Encounters with Translations of Happiness

Abstract

This special issue edited by Katie Aubrecht demonstrates that a focus on translations of happiness makes us attend to the interpretive process animating social relations. There are many registers of translation that individuals, communities, and the state make use of as they grapple with relations to happiness. Among the vast array of historical registers that aim to make happiness comprehensible or compelling, medicine and politics are two of the most noteworthy. Moving from one register to another, such as from institutional versions of happiness as a medically regulated matter, to its appearance in situations of war, trauma, illness, local community or state, between these differing registers, we come to re-encounter happiness in many important ways as this special issue demonstrates. This issue thus invites its readers to question modernity’s progressive interest in and use of happiness as a way to narrate and assemble our essential inter-relatedness.