Reflexivity through practice-informed student journals: how “sustainable wellbeing” relates to teleoaffectivities

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic that first swept across the world in 2020 led to disruptions in habits and routines—central themes in social practice approaches to consumption. Teaching was also disrupted: the move to online classes forced the development of new modalities of teaching and learning. As a result, a group of social science instructors in a “sustainable consumption” network came together to engage students in a reflexivity exercise through weekly journal entries at four universities located in Switzerland, Germany, and Ireland. The students were invited to document how their everyday practices were changing, and how these reported changes related to “sustainable wellbeing.” Further, they were encouraged to reflect on how notions of the collective were reimagined in light of the uncertain sanitary situation. Our analyses show how individual wellbeing is tied to time and social interactions, which are both structured by spatial arrangements. We also discuss how students situate changes in relation to broader, societal trends, hinting at how “sustainable wellbeing” contrasts with other teleoaffective formations such as economic health. We conclude with a discussion around the implications of the journaling method in relation to other participatory processes toward the normative aim of a good life for all.


Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic that first swept across the world in 2020 led to disruptions in everyday lives, habits, and routines, including teaching practices. For university students, classes abruptly moved online, forcing instructional staff to develop new learning modalities. For many teachers, this situation involved questioning teaching methods and meanings, as well as the need to adapt certain subjects to echo the extraordinary events. In this context, a group of educators in the social sciences tied to a "sustainable consumption" network came together to engage students in a reflexivity exercise through weekly journal entries at four universities located in Switzerland, Germany, and Ireland. The students were asked to document how their everyday consumption was changing, and how the changes related to the notion of "sustainable wellbeing"-described for this article as living a good life with respect for the environmental and social dimensions of consumption-related practices. Students engaged directly with social practice theory approaches, as well as a shared understanding of what might qualify as "wellbeing" and "more sustainable consumption." The weekly journals triggered reflexivity around their everyday lives, understood as the more in-depth pondering and examination of one's own thoughts, emotions, and actions. Students were encouraged to apply conceptual frameworks and normative understandings in describing their lived experiences. More poignantly, the exercise allowed students to reflect critically on how they understood the good life at a time of great uncertainty and change.
The beginning of the pandemic in March 2020 presented a range of challenges specific to the academic population, beyond the shift to online learning: college campuses were closed down, international exchange programs were halted, and job and internship opportunities evaporated-leading to a loss of income for some students. In the emerging body of work published around the impacts of COVID-19 on psychological wellbeing, it is clear that for those aged 15 to 25, the pandemic is likely to have had a greater impact on mental than physical health (O'Connor et al. 2020a(O'Connor et al. , 2020b. Isolation, financial insecurity, concerns for the security of loved ones, and the difficulties and apprehensions associated with remote learning have also been among the factors affecting students' wellbeing (THMN and ACHA 2020; Son et al. 2020). The pandemic also exacerbated existing inequalities, particularly affecting disadvantaged students such as women; Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) students; and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQþ) students (Hasan and Bao 2020;Hoyt et al. 2021;Lederer et al. 2021). In the general population, increased time spent with family members has been identified as a source of wellbeing yet homeschooling and working from home are strongly associated with negative emotions; spending time outdoors and exercising are among the activities most positively associated with emotional wellbeing (Lades et al. 2020). Contact with nature and social interaction with household members have also been found to generate a positive impact on psychological wellbeing. For example, Majeed and Ramkissoon (2020) suggest that the pandemic might foster new "pro environmental" and "pro social" behaviors that could promote wellbeing, while also benefiting the environment and society.
What emerges from this brief overview of the literature is that student populations are worthy of specific attention when it comes to understanding how disruptions in everyday life relate to "sustainable wellbeing," but also that how "wellbeing" is defined can vary-from a more subjective understanding related to life satisfaction and happiness to its relationship to satiable, and potentially universal, human needs-as described in the conceptual framework below. The literature also hints at the need to consider how wellbeing might relate to the environmental and social dimensions of sustainability. Scholars reflecting on the sustainable consumption implications of the COVID-19 have hypothesized that the pandemic could act as a catalyst for change and represent a window of opportunity for the transition to sustainable lifestyles (Cohen 2020;Rosenbloom and Markard 2020). Based on a social practice approach, Carolan (2021) studied how the pandemic disrupted food practices, showing changes in the distribution of work in the household between genders, with men taking up tasks such as provisioning for food, but women (especially mothers) accomplishing more food-work overall, in part due to increased meals eaten at home. In a study set in California, Zanocco et al. (2021) demonstrate how higher energy consumption tied to changes in everyday activities at home led to an increased interest in smart home technologies. More generally, Boons et al. (2020) looked at the disruption of social practices from existing research in key areas of daily life such as food provisioning; alternative economies and thrift; and household work, coordination, and care. They imagined post-crisis scenarios, underlining the key role of civil society, societal actors, and government responses in creating more sustainable futures. This work highlights how changes in practices due to COVID-19 can favor lower carbon lifestyles and targets (such as virtual meetings, working from home), while others may run contrary to lower carbon goals such as increased energy use in homes during the day or turning to cars over public transportation for health reasons. They conclude that some of these practices will no doubt be reversed after the pandemic, but others may "stick around" for generations.
A key contribution of this study is to bring together both the wellbeing dimension, or how people understand the good life as a form of individual and collective flourishing, and the sustainability dimension in relation to the environmental and social impacts of consumption categories. Both of these normative aims can be captured in the notion of "sustainable wellbeing," as part of teleoaffectivities-involving ends, purposes, projects, and aims (teleology) with emotional engagements and beliefs (affectivity) (Schatzki 1996). Teleoaffectivities are either associated with practices or transcend individual practices as formations (Welch 2020). Our main research question addresses the extent to which a journaling exercise can support increased reflexivity among students, in relation to everyday life dynamics and sustainable wellbeing as a (desirable) aim.
