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In this series, guests from across UCL and beyond share their innovative solutions and ideas for addressing societal challenges, discussing topics from a cross-disciplinary perspective and inspiring and encouraging us to think differently about issues of local, national and global concern.
Jade: Hello and welcome to Disruptive Voices from UCL Grand Challenges. I'm Jade Hunter, your host and coordinator for UCL's Grand Challenge on Mental Health and Wellbeing. In today's episode, we're exploring the ERC funded Anthropologoy project led by Professor Joanna Cook. This research is all about joy, that feeling of happiness and delight we often take for granted. Joy might seem simple, but it plays a crucial role in helping people cope and find resilience, especially in times of crisis. The project looks at how joy is experienced, expressed and valued across different cultures. It's the first long term qualitative study of joy, combining innovative methods with a focus on inclusive, decolonised social science. By studying joy, the team hopes to challenge the dominant narrative of crisis and highlight the potential for positive change through collaboration and shared understanding. So joining me today is the project's lead Professor Joanna Cook, who is professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at ucl. So thank you for joining me.
Professor Joanna Cook: Thanks.
Jade: Jade, could you tell me a little bit about the background about the project, please? So what inspired anthropologoy and, why focus on joy in times of crisis?
Professor Joanna Cook: Yeah, of course. And thank you, Jade. It's really nice to be here. I think this is the first, maybe one of the first podcasts I've ever done, so I'm excited. This is fun.
Jade: Well, thank you for being here.
Professor Joanna Cook: Oh, absolute pleasure, absolute pleasure. and also because I get to talk about joy, which is, you know, like catnip for me, really. It's one of my favourite things to talk about. So the project began. Well, my, the impetus for it really came during the pandemic when so many of the normal kind of avenues for joy that we all experience was stripped away. And if the pandemic, taught us anything, it's that you can't have a dance party over Zoom, basically. And I was really struck by the absence of joy. I mean, the pandemic was different for everybody, but the opportunity for collective coming together, was different. And it really made me think about how important joy is in our lives and how much we take it for granted or how little social scientific research there is about it. and so I started to approach it in a very geeky way. I started to create conversations about it where they didn't previously exist. I read everything I could, I talked to everybody about why joy matters and why, why it might matter to them. And one thing led to another and this project really began to emerge in collaboration with, colleagues through events and, dialogue. And it's been a real process for me. I feel. We're just at the cusp of something really exciting. The project began at the beginning of January, so we're really only just starting. and my team of three postdocs and I are having, weekly meetings. and they are extraordinary, as Matin Shapiro, Dan White and Ben Theobald. And we have this incredible administrative support from Wendy Chandler as well in the department. So I'm feeling incredibly lucky after having had a few years of, you know, thinking and writing about joy on my own, to be able to be with other people, thinking about, writing about joy. It's a great start, basically.
Jade: That's really fascinating thinking about how actually, like, it was catalysed by a time of crisis, like by the pandemic. Yeah. How much of your work was focused on joy before that? Or was it something literally that came out of the end of it?
Professor Joanna Cook: Very little. I mean, so my previous work was on, My early work was on meditation as a monastic practise in Thailand. So that was characterised by a lot of discipline, a lot of asceticism. and then my last project was on mindfulness and mental health in the uk. particularly looking at depression and anxiety, but also the way that mental health has become a really transversal issue. we now routinely think of ourselves as having mental health or, experiences in terms of mental health and supporting mental health. So I was really interested in exploring that. and one of the things that struck me when I started to think about joy was actually how dry much of that is. One of the things that's interesting to me about mental health in the kind of shift from mental health as a kind of, clinical diagnosis, to the incorporation of mental health into everyday life, I
Professor Joanna Cook: think is the way we shift from both from the prevention of ill health to the cultivation of a kind of a positive framing of health. So to move from, struggling to flourishing, I suppose. But flourishing for me implies so much more than just the, prevention of illness. I think flourishing implies broader, ah, kind of ethical questions about an alignment between our sense of values and purpose and our engagement with other people and our involvement with the world. and so joy is quite exciting to me for those reasons. It marks a very positive, Sense of being with oneself and also other people. I like joy because it's, There's a kind of this great anthropologist called William Mazzarella, who has this term extimate, to describe affective experience. It's both external, it's something that's shared between people and it's also deeply intimate. There's something in it that we've, in which we feel a sense of alignment between ourselves and the moment that we're experiencing. and so that gave me that started to feel very exciting to explore that cross culturally. So the idea of the grant is the project, the first three years we'll be looking at joy in cross cultural perspective. So I'll be working on joy in the uk, Matan will be working on Joy and the Divine in Brazil. Dan will be working on Joy and the environment in Japan and Ben will be working on joy and politics in Thailand. And what we hope to do is you know, develop a conversation about joy more broadly in the social sciences but also to think about the ways in which joyous experience is comparable across very, very different cultural contexts.
