by divergence between the Balkans and Western Asia, and founding of the Italian population through late Pleistocene admixture from Iberia and the Balkans. We compare these results with what is known for other members of the oak gall community, and consider the strengths and weaknesses of using a tournament approach to explore phylogeographic model space. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

The chapter draws on fieldwork in Chiawa, Zambia, to ask what it means to talk of ‘the good life beyond growth’ in contexts of marginality and economic hardship. The chapter begins with a brief summary of villagers’ own perspectives on what a good life (or ‘wellbeing’) means. These emphasise the centrality of material sufficiency but locate this in a relational context: the importance of ‘taking care’ of others. The following section describes how the poverty of local livelihoods is only one part of the economy of Chiawa. It exists alongside, and is deeply intertwined with, a ‘modern’ development sector of high inputs and high profits. The chapter closes by describing what can be learned from the Chiawa case. Theoretically, it suggests the need to make relationality central to understandings of wellbeing. Substantively, it shows that Chiawa villagers do consider economic development to be a vital component of ‘the good life’, but that this needs to take a form that puts people and the environment, not simply growth and profits, at the centre.

WOS:000418252300014 PubMed: 28980401 Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a powerful and widely used approach in inference of population history. However, the computational effort required to discriminate among alternative historical scenarios often limits the set that is compared to those considered more likely a priori. While often justifiable, this approach will fail to consider unexpected but well-supported population histories. We used a hierarchical tournament approach, in which subsets of scenarios are compared in a first round of ABC analyses and the winners are compared in a second analysis, to reconstruct the population history of an oak gall wasp, Synergus umbraculus (Hymenoptera, Cynipidae) across the Western Palaearctic. We used 4,233bp of sequence data across seven loci to explore the relationships between four putative Pleistocene refuge populations in Iberia, Italy, the Balkans and Western Asia. We compared support for 148 alternative scenarios in eight pools, each pool comprising all possible rearrangements of four populations over a given topology of relationships, with or without founding of one population by admixture and with or without an unsampled ghost population. We found very little support for the directional out of the east scenario previously inferred for other gall wasp community members. Instead, the best-supported models identified Iberia as the first-regional population to diverge from the others in the late Pleistocene, followed by divergence between the Balkans and Western Asia, and founding of the Italian population through late Pleistocene admixture from Iberia and the Balkans. We compare these results with what is known for other members of the oak gall community, and consider the strengths and weaknesses of using a tournament approach to explore phylogeographic model space.