The next section introduces the conceptual framework we proposed to students in their journal-writing exercise. The analysis is structured around three key findings: how practices changed in relation to wellbeing; how individual and collective wellbeing was understood by students as part of broader social dynamics; and the relevance of a social practice approach to understanding change, with an emphasis on time and space configurations. In the discussion and conclusion, we review how a focus on collective wellbeing reveals teleoaffective formations shared among students from different universities.

Conceptual framework
We introduced students to social practice theories in class lectures and through reading materials in order to enable them to recognize how the ways in which we "consume" go beyond individual decisionmaking processes and often assume freedom of choice. Students were given Schatzki's (1996) interpretation of practices as the site of the social, involving bundles of practices, and how practices are held together through teleoaffective structures, a notion that includes goals, beliefs and emotions, as forms of engagement. In relation to consumption dynamics, we explained social practices as involving three interrelated elements: material arrangements such as objects of consumption that may or may not be available in a given time and how spaces are materially configured; social norms and other meaningful registers that tell us what we should or should not consume, and in what way; and skills and competencies in being able to perform certain practices over others (Shove and Pantzar 2005;Sahakian and Wilhite 2014).
In addition to this general understanding of practice theory in relation to consumption studies, and given the confinement measures that students experienced, we also account for time and space configurations, as well as the role of social relations in practices. For the former, there has been much research on the rhythms of everyday life in relation to practices and temporalities (Shove, Trentmann, and Wilk 2009;Jalas 2006;Southerton 2006;Plessz and Wahlen 2020), highlighting the importance of time and space disruption to foster change in consumption practices (Paddock 2017;Gojard and V eron 2019). For example, in energy studies, social practice theories have been used to understand how energy "demand" fluctuates over time and is an outcome of social practices, which include patterns of energy usage that relate to social and institutional rhythms (Hui, Day, and Walker 2017;Rinkinen et al. 2020). While social practices account for material arrangements in space, such as how a cooking practice might play out in a specific kitchen setting, we hope to contribute to the literature on how practices are destabilized when new spatial arrangements are imposed-as was the case during the pandemic with its "stay at home" injunction.
Social practice scholars who have applied this conceptual framework to the task of designing change initiatives have also grappled with the question of what role social relations or interactions play in either holding in place certain (unsustainable) practices or in finding opportunities to destabilize practices. Such work has included the mapping of "enabling networks" that include not only the different elements of practices described above, but also "interactions and relations" (Vihalemm, Keller, and Kiisel 2015). While codesign processes to map social practices and to identify change points consider "influencers" as being both human and non-human, what exerts the most power in practices is also an important consideration (Hoolohan and Browne 2020). Halkier (2020) has recently theorized social interactions as part and parcel of practices by seeking to understand how practices are coordinated between them and by people interacting together. Empirical work has also demonstrated the relevance of social relations in identifying opportunities for changes in practices such as the role of children in shifting family-eating practices (Godin and Sahakian 2018) or the interactions between people in a community of practice who voluntarily engage in a change initiative .
A central debate in relation to social practice theory has been that of agency, as the social practice theoretical contribution to the social sciences attempts an account of agency that is neither at the individual level nor at the level of social structures. However, as discussed by Welch, Mandich, and Keller (2020), this theory has been criticized for downplaying the agency of individuals, referencing the relative lack of reflexivity of people engaged in social practices which are socially and historically situated. For this contribution, we are most interested in occasions when social practices explicitly involve some degree of reflexivity on behalf of practitioners. This is precisely what we wanted to encourage through the journaling activity which prompted students to reflect on social practices related to different consumption domains that were affected by varying lockdown measures. Rather than assume that most practices are routinized and habitual, we asked students to reflect on changing or destabilized practices, and how they understood and engaged with them, as well as any forms of experimentation that they might have enacted with new ways of doing. This methodology allowed us to reveal the normative dimension of practices, generating reflections on how things ought or should be done, but also what this meant in terms of teleoaffectivities, including goals, understandings, and emotions.
While teleoaffectivities involve the goals, understandings, and emotions around a given practice, such as cooking a meal, wider socioeconomic configurations relate to what Welch (2020) has termed teleoaffective formations. Such formations are configurations across multiple practices, conditioned by a relational nexus of general understandings, that enjoin those practices to common ends, and normatively orders the orientations and affective engagements of those practices (Welch 2020, 7). This nexus of general understandings is a normative stance that can operate at different scales and across several practices; in other words, such formations can be common to several practices at once. As teleoaffective formations are configurations between different elements of practices (notably general understandings, ends and orientations, affective engagements, norms and subject positions), Welch underlines that a reconfiguration of teleoaffective formations "consists of novel relations between both new components and elements of continuity," that can lead to significant changes in existing understandings and values (Welch 2020, 16). In his article, Welch introduces the emergence of a nascent "promotional sustainable consumption" teleoaffective formation, whose central idea is that brand management must reconfigure demand toward more sustainable practices and act as an intermediary between citizen consumers and institutions. It arises from the problematization of unsustainable consumption, in contrast to, and perhaps also in response to, other teleoaffective formations that have been established over time, including "consumer sovereignty" and "emancipatory consumerism" (Welch 2020). The author shows that this new form of "promotional sustainable consumption" has both elements of novelty and continuity with the previous ones. Changes in the socio-economic context (such as growing concern over environmental and sustainability issues), and the new responses brought about by certain actors, have contributed to the reconfiguration of sets of practices and to the emergence of new teleoaffective formations.