Jade: That's really fascinating thinking about those comparisons. M Not to put you on the spot but is there something you could say about the methods that you're using for that to kind of draw those comparisons?
Professor Joanna Cook: Oh sure, sure. I mean we're anthropologists so our bread and butter is really participant obs. We go and we hang out with people and kind of Clifford Gertz called it deep hanging out. But we're invested in and committed to long term qualitative research with people with the idea of developing data that is contextual and thick rather than numerical data that could be analysed with statistical methods for example. Participant observation is really key with that world. Second to be doing semi structured interviews with people and taking life histories and so on. But we're also engaging with a couple of different methods that I'm really excited about. One is microphonemenological interviewing. After people have experienced a very joyous moment we will be doing short form micro phenomenological interviews asking them about the phenomenology of the experiences that they shared. So what I hope is that that will lead to interesting comparative data across these field sites. So for example, if you have a joyous experience I might ask you where did you feel that? Was that in your body? Could you describe, you know, you're pointing to your chest. Was that a tingling? Was that a warmth? Was that, did it have emotion associated with it? Did it have a cognitive component to it? What were your thought like? So you're extending into an account of the experience itself and that I think will be really interesting, and quite joyful I hope as a kind of participatory method for people involved with it. The other thing that we're going to do is photo voice. The project and the team are really committed to participatory and collaborative research. and photovoice is an opportunity for people to represent themselves. So we ask people to tell, take photos of things that mean joy for them. And then we had develop we have interviews based on the photos. Now what we want to do to extend the project beyond the kind of life of the grant is we want to use the photos with kind of ethical permission of course and consent. But we want to use the photos as the basis of an exhibition on the cross cultural study of JOY that we're going to mount probably first in London but I'm not sure. And then we'll tour around each of the field sites so that the people we're working with in each of the field sites are able to have an ongoing dialogue and engagement with the project. And we're also going to be working, we have an amazing advisory
Professor Joanna Cook: board including advisors from each of our field sites. But we're going to be working with local research assistants in each of the field sites. And what we're hoping is that local research assistants will be working collaboratively with us but also we'll be giving them training in research methods and ethics and we'll be writing with them as well. We'll have a website, the Anthropologoi website which is being created at the moment. and we hope that will be able to develop short form pieces of writing that are co written with our collaborators in the field. So it's exciting a lot.
Jade: It sounds incredible. Really rich.
Professor Joanna Cook: It's a lot. It is a lot. Yeah, it's super exciting and amazing to.
Jade: Hear sort of how it will go beyond the project as well. Like the kind of prolonged impact of that as well.
Professor Joanna Cook: Well the other piece of that in terms of long term impact is we also will set up the Anthropolog the JOY Network which will be a kind of a meeting ground for scholars and activists and indigenous wisdom holders and anybody who's interested in thinking and talking about joy. And once we've as that develops we're hoping to have a series of events that will be available for both academics and for the wider public so that we can participate together.
Jade: Amazing. And it sounds really interdisciplinary in that respect as well. The fact that you've got all of these different kind of stakeholder audiences. Yeah, I wanted to kind of Ask you about why do you think that joy has sort of so often been overlooked in research or in how we talk about emotions?
