26/09/2026
Nick Gellatly
Where the week has left me.
Four things are running at once this trimester: the Ruskin module on happiness, Motion Graphics, Immersive Storytelling, and being a Welcome Buddy for the new intake. On paper they have nothing to do with each other. A Monday spent animating type, a Wednesday spent discussing eudaimonia, a museum gallery, and a handful of fresh faces who cannot find the right building.
By Friday it was clear they are all the same brief in different clothes. Every one of them is about attention: who gets it, what it does to people, and whether it is offered as a welcome or extracted as a resource. That was not the plan. It is a better plan than the one I had.
Four things are running at once this trimester: the Ruskin module on happiness, Motion Graphics, Immersive Storytelling, and being a Welcome Buddy for the new intake. On paper they have nothing to do with each other. A Monday spent animating type, a Wednesday spent discussing eudaimonia, a museum gallery, and a handful of fresh faces who cannot find the right building.
By Friday it was clear they are all the same brief in different clothes. Every one of them is about attention: who gets it, what it does to people, and whether it is offered as a welcome or extracted as a resource. That was not the plan. It is a better plan than the one I had.
What Does It Mean to Be Happy?
The Ruskin module turned out to be less about happiness than about power. Who defines it, who gets pictured having it, and who is told to try harder. The lecture gave me the vocabulary for things I already half knew: life scripts, social comparison, the hedonic treadmill, and a set range that is rather less obliging than the popular version suggests.
The part that stung was that my own trade is implicated. Digital media manufactures the images against which people measure their lives, so being told that comparison drives unhappiness is a bit like a brewer being briefed on liver damage. My discipline is built on the edit, on keeping the good bits, and the lecture more or less identified that as part of the problem.
What I want from the module: to come out the other end with an argument rather than an opinion. The artefact is Queerly Beloved Café, a community project built on queer joy rather than queer struggle, and the claim underneath it is that belonging is a structural answer to unhappiness rather than a personal resilience one. Twelve weeks to find out whether that survives contact with the reading.
Motion Graphics
Twelve weeks to make an animated title sequence. Titles did not have to come from his list, so I have chosen My Beautiful Laundrette.
That choice looks like nostalgia and is not. A 1985 film about a gay interracial relationship set in a launderette in Thatcher’s London is a film about finding somewhere to belong in a country that would rather you did not. It is also a film about making something warm out of unpromising municipal premises, which is more or less the café brief with soap powder.
What I want from the module is craft. Title sequences are an exercise in saying a great deal with very little: type, rhythm, restraint, and knowing when to stop. Those are exactly the skills the café documentation will need, and they are the ones I am weakest on. I am comfortable with words and getting more comfortable with pictures. Timing is the gap.
Immersive Storytelling
Two halves. Trimester one is Complemental, a binaural audio piece for the Darwin the Geologist gallery at the Sedgwick Museum, made to a set brief with a partner and still to be talked through with tutors. Trimester two is Queerly Beloved as a project in its own right.
Binaural audio is the most hospitable medium I know. It puts the listener inside a space rather than in front of one, and it does it without showing them a single face to compare themselves against. After a week of learning that images drive comparison, working in sound feels less like a technical choice and more like an ethical one.
What I want here is to learn how a room can be made to hold someone’s attention gently. The Sedgwick brief is the rehearsal. The café is the performance, and the fact that the two trimesters run in that order is a lucky piece of timetabling.
Welcome Buddy
The fourth strand carries no credits, which is probably why it is the one that keeps proving the point. I am a Welcome Buddy for the new intake on Digital Media Production and some on Film and Television, making welcome-message sequences for people who have not arrived yet.
It is the café in miniature. Somebody turns up somewhere unfamiliar, works out very quickly whether they are expected, and the whole of their first term bends around that judgement. Nothing in the module handbook covers it and no ‘rubric’ measures it.
Tutu’s line about doing your little bit of good where you are was written for exactly this sort of thing. So was the bit of the happiness lecture about relationships mattering more than circumstances. It is the least assessed thing I am doing and quite possibly the most consequential.
The thread running through
Set the four side by side and the same question keeps surfacing: who gets cast, and who is made welcome?
The happiness module asks whose happiness is treated as the norm, and whose is left out of the picture entirely.
My Beautiful Laundrette is a film about two people who were never going to be cast in the national story, making a life in a launderette anyway.
The Sedgwick piece is about inviting a stranger into a room and holding their attention without taking anything from them.
Welcome Buddying is that same invitation, delivered to actual eighteen year olds in September.
Queerly Beloved is all of it in one place, with a teapot.
Underneath sits the thing I could not have articulated a fortnight ago. My discipline is very good at capturing attention and has almost no vocabulary for whether the capture did anyone any good. Engagement, retention, reach: none of them ask how the audience is afterwards. The happiness module has handed me the missing half of my own trade, which is an uncomfortable gift and clearly the useful one.
On arriving late
I have started reading Rutger Bregman’s Moral Ambition, which argues that too much talent goes into work that does not matter, and warns about the golden handcuffs that keep people in jobs they have stopped believing in. I will be sixty next birthday. It would be easy to read that as an indictment and conclude I have a great deal of catching up to do.
Two objections to my own self-pity. The first is that the book is aimed at people still wearing the handcuffs. I took mine off in 2023 when I left full-time employment; when I enrolled on a degree at fifty-seven, which is the leap Bregman is describing rather than the thing he is warning against. The second is that catching up implies a schedule I am behind on, and the module has a name for that. It is a life script in a different suit.
Thomas Clarkson wrote his Latin prize essay in this city in 1785, asking whether it is lawful to make slaves of others against their will. He entered to win. Then he stopped at Wadesmill on the road home with the awkward thought that if what he had written was true, somebody ought to act on it. He was twenty-five, and it still took him forty years. The point is not the scale, which does not bear comparison with anything I am doing. The point is the question: what follows if you take your own argument seriously?
What I have now that I did not have at twenty-five is time I actually own. Tutu’s little bit of good is done where you are, not when you meant to arrive. On the evidence of week one, where I am is a launderette, a museum gallery, a seminar room with the chairs pulled into a circle, and a few new students who have not worked out where the library is. That will do for a start.
Reference list in ARU Harvard, covering everything I have drawn on across this session.
Books
Ahmed, S. (2010) