‘Is Happiness Contagious?’

How can we understand the recent turn to happiness within economics, psychology and social policy? To what do we appeal when we appeal to happiness? This special issue offers new perspectives on happiness. Rather than assuming happiness is what is good, as a shared object of human desire, contributors consider how happiness is involved in making things good. Drawing on readings of therapy culture, film and literature, the essays collected here consider how happiness works as an aspiration, promise, ideal, emotion, temporality and habit. Contributors discuss how happiness involves specific images of the good life, as a form of world-making, and reflects on the intimacy between happiness and power.