Professor Joanna Cook: That's an interesting question. I mean I think social scientists, are a bit miserable, that's facetious, as an answer. But there is a tendency towards the important work of both studying really challenging circumstances and situations and issues for people and also for the power of critique as well. Social scientific critique. And I think that is incredibly important work. What I think it misses and what I hope to bring into conversation and dialogue with my colleagues is an opening of the extent to which we explore the range of human emotion, and emotional responses. Even in circumstances of iniquity in which people face significant challenges, it's often the case that there is more than suffering. And so in some ways the anthropological impetus responds to the decolonizing argument that call for communities to be represented as more than just the challenges that they face. I think it's also interesting to say that when we're studying joy, we're not being Pollyanna Ish. So the study of joy is not an effort to join the high vibes tribe and just say that everything is lovely, but rather it's to acknowledge the fact that even in very challenging circumstances people experience a range of emotion. And so by focusing on joy, we expand the kind of the aperture with which we can, we can understand people's emotional lives.
Jade: That's so interesting. Thank you. It sounds like a real sort of has the real potential to reframe a lot. And I think going back to what you were saying earlier on about the type of interviews that you're using and how people feel joy. That's so fascinating to think about. Like I was just thinking about, you know, how would you react to that question and actually do people often reflect on that, what that actually feels like? I don't know. But anyway. Really? Yeah, really interesting to hear more.
Professor Joanna Cook: Well, it is interesting because you know, reflection there's. So what the psychologists say is that joy is not just a feeling, it also involves some sense of appraisal, some kind of right fit between yourself and the moment that you're experiencing an alignment between you and the world. So in that sense I'm really thinking about joy as a form of my, the way I'm theorising at the moment is as a form of affective ethics. because there it has this kind of ethical component to it. But importantly often it doesn't involve in extensive forms of reflection. You know, you're Joyous, you're caught up in the moment. You're, you know. In fact, often joy is characterised by experiences of self transcendence and social connection.
Professor Joanna Cook: So it's, it was going to be interesting to use these reflective methods to see, you know, in what ways people respond to them and how they find them.
Jade: Definitely. And especially to have that comparison between different places too is just. Yeah, amazing.
Professor Joanna Cook: Yeah.
Jade: So how does joy fit into today's world where we hear so much about crisis and uncertainty?
Professor Joanna Cook: Yeah, I mean the framing of the project is really in terms of, and in response to the meta crisis. What I call, I'm calling the meta crisis following the work of a brilliant philosopher called Jonathan Rosen, who I really admire. And we hear often about this idea of polycrisis or in which we have. Which roughly is understood as complex systems, in crisis, interacting with each other, perpetuating more crisis. And I think one of the challenges of the polycrisis, framing is that it kind of leads people on the sidelines. It makes it seem as if the problem is systems at scale. And one of the things that I admire about Jonathan Rosen's framing of the metacrisis is his emphasis that humans, as complex creatures themselves, are necessarily implicated in the complex worlds in which they find themselves. Ah. And that they have effect. So that I think is important when we're thinking about joy because it points to ways in which people might move from despair to hope, how they might navigate the circumstances in which they find themselves and they might find light in the darkness, as it were. So for those reasons I think it's important. I think it's something very humbling and potentially very exciting. I think one of the things about the metacrisis is of course anthropologists, social scientists, academics are as implicated in it as the people with whom we work. And one of the ways in which I'm m thinking about this work is both its participatory, kind of real world implications, its interdisciplinary implications, but also I'm thinking about it in terms of the kinds of meta narratives that we perpetuate as academics. And are there different storeys that we might tell that are supportive of the ways in which people respond to crisis?
Jade: Wonderful, thank you. And you've spoken about this a little bit already about, you know, the sort of interdisciplinarity of the project, but I wondered if you could say a bit about how this work relates to the. You see a grand challenge of mental health and well being. so how does Collaboration between disciplines strengthen projects like this.
