WEAll News

December WEAll Talk – Christopher Boyce- ‘Experts by Experience: Cycling to Bhutan and other big stories’

Tags:
Published on December 02, 2022

Can we empower ourselves and others through sharing our experiences, and can sharing our experiences help shape social and economic narratives? Discussion about our economic, political, and social systems are often dominated by those who have acquired knowledge through extensive training yet have little direct experience of the consequences of those systems. This talk will explore the value of our experiences (in contrast to formal knowledge acquisition) and how we can and must bring those experiences to what we do to empower ourselves and others. This talk will be structured around the speaker’s current role supporting community mental health, his academic career as a happiness and wellbeing researcher, and what an 18-month cycling journey to Bhutan showed him about the interplay between knowledge and experience.

Christopher Boyce is currently a community mental health support worker in the Scottish Borders. He originally trained as an economist (BSc, MSc) and went on to explore the links between the economy and wellbeing, completing a PhD in Psychology in 2009. Over the years he has worked at various academic institutions and published more than 25 peer-reviewed academic papers on happiness and wellbeing. However, his academic career came to an end when he realised just how much of a threat the academic system was to his own happiness and wellbeing. He then spent 18-months cycling to Bhutan exploring alternative ways of being, finding deeper personal fulfillment, and sharing his experiences with others. Since returning from that journey he has committed to the creation of conditions that foster individual & societal wellbeing.

Dec 8, 2022 04:00 PM in Universal Time UTC

Want to join
the discussion?
Let us know what
you would like
to write about!