This year, the GHfP Institute was once again a contributor to the annual Well-Being Economy Forum held in Reykjavik, Iceland. Prof Scherto Gill joined the Rector of Icelandic University and former educational minister of Italy in an important panel to explore how higher education might nurture well-being. The specific focus of the session was to identify ways that universities might break silos in co-creating masters programmes dedicated to well-being studies.
Based on insights from the GHfP Institute’s experiences coordinating UNESCO Healing-Justice-Well-Being initiative, Prof Scherto Gill outlined three key points as references when developing Masters programmes in well-being: (1) a holistic conception of well-being to ensure clarification amongst components of well-being, conditions for well-being’s arising, and pathways to well-being; (2) well-being as an organising principle of the course as well as students’ experiences; (3) well-being as the course’s contents as well as the focus of students’ inquiry.
The GHfP’s MA in Peace Studies was used to showcase how well-being programmes can be interdisciplinary, engaging students as co-creators of programme contents, and orienting students’ research towards community’s well-being and nature’s thriving.