"This Is What You Get When You Lead with the Arts": Making the Case for Social Wellness

Like other key terms in the medical and health humanities-empathy, creativity, and reflection, to name just a few-wellness has become a weasel word, rife the language of optimization, duty, and self-perception. While alternative vocabularies exist-well-being and quality of life among them-these options usually privilege the objectives of academic (often psychological) research, health institutions, and the economic state apparatus, rather than people themselves. In mind of these concerns, why attempt to make a case for wellness at all? We present a historically informed, theoretically driven, praxis-guided framework for a renewed vision of social wellness (a concept first defined in the late 1950s). While definitions since Bill Hettler's "hexagonal" model (1980) have included mutual respect for others and the assumption of cooperative behaviors, conspicuously absent from contemporary definitions and usage is any mention of the aesthetic realm, which we-alongside philosophers like Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum-take as a central human capability. How can the relational possibilities of arts engagement be understood as not just a means of promoting individual wellness, but also as a method and outcome of social wellness? We propose that social wellness is ultimately premised on the interplay between wellness of the collective and the strength of the relational encounters it engenders. We turn to a key practice paradigm-community arts engagement-as both a vehicle for and site of social wellness. With brief reference to a Canadian exemplar, we conclude with concrete recommendations for addressing critical opportunities for advancing arts-led social wellness initiatives involving academic and community partners.