What interests us in the case of student journals is that new components are likely to be found in the analysis because of the singular situation of the pandemic, which has led to new material constraints, and the journaling exercise, which encouraged reflexivity among students. The journals potentially fostered some questioning around students' own practices and (potentially new) understandings, involving both individual motivations and aspirations, as well as reflections on political issues and collective wellbeing.
In addition to social practice theory, we also introduced students to theories of human needs as part of how "wellbeing" can be understood. Similar to the notion of "sustainability," the concept of "wellbeing" recognizes that people should have the opportunity to live a good life. Building on Ryan and Deci (2001), we invited students to consider the difference between eudemonic and hedonist approaches to wellbeing. For the former, the capacity to live a good life and to flourish is central, and might involve the development of certain capabilities in the Martha Nussbaum tradition (2000) or the meeting of certain needs-such as feeling free, being protected, having contact with the natural environment. In hedonic approaches, happiness and pleasure-seeking are more important; it is up to each person to feel happy or satisfied with their lives. We asked students to work with theories of human needs, in a eudemonic tradition which implies different interpretations and lists. What needs-based theories have in common is the idea that there are a finite number of needs that are valid for all people over time, that needs are non-substitutable, and that they must be differentiated from the means necessary for satisfying them. Maslow's (1954) hierarchy of needs was presented critically, explaining that the notion of a hierarchy of needs is unfounded-people do not necessarily satisfy physiological needs before aiming for self-actualization. We further introduced students to Manfred Max-Neef's "fundamental" human-needs theory (1991) and more recent developments by Di Giulio and Defila (2020) around the notion of "protected" needs. Further, they were encouraged to reflect on the difference between needs and their means of satisfaction (satisfiers), as detailed by Max-Neef (1991). Some forms of consumption can satisfy human needs while others can impede or indeed destroy the possibility for need satisfaction. In addition, different satisfiers for the same need may well be associated with different ecological and societal impacts. This situation has implications for engaging in more sustainable practices as some forms of consumption might lead to (individual and/or societal) wellbeing while others might not. How to relate social practices to wellbeing is also a growing area of inquiry that considers how practices lead to need satisfaction (Guillen-Royo and Wilhite 2015; Sahakian and Anantharaman 2020; Guillen-Royo 2022; Moynat, Volden, and Sahakian 2022).
While students were able to use needs-based theories and to reflect on wellbeing in their everyday lives, they also expressed clear emotional statements in their journals around how they were feeling about the present and projected into an (uncertain) future. This relates to the concept of teleoaffective formations while also articulating general understandings with respect to emotions. We interpret these emotions as contributing to subjective understandings of wellbeing. The different teleoaffective formations associated with students' practices emerged from an analysis of their general understandings (of what their consumption patterns mean to them, of their own status as consumers, of what is a more sustainable form of consumption, or what is collective wellbeing, for example), along with the ends and orientations shared in their journals, with associated affectivities (such as their hopes, fears, and aspirations). Such teleoaffective formations are common to different consumption domains and a range of everyday practices. Studying emotions in relation to practices and teleoaffectivities has become an area of interest in sociology, in a way to reclaim the study of emotions from psychology (Weenink and Spaargaren 2016;Sahakian and Bertho 2018;Welch 2020).
For the student exercise, we placed "wellbeing" in relation to "sustainability," introducing a very general understanding of unsustainable consumption as forms of provisioning that have a high environmental impact involving fossil fuel-based forms of mobility or meat consumption. Students were asked to reflect on how changes in their everyday lives relate to the use of certain resources-such as material goods, but also energy and water usage in the home. We also highlighted notions of social justice, discussing how people's use of resources in one setting might infringe upon the ability of others to do the same. In this spirit, students were asked to reflect on the possible synergies and tensions between individual and collective wellbeing. The question of social justice was all the more pertinent during the lockdown measures where certain restraints on physical proximity to others was claimed by the State to be necessary toward the greater good of "flattening the curve" or reducing the strain on hospitals and other healthcare services. We asked students to "zoom in and out" (Nicolini 2017) in describing changes in practices in their lives, at a more micro level, to then relate these changes to broader dynamics, thus going from the granularity of everyday life to larger scale phenomena.

Methods
Based on the rapid switch to online learning in April 2020, a group of nine sustainable consumption university instructors in the social sciences developed a reflexivity exercise to engage students in their classes. For this article, results are presented for four universities in three European countries (Switzerland, Germany and Ireland). The study adopted journaling as a key approach to examine how students navigated and negotiated their daily lives during the first COVID-19-relaled lockdown in Spring 2020. Often used in mental health and psychology practice, in recent years reflexive journaling as a qualitative research technique has grown in popularity in other social sciences. It has been used to encourage student reflection in a number of fields including environmental education (Arnold 2012) and sustainability (Anderson 2012). Journal entries as a method allow for spontaneous expression, render changes over time more tangible, and are used notably to study the everyday (Gershuny 2002;Kenten 2010). They can express personal testimonies, everyday events, chronological details, contextual details, and introspection (Hyers 2018).
