We are happy to announce the WELL-ASIA project's Kick-Off Workshop 'Wellbeing in a Capitalist World: Embodiment, Spirituality, and Mobilities' taking place on Thursday 9 April - Friday 10 April 2026, hosted at the Maastricht University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

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The workshop brings together scholars broadly working on themes relating to wellness within Asia and in other regional contexts: from medical anthropology and the commodification of health and medical travel, to embodied practices and the labour of wellness and hospitality workers, tourist and lifestyle mobilities, and wider questions relating to spiritual and planetary wellbeing. We aim to collectively understand what it means to live well in today’s highly mobile and capitalist context, what is distinctive about the expansion of a wellness industry and its practices in this particular moment in time, and how it relates to historically-rooted healing practices and mobilities across borders; and experiences that are not reduced to market logics.

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Check out the program in the images below.