Wellbeing Economies

WHISPAs provide information, advice, activities, and/or accreditation about workplace health and wellbeing, such as guidance on policies about flexible working and caring responsibilities, mental health support, and fitness classes. They are free at the point of use for workplaces, usually because they are funded by local government or voluntary and community organisations. Free at the point of use means that participating workplaces do not need to pay anything to take part. Examples include the Better Health at Work Award in the North East and Cumbria, Thrive at Work in the West Midlands, and Healthy Cornwall workplace health. If you are involved in a WHISPA, please get in touch with us – we want to hear from you.

Find out more about our WHISPAs network.

The University Birmingham Housing-Led Regeneration Research Group is committed to advancing knowledge and understanding in the field of housing-led regeneration. Our mission is to conduct comprehensive research on various aspects of regeneration processes, including bidding processes, engagement and consultation strategies, large-scale demolition practices, planning loopholes such as viability arguments, and legal challenges.

We emerged from a group focussed on the Ladywood regeneration area in Birmingham, UK. The regeneration will affect around 2,000 homes, businesses, and places of worship. Mass compulsory purchase and demolition are expected and little to no resident consultation has been undertaken. There are complex social, economic, environmental, and legal aspects of these plans, which research can help to inform.

As a multidisciplinary and mixed methods research group, we strive to bring together diverse expertise and perspectives to address the complex challenges facing urban regeneration efforts. We are dedicated to fostering collaboration and dialogue among researchers from various disciplines, including but not limited to urban planning, anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics, law, and architecture.

Our group aims to generate actionable insights and evidence-based recommendations to inform policy-making, planning decisions, advocacy, community engagement initiatives, and grassroots community organising related to housing-led regeneration in Birmingham. We are committed to promoting transparency, inclusivity, and ethical conduct in our research practices, and we actively seek to engage with stakeholders at all levels, including government agencies, community organisations, residents, and industry partners.

By facilitating rigorous research, knowledge exchange, and capacity-building activities, we aim to contribute to the creation of vibrant, sustainable, and equitable communities in Birmingham and beyond. Our ultimate goals are to create a platform for experimenting with participatory and action research on regeneration and housing and to support efforts to revitalise neighbourhoods, improve housing equality, and enhance the wellbeing and quality of life for all residents affected by regeneration initiatives.

Find out more about the Housing-Led Regeneration Research Group in our latest blog post.

Grounded in an over a decade of ethnographic and anthropological exploration about living, livelihoods and the everyday life, this project explores the discontent with work and workers’ attempts to imagine a life beyond work. This project seeks to rethink work by exploring how workers’ acts of refusal and ordinary defiance seek to navigate and challenge how work reinforces experiences of oppression and subjugation. Rethinking Work documents workers’ struggles and subjectivities as revolving around workers’ attempts at recapturing a degree of ownership of their bodies and carving out some space and time for themselves.

Find out more about Rethinking Work.

Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork and interviews carried out between 2013 and 2020, this project is an investigation of the political and moral economies of the construction industry, the sector leading the expansion of African cities. This project explores how city builders’ understandings of the economically necessary and the politically urgent as well as of their moral roles and responsibilities in the city have contributed to shape experiences of urban exclusion.

Find out more about Conspiracies to Build.