Unlike daily journals, these solicited weekly journals included a series of questions that acted as prompts for student reflections. For example, students were asked to describe how their consumption-related practices were changing in relation to certain domains (e.g., food, mobility, clothing, and fashion) and to relate these adjustments to different dimensions of sustainability (e.g., environmental impacts, social justice). In a second phase, we introduced new questions pertaining to individual and collective wellbeing, with "wellbeing" defined in relation to human-needs theories. A complete list of questions is provided in Appendix 1. As such, this exercise was a form of co-construction of knowledge between researchers, instructors, and students and aimed to encourage reflexivity (Elliott 1997;Kenten 2010). While students were not guided through a mindfulness exercise involving moments of meditation (see Frank, Sundermann, and Fischer 2019 for a compelling study on mindfulness to encourage attentiveness in the classroom about sustainable consumption), the journaling method did cultivate the learners' ability to introspect.
Undergraduate and graduate students from a variety of social science programs at four European universities participated in the study (see Appendix 2 for details on the sample). In all, 118 students participated, through their enrollment in specific courses, with a majority from Geneva (given the larger class size for the university in that city). Their participation in the form of reflexive journaling lasted between eight and ten weeks. The exercise was undertaken in three main phases. The first phase (approximately three weeks) focused on asking students to journal, to describe, and to reflect on their social practices in relation to a variety of consumption domains including food, mobility, and clothing. The second phase (approximately three weeks) revolved around the topic of need satisfaction. These first two phases were supported by structured questions as well as reading material and, in some countries, recorded lectures on the topics under discussion. Students were offered the opportunity to exchange their journal entries with other study participants, in some cases at the national level or with students from the other participating universities, facilitated by the international network developed for this project. The third phase of the data collection varied depending on the country, with some students undertaking group work and final reporting (Geneva, "GE" and Fribourg, "FR") and others submitting insights in final reports based on interviews with students in different countries or cities (Galway, "GY" and M€ unster, "MS"). See Appendix 2 for an introduction to the different approaches to the learning exercise.
Ethical clearance was gained for the project as a whole, covering the participation of all nine universities that were part of the original design. In terms of data analysis, research teams analyzed the journals from their respective universities, in the language of the journals. In addition, transcripts were shared among the coauthors of this article, allowing for "insider and outsider" perspectives and based on the language skills of the research team (ability to read in French, English, and German). Select citations were translated into English, as needed; each citation is coded with the University initials as listed directly above, the phase of journal writing, and the student-code number (for example, FR_Part1_S01; the first student in the University of Fribourg studydata set, from the first phase of journal writing). Social practice theoretical approaches very much guided the treatment of the data, with the themes of time, space, and teleoaffectivities emerging from the analysis.
Importantly, the student exercises at the four universities were not meant to provide a basis for systematic contrast across countries, cultures, or political systems. Too many factors varied to allow for such a comparison. The semesters were spread over different months, the situation with respect to COVID-19, as well as political and public health responses, varied across the countries, and the students are part of different study programs, to name just a few of the most obvious sources of variance. Thus, gathering insights across the four universities is intended to provide a breadth of information on changes experienced by university students in Europe and not a basis for explaining differences across cases. The research sites experienced varying levels of lockdown during the first wave (See Appendix 3 for a snapshot of these differences, at the time of data collection). Overall, some students were living in co-housing situations, others with their parents, and some alone. About two-thirds of the students were women and most were in their early 20 s.

Results
Our analysis of student diaries is divided in three parts. First, we consider how changes took place in student lives, showing how individual wellbeing was tied to time and social interactions that are both structured by space. Second, we discuss how students situate these changes in relation to broader societal trends, questioning the possibilities for achieving sustainable wellbeing as a teleoaffective formation. Third, we discuss the relevance of a social practice approach to understanding change, with an emphasis on time and space configurations.

Changes in practices linked to individual wellbeing
Students who participated in the journaling exercise were all at universities that had switched completely to online learning, leading to significant disruptions in their studying and working habits. From the start, the journals clearly showed how being able or not to access certain spaces played a determining role in organizing both time and social relations, and the importance of space for individual wellbeing. Not being able to move between customary spacesclassrooms, libraries, workplaces, transit hubs, and home-contributed to blurring how students experienced time. As an overarching element, students discussed the importance of keeping a rhythm to their everyday lives and maintaining pre-existing daily routines or inventing new ones. Some students explained how they needed to create a new structure, as was illustrated by one participant at the University of Fribourg. I normally have a precise and well-organized diary where I know that I have to study on which day and at which time. But since the beginning of the lockdown, I have hardly had anything on the agenda, which has completely changed my daily life. It took me about a month to get back to working well and creating some sense of being organized. (FR_Part1_S01).
Consumption-related practices played a role in creating new structures to mark time and to maintain some coherence over the days and weeks such as cooking, having a drink, or watching a television series. Many students wrote explicitly that they had consumed more consciously during the lockdown and generally shifted consumption patterns from consuming what they wanted to consuming what they needed, as expressed through the theories of human needs to which they had been previously exposed. Having more time on their hands played a big role in that shift: "Since stressful situations of everyday life no longer exist and I have more time at my disposal, I can align my consumption more purposefully and in relation to my interests" (MS_Part1_S01).
In the same vein, during the confinement, books, movies and video-based shows-usually watched on streaming services-served as a distraction and a retreat from the events unfolding. Students also took up new, often creative activities such as painting, baking, listening to music more actively, or exercising. However, as the weeks progressed, it was evident from some journal entries that enthusiasm for these new activities eventually started to wane. Nevertheless, the confinement was a time for nurturing one's curiosity and discovering new things through reading, watching documentaries, or having conversations with family members, friends and, flatmates. As one student in Geneva explained, "Since I spend more time with my flatmates, we talk a lot about political topics, since we are all in the same field of study. Talking with them has made me curious about the political situation in some countries I am not very familiar with, especially the Middle Eastern countries. These moments of discussion give me great pleasure" (GE_Part2_S19). A foreign student living in Fribourg joined Instagram and followed the "lives" of his compatriots living worldwide: "It reinforces my sense of belonging and puts into perspective the loneliness that can result from this confinement" (FR_Part2_S07). This reflection relates to two of Di Giulio and Defila (2020) needs, namely to develop as a person and to be part of a community.
