Wellbeing and everyday shared experiences of beauty in families and communities: Promoting social and aesthetic justice through everyday arts and culture

In the face of increasing social-ecological challenges, it is crucial to build pathways towards individual and collective flourishing and wellbeing, in harmony with nature and with community needs and aspirations. In this chapter, we explore the role of shared experiences of beauty in families and communities, in individual, collective and ecological wellbeing. We assume these experiences have a mutually amplifying relationship with the experience of transformative human bonds and that these may facilitate deep, positive social changes and more positive and sustainable connections with nature (when attuned), and amplified by appreciative community relations. These experiences can be supported by everyday micro-creative, artistic and cultural practices, at different levels of the ecosystemic organisation of communities and the interactions between them. We explore the implications for practice, namely for the development of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to arts-based interventions for family and community wellbeing aimed at ensuring social and aesthetic justice for all. We base our proposal on the assumptions that: (i) there is no true social justice without aesthetic justice and the right to (experiences of) beauty; (ii) shared experiences of beauty can strengthen transformative bonds and scaffold integrative individual and collective wellbeing and positive transformative social and ecological change.