Project title:
Digital Wellbeing
This project, funded by the Anniversary Fellowship (2023-26), has evolved from a comparative study to a critical case study on digital wellbeing (Flyvbjerg, 2006). The strategic choice of a Taiwanese wellbeing/peer-support platform (Moodii) allows for a critical exploration and conceptualisation of spiritual feelings and experiences in relation to the ‘Western’ concepts of wellbeing and empathy. Several methods, from an art-based method to online interviews, are used to let these spiritual dimensions ‘reveal themselves’ non-forcefully and naturally: unfolding from conversations, walking, drawing, and thinking.
Outcomes: An ‘outsider art’ exhibition was held by the Hartley Library in June. An art book for this exhibition was published in December, 2025. An intervention that introduces Daoist thinking to the geographical understandings of subjectivity was published in the Transactions of the British Institute of Geographers (Tseng, 2025). A full-length paper on spiritual empathy is currently under revision.
Overall, this project advances the ‘Western’ understanding of feelings, subjective experiences and wellbeing by considering the individual’s soul/heart as the place for spirituality and the Universe as the space for being and becoming a spiritual self. As this research shows, these spiritual feelings now also occur under specific geographies in digital spaces, which are of absolute importance and meaning for those with mental health conditions.