The new relationship to space that resulted from confinement and moving most interactions online also led to a transformation in the quality and quantity of social relations. The importance of social relations and how they were affected by lockdown measures was a dominant element of the students' journals. In regard to school and learning, this meant that students were often more sedentary and tied to their screens for longer durations of time, leading to some ambivalent reactions. The negative health effects of screen time and loss in the qualities of relationships were underlined by some students. Social relations, which can be central to the learning experience, could not be easily replicated through online forums, quickly leading to difficulties: "The changes have affected my ability to focus on schoolwork. It has required an effort to adjust to working from home. I was surrounded by peers on campus. Their focus and hard work encouraged me to do the same" (GY_Part1_S03). Others emphasized the positive aspects of activities shifting online, as they felt free of the constraints of moving around. Some found learning opportunities that were more easily available by virtual means, as shown by one student who was able to attend an online course given by a local environmental group that would otherwise have been out of reach. Another noted: "If college gets delivered completely online I save money and stress about having to pay for accommodation, student levies [fees], bus-ticket costs and extra food costs while on campus" (GY_Final_S02). Lost employment opportunities, for students who could not benefit from the financial support of their parents or other forms of assistance, were a source of stress for many of our participants.
Not being able to meet in person, aside from a few exceptions, meant that not just schooling, but most interactions were moved online, often through videocalls that induced significant changes to the nature of the relationship or interactions, and the value ascribed to it. There was some ambivalence regarding online social interactions: for several students, face-to-face meetings "represent a significant part of my self-perceived quality of life" (MS_Part1_S01) or were a more "active" form of interaction, "whereas on the phone we are rather passive and just tell each other about our days" (FR_Part1_S01). For other students, there were benefits associated with moving communication online, with renewed or more frequent (long-distance) social contacts, in response to the pandemic. Others turned to online gaming as a core space of contact with others: "I play a lot, my social life is mostly through online gaming now, it allows me to escape from everyday life and really gives me a sense of being with other people, to accomplish things" (GE_Part2_S43).
Some students actually saw an improvement in their general sense of wellbeing at the beginning of the pandemic, as social contacts and external diversions were drastically reduced: "All the advertising, hectic people, thousands of daily impressions, sounds, sights, smell, etc., just so much new information that we have to process constantly without even realizing it" (GE_Part2_S2). There also seems to have been a significant change in cleanliness and beauty standards, such as doing less laundry and showering less often. For women especially, the confinement allowed them to let their guard down in relation to their appearance: The context of confinement explains in part the fact that I dared to shave my hair with clippers (it used to go down to my navel) and what's more, without going through the expert hand of a hairdresser. Fear of other people's gaze was one of the elements that delayed the decision to shave my hair, even though I've been wanting to for a longtime. The dominant norm in terms of women's hair, intimately linked to the imagery of femininity, was a real obstacle and influenced what I was ready to do or what I was willing to do or not do for my wellbeing (GE_Part2_37).
Students were able to recognize that identity and participation, two of Max-Neef's needs (1991), were not satisfied by personal appearance alone.
The social relations that mark living spaces also became more important, the changes being sometimes positive and sometimes negative. Some students who went back to their family home during confinement expressed that, "It has created renewed social bonds with family members" (GY_Part1_S02), which was most often seen in a favorable way, confirming the findings of Majeed and Ramkissoon (2020) who observed that social interaction with household members during lockdown had a positive impact on psychological wellbeing. However, others reported dispiriting feelings of going back to a previous life stage, or having to navigate tensions in the reorganization of everyday life and family relations. As a student in Geneva wrote: In my family, we used to watch a movie or TV series at night, after dinner. Now we break that rule quite a bit, my parents watch something alone, and I go play or read, or I watch something only with one of my parents. I think we feel the need to be alone sometimes, and not constantly doing things together (GE_Part 1_S43).
In shared living spaces, the need to set boundaries and to preserve a sense of intimacy was important to students. People living with roommates often underlined the importance of this small social group of flatmates as a means of emotional support, but also raised the issue of needing to find a balance between personal time, working from home, and conviviality with others. Living in an inadequate space, such as an overcrowded or noisy apartment where it is difficult to find an appropriate space to work, could be a barrier to online learning, home-office work, and general wellbeing. The question of who has access to appropriate spaces thus reveals social inequalities that directly affect the daily lives of students.
Outside of the home, in public spaces, being with others also gained in importance. However, interactions were tied to tense feelings around the need to feel protected in society, or to feel safe. For example, interactions with friends, fellow students, and coworkers were greatly missed, and interaction with neighbors, cashiers, and other workers, as well as strangers in the streets, provided a small sense of relief and gained in relevance. Meeting with friends, for a walk outdoors, for example, became more significant: "The first week, having less social interaction was a relief. But now those interactions, often with just one person, are very important to me and very often you feel the need to talk about some pretty deep stuff. Interactions are quite changed I think" (GE_Part2_S43). For some respondents, the new ways of meeting friends-one-on-one, often while having a walk-increased the quality of the interaction and the depth of conversations. By contrast, taking a more critical stance, one student wrote: "There is still a little weird feeling while leaving the house because the danger of the virus is still there" (MS_Part1_S04), with physical interactions feeling uneasy or tense to some.
Finally, mirroring the importance of having adequate living space, students stressed the importance of being able to safely access natural environments and other outdoor areas in particular. Many of them saw this experience as meeting fundamental needs such as achieving a sense of freedom, for example, or participating in society beyond the confines of private spaces. Spending some time in nature was presented as a way of compensating for what students experienced as excessive working at home and online, as well as an answer to health problems such as headaches, insomnia, and stress in general: "What is important from now on are the small freedoms to which I have the right … Being locked up inside makes me anxious and knowing that I can always go out and walk around is very comforting" (GE_Part2_S56). Spending time outdoors and exercising were generally associated with enhanced physical and/or emotional wellbeing, as well as contributing to need satisfaction, confirming the findings of other recent studies (Lades et al. 2020;Majeed and Ramkissoon 2020;Sahakian and Anantharaman 2020). Some students also reported new activities outside the home and in their communities, such as taking more walks or cycling, especially where parks and public outdoor spaces were closed. This change led students to develop a new appreciation for public spaces and the physical organization of their city, which either supported or hindered walking and cycling opportunities. The amount of space taken up by cars also became much more visible. However, the ability to spend time in nature relied on being able to access it, in relation to where one lived and in accordance with specific confinement measures.

Reflexivity around sustainability and collective wellbeing
While engaged in the journal exercise, the students not only acknowledged changes in their own practices in relation to their own personal wellbeing; they were invited to reflect on how changing practices related to environmental sustainability and collective wellbeing. Becoming more aware of the recycling routines and the waste produced at home were among such changes, as one student expressed it: After this assignment, I am more aware now of my habits and changes I can make. As a result of the time I have had to reflect on my daily routine, I could make decisions on how to reduce my impact on the environment. I have been able to identify unnecessary practices and identify how I can take steps towards reducing my consumption practices, reducing waste and working towards sustainable practices (GY_Final_S01). By spending more time at home and with limited physical interactions, the students also reflected on fast fashion and the possibility of buying fewer clothes, or on the impact of fossil-fueled mobility options in cities that experienced much less road and air traffic during the lockdown.
Participants saw the evolution of their own consumption practices as reflecting broader trends in their communities. Although some students critically observed a rise in individualistic and materialistic consumption in their communitysuch as food and cleaning-supply stockpiling or increased online shopping-others noted what they believed to be a general trend toward more conscious and sustainable consumption. Those engaged in gardening explained that they saw a growing interest in self-grown food and exchange practices. A student from Fribourg who had been gardening for a couple of years observed that "this is the first year that we have exchanged so many seeds, seedlings, etc." (FR_Part1_S03). Moreover, students in all four countries noted that the pandemic engendered more support for local businesses and made visible the importance of consuming locally produced food. These shifts in collective consumption practices were not solely related to the fact that people had restricted access to shopping facilities, but were attributable to the time liberated from other activities. Students noted that there was more opportunity to discover different places in the Geneva countryside, for example, or to share gardening materials and skills with others in Fribourg.
Students also observed a structural transformation of consumption patterns. They related these changes to the sudden importance given to previously underappreciated sectors of society, such as local food suppliers, which made people willing to be more supportive of their local shops. As roads were depleted of cars, the students also engaged in reflection on the impact of personal mobilityrelated practices. In Geneva, which is home to an international airport, during a particularly warm spring they noted how the blue skies were clear of aircraft-exhaust contrails and noise. As a student from M€ unster stated with respect to the dominant fossil fuel-driven mobility patterns, "Excessive mobility is viewed more critically than before" (MS_Part2_S01).
Students were hesitant to derive assumptions about the future impact of the pandemic on societal practices, particularly in relation to environmental sustainability. Many of them hoped that the temporary disruption to everyday life would present a window of opportunity for substantive environmental recalibration of economic practices. Nevertheless, they emphasized "the dichotomy between economic and environmental issues, in terms of consumer practices" (FR_Part2_S02) and recognized that economic development would likely remain a priority. Students also observed that it might be difficult to maintain and enhance these changes in collective consumption practices as people returned to their busy lives; the desire to support the economy and struggling economic sectors was regarded as a strong societal expectation. This commentary suggests that human and economic health are part of teleoaffective formations that help some people make sense of the world, particularly in times of uncertainty, and that other registers-such as planetary health or a broader understanding of human wellbeing-are not as prominent.
Students were also asked to reflect in their journal entries on how collective wellbeing might have been affected by the pandemic and they accordingly were able to extrapolate from their individual experiences to make more general observations. Mirroring their individual experiences, many students came to see direct and meaningful contact with friends, family, and loved ones as an important collective good. This sentiment is reflected by a Galway-based student who remarked that "connecting to others has become more valuable" (GY_Part1_S01) and by a student in Fribourg who came to regard the time spent with her family "as a basic need" (FR_Part2_S04). They also remarked on the importance of solidarity within their own community and were happy to see and to be able to participate in different initiatives fostering solidarity among neighbors. This observation echoes both theories of needs that were presented to students-Max-Neef, and Di Giulio and Defila-which name being part of or participating in a community as a need. In terms of societal values, "solidarity, respect and consideration for others" (MS_Part2_S07) gained in relevance for students, presumably due to the newfound prevalence of collective and societal risks of infections, as well as measures that translated solidarity and respect into a call for gestures that encouraged physical distancing and barrier protections.
While responding positively to this increased sense of community, students were also very concerned about rising inequalities. For example, they acknowledged their privileged positions compared to that of others around them. The pandemic and their involvement in this research made different expressions of social inequality much more visible to students, especially in terms of class, age, disability, housing situation, access to outdoor space, and having a supportive social network, among other factors. The journals often provided examples of inequality of treatment during the confinement, negative impacts on small businesses, neglected professions that failed to get sufficient state support, or people in difficulty or more vulnerable in times of crises. Some students also observed that political decisions did not consider specific populations such as migrants, prostitutes, and homeless people.
Finally, the uncertainty provoked by the sudden lockdown measures and the impossibility of predicting the near-term future were also discussed as important concerns when it came to achieving collective wellbeing. The relationship with uncertainty in the student journals varied according to the degree of trust in public authorities. On this point, the journals revealed very contrasting sentiments. Some students expressed anger and criticism while others underlined the responsible management of the crisis by their respective political authorities. Having trust in government measures more or less compensated for uncertainty and could be seen as calming concerns whereas, by contrast, defiance and low confidence in the government exacerbate them. Some of the contrasts could be explained by differences in political cultures in the cities where each university is based. However, it is interesting to note that contrasted experiences of uncertainty were also visible within the same city, and sometimes in a single journal. These divergences in how students trust their government demonstrate that feelings of uncertainty were different depending on both individual dispositions and cultural settings, but also varied depending on the weeks in which students were journaling.

Understanding change through time and space configurations
A social practice theoretical approach to analyzing student reflections on changing consumption patterns during a pandemic was useful as a framework for uncovering the transformations underway and how they relate to the normative aim of "sustainable wellbeing." In terms of understanding change, how time was organized at the individual and collective level had an important impact on wellbeing. The capacity for students to organize their days, at an individual level and in interactions with others, gave them openings to create "marking moments" in their daily routines such as preparing a meal, participating in sports, or spending time outdoors. These activities seemed to increase their sense of wellbeing, but also related to how well students were able to coordinate time with others. As shown by Plessz and Wahlen (2020), sharing and coordinating a practice such as a meal gives the practice itself power over other practices. In a situation in which time constraints are minimal, the importance that practitioners give to these shared practices can be a way to create a positive temporal marker around which activities can be organized. Students also had to adapt to new temporalities in terms of their studies. For participants who were able to join asynchronous classes online, at times that differed from the more rigid in-classroom format, there was greater flexibility in how they could create this "collective" time for learning. Students had the possibility to organize what Fine (1996) described as the tempo (the rate or the speed), the timing (synchronization), and the sequence (the ordering) of their learning activities.
Nevertheless, as shown by Southerton (2006), the organization, adaptation, and experience of these dimensions of time can differ according to a range of social constraints. For instance, students' experience of time was constrained by social situations such as their living conditions, family circumstances, and work commitments-emphasizing the role of social interactions and spatial configurations on practices. Any sense of wellbeing that might be supported or hindered by the reorganization of time should not be overindividualized and can be understood as a complex entanglement of collective practices and institutions, social and material characteristics, and individual competencies. Moreover, the organization of time also had an impact on moments of consumption. The disruption of daily routines can be seen as an opportunity to reflect on and to change previous practices (Gojard and V eron 2019). The increased time spent at home gave students the opportunity to observe their habits and to develop more sustainable practices, which allegedly involved assessing their resource consumption or waste production, gardening and cooking, or restricting their purchases to what they felt was necessary. This demonstrates how time organization, which is not only an individual matter but is also constructed by collective and social habits and institutions, has an impact on practices and can foster, or prevent, the adoption of sustainable practices.
Space was also a central element in recognizing how certain practices might be performed or might have changed during this period. This relates both to private spaces-often shared with others-and public spaces, more specifically, access to natural environments. Having some kind of contact with nature was found to be an essential need across the sample. In terms of private spaces, students sharing a home with others had to negotiate between moments of exchange and social interaction with other household members, and more private time in spaces that were isolated from others. Outside of the home, how people experienced space was important to need satisfaction-in being around others, even if alone. Yet, in relation to the spread of the virus, there was some anxiety around physical contacts and a sense that collective wellbeing was in peril because of physical proximity. The virtual world became another "space" that students could navigate, but in many respects these online spaces proved ambiguous when related to wellbeing. For some students, connecting to others virtually contributed to need satisfaction, but not all the time, and not for all; online time could be excessive and a poor replacement for physical contacts. Participants were very much aware of how space might structure inequalities: those who had more access to private spaces, indoors and outdoors, often explicitly mentioned their privileged position. Inequalities in access to nature in public spaces were also highlighted by many students, and results show the importance of well-maintained and accessible outdoor public spaces as a resource for individual and collective wellbeing.

Conclusion: the relevance of teleoaffectivities in times of change
The study of student-journaling exercises during the first wave of the pandemic in Spring 2020 was an opportunity to uncover how changes took place in relation to everyday life, and how these more granular variations related to broader societal dynamics. The notion of teleoaffectivities is one way of zooming in and out, by looking at goals, emotions, and shared understandings at the level of practices, but also at formations across practices (Welch 2020). In relation to teleoaffective formations, the journals revealed shared goals and emotions across student populations at different universities: human and economic health imperatives were understood as desirable goals. A shared understanding of what is meant by "individual and collective wellbeing," beyond human health, to include multiple human needs, or a shared understanding of what is intended by "sustainable forms of consumption" are both part of faint teleoaffective formations that may have found some outlet and expression through journaling. Through such deliberative processes, a broader and shared understanding of "sustainable wellbeing" could be further amplified toward imagining more sustainable futures. This might contribute to a teleoaffective formation that includes notions of individual and collective wellbeing, as distinct from that of "promotional sustainable consumption" and its discourses of environmentalism and orientation of consumer culture toward "sustainable" brands (Welch 2020).
