The Life Worth Living in the Context of Ecosocial and Biopolitical Inequalities

This course will be a learning context where students coming from any discipline have space to reflect individually and collectively on the question of how to live a life worthy of our shared humanity. The course will bring together spiritual, political and intellectual traditions of thinking about what an individually and collectively meaningful life can look like. Apart from discussing these questions by building on the Life Worth Living approach (Volf et al., 2025; Yale Center for Faith and Culture, n.n.) the course will create a space to engage in conversation about how the individual quest for the meaning of life takes shape in relation to questions of how we live together in the context of finite planetary material resources and intensifying ecosocial crises. Moreover, the class will also include a discussion on how different biopolitical and social conditions shape the process of determining for oneself which life is worth living, in this I want to open a discussion of how marginalization can be both obstacle and inspiration in addressing ‘the question’, as well as to what extent the idea of a ‘life worth living’ has been used to discredit certain identities and subject positions and in which way.