Professor Joanna Cook: Yeah, well, I mean, it's worth saying that the project might not be here if it weren't for the Grand Challenge because the Grand Challenge's team very generously awarded us a small networking grant, early Doors, which made it possible for me to run. I ran a series of events and I ran an event using Grand Challenges support in which I was able to bring together many of the people who are now working on the project. So my three postdocs presented there and a number of the people on the Interdisciplinary Advisory Board also presented there. so I'm very grateful to the Grand Challenges team for their support for the development of the project itself. In terms of the interdisciplinary nature of the project, I think more than any other work that I've done before, I think perhaps for other members of the team as well, though I don't want to speak for them in terms of their experience, but I think we really see this as a conversation that begins in an anthropology but extends across disciplines and also into the real world. And so to support that, on our Advisory Board we have people from across the humanities and the social sciences M with whom we've been in dialogue in the development of the project, really from the get go. and year five of the grant is committed to interdisciplinary dialogue. Yeah. So we're going to run at ucl, we're going to run two large conferences. First looking at the ethics
Professor Joanna Cook: and place of Joy and the second looking at the institutionalisation and cultivation of Joy. and those will both be interdisciplinary and the project, my thinking has really benefited from guidance from colleagues in other disciplines. Particularly there's a wonderful woman, ah, called Tanisha Spratt at King's Golledge, who's also working on Joy, whose thinking has really been an inspiration to me. and I am hoping to. That interdisciplinary dialogue will be really embedded in every stage of the research.
Jade: It sounds really important to have that kind of ongoing dialogue to shape the project as well. Because, I mean, when was the original Grand Challenges funding that you received?
Professor Joanna Cook: It was probably two or three years ago.
Jade: Okay.
Professor Joanna Cook: So I think it's. I think it's at least four years that I've been thinking about and developing this project.
Jade: And then just as a final question then, what are the next steps for the project and how might people find out more and become more involved?
Professor Joanna Cook: So at the moment we just started, so the team and I are currently developing our ethics application for UCL Rec, and we are undergoing all our methods training in in order to prepare for fieldwork. And then fieldwork begins at the beginning of July and we'll be doing long term fieldwork for 12 to 15 months. and our Anthropologie website, made by the brilliant Anna Betts, will be up very soon, hopefully by Easter. In the meantime, if people would like to find out more or would like to talk to me about Joy, I would love to hear from you. You, can email me or there is a website for the JOY Network which is available via the anthropology website. So if you Google Joe Cook Joy Network, that's probably the easiest way to find it.
Jade: That's amazing. Thank you so much Jo.
Professor Joanna Cook: It's been a pleasure.
Jade: It's honestly such an interesting project and I just. Obviously I'll ask Annabelle to edit this bit out but I did a school workshop today which is why I had to ask to move back and it was kind of getting community members in and I literally had that feeling when you were kind of speaking about those interviews. I was like, oh, that is what Joy feels like for me is that moment of these, you know, connection. so, yeah, just really interesting to kind of hear it reflected back.
Professor Joanna Cook: yeah, don't edit that out.
Jade: That's great. Yeah, I just thought I can really understand it. yeah. Is there anything that you'd like to add that you feel we haven't covered?
Professor Joanna Cook: I just thought I am giving my inaugural lecture, Joy, on the 18th of March at 6:00pm in the Gustav Tuck Lecture Theatre in UCL. so if anybody would like to come along and listen to me banging on about Joy for an hour, then that's the place to be if you want to come. It's free, but there is an Eventbrite sign up for attendance.
Jade: Is that accessible through the UCL website?
Professor Joanna Cook: Yes.
Jade: Okay, so we can link to that too.
Professor Joanna Cook: That would be great.
Jade: Brilliant. Okay.
Professor Joanna Cook: This has been super fun. Thank you very much.
Jade: Thank you for joining me today. And thank you to Professor Joanna Cook for her insights on the Anthropologoy project. It's been fascinating learning more about Joy and how it can be conceptualised and understood and the ways in which the project offers opportunities to understand Joy in different contexts. You've been listening to Disruptive Voices. This episode was presented by me, Jade Hunter, produced by Decibelle Creative and edited by Annabelle Buckland at Decibelle Creative. If you'd like to hear more of these fascinating discussions from Disruptive Voices, please make sure you're subscribed to this podcast so you don't miss future episodes. Come and discover more online and keep up with the latest grand challenges, news, events and research. Just google you UCL Grand Challenges.