This insight into new teleoaffective formations leads us to conclude with a discussion around a core question in sustainability studies: What is the role of citizen deliberation in sustainability transitions, as providing opportunities for reflection and exchange, in our case, fostered by student journaling and reflexivity exercises? Sustainability researchers have considered such deliberation and participation as an important contribution to, if not condition for, a successful transition, for a long time. They have assumed that such deliberation and participation will improve acceptance of the costs of transition (financially) and the abandonment of cherished or taken for granted practices (comfort), as well as allow access to a larger pool of creative solutions (Bohn et al. 2019, Newig 2011. It is due to such assumptions and parallel concerns about governments' lock-in into high-carbon, growth-driven, politico-economic trajectories that citizen assemblies on climate change have emerged in a range of countries. In particular, scholars view societal dialogue about living well in a world of limits, shared meanings around the good life, and the role of consumption minima and maxima in pursuit of the 1.5 target of the Paris agreement and sustainable lifestyles, as urgently needed (Fuchs et al. 2021).
However, deliberative citizen dialogues do not guarantee a successful transition and are extremely difficult to orchestrate. Indeed, the concrete "howto" of these deliberations is still a matter of research and experimentation. How to ensure representative participation by citizens, including societal sectors difficult to reach, and how to enable participating citizens to ponder relevant questions and potential answers on a sufficiently sophisticated level, i.e., to provide relevant inputs without manipulating the discussion in the assembly, are only two of a range of challenging questions at the foundation of a successful citizen dialogue. These challenges notwithstanding, however, citizen assemblies or other fora for citizen dialogue could provide important arenas for exercises and exchanges toward fostering reflexivity on sustainability-related practices. Following the experiences gained with reflexive journaling in our joint exercise here, we believe that such deliberative citizen-focused processes could help to strengthen emerging teleoaffective formations around a broader notion of sustainable wellbeing.
At the same time, we must acknowledge potential biases and limits of this study. First, while the students provided informed consent for the anonymized use of their data and the research project underwent a thorough ethical clearance process, our participants were aware that their journals would be shared and this could have hindered what they were willing to reveal. Second, in some universities the assignment around the journals was graded which may have influenced their participation-though students could withdraw their consent to share anonymized and de-identified journals after grades were submitted, as part of our ethical obligations. Third, the journal activity took place in the first wave of the pandemic when lockdown measures were relatively novel. Conducting the same study one year later might have revealed different results, particularly in considering how students were able to remain resilient to uncertainty over an extended period of time. Moreover, the way the different confinement measures and disruptions to daily life were framed in the media across countries and over time is likely to have played a role in how students looked at and accounted for their own experience. Finally, some of the participants were enrolled in academic programs that focused on sustainability issues and would have been more likely to be interested in this topic.
The journaling exercise is only one way of engaging students in reflections around "sustainable wellbeing," and could have been enhanced in a number of waysfor example, by bringing students together to debate issues prior to referenda. Regardless of the format a participatory process might take, engaging with social practice theory and a short introduction to the normative aim or "sustainable wellbeing" draws into the open, and may well increase reflexivity around, how everyday life plays out. Such an exercise was particularly suitable to a moment of disruption, as a specific time and space opened up during lockdown measures and at-home learning to allow for such reflections. Across the sample, all students found that the practice of journaling, as an individual exercise and as part of an international endeavor, contributed to their sense of wellbeing-either because they were participating in a shared endeavor with other students (relating to a need identified by Max-Neef 1991) or because they could use the journals as a way to make sense of their lives and to live their lives as they saw fit (relating to protected need identified by Di Giulio and Defila 2020). Participation is in and of itself a need. Whether reflexivity overall increased, stopped at the journaling exercise, or was carried through to other practices remains to be ascertained, but nonetheless points to the potential contribution of such exercises in creating a basis for reflection and dialogue on what it means to live the good life in times of disruptive change.

Part II: connecting consumption to wellbeing
You have all heard about sustainability, a term usually used to talk about environmental impacts but a concept that also raises questions related to social justice and equity. The notion of "wellbeing" relates to the recognition that all living beings should have the possibility to live "a good life." For some people, wellbeing is defined by subjective criteria alone and is about feeling happy, or being satisfied with how your life is going. For other thinkers, wellbeing can be defined on an objective level proceeding from the assumption that people all over the world have very similar "fundamental needs"like the need for freedom, contact with nature, or security. Theories of human need are one way to think about the difference between needs and desires. This also relates to how we understand and live with limits to consumption. By limiting our consumption, do we create opportunities for people to experience wellbeing? Or does wellbeing become more limited? We are living at a time when some of our individual needs are not being met, but these limits might be for the greater good of society, or for the good health of vulnerable groups in societyby reducing the amount of harm that is being unleashed by this virus. This may lead us to reflect on our role in collectives and our reciprocal responsibilities.
Assignment: Please reply to the following questions in order to document how changes in your daily life practices relate to wellbeing.
1. Do you see any new changes happening around you, at the societal level and in your own consumption practices? What are they? 2. Can you list the things or experiences that help you achieve wellbeing during these weeks, and what you are missing? In doing so, please distinguish between materials and services (food, consumer goods, fashion, and so forth) and more immaterial experiences (walking in a park, spending time with friends, feeling safe, feeling free In total, nine universities participated in this study, including in its design and implementation in the classroom, with a complete list presented below. Due to time constraints and other priorities, not all of the partners were able to join in this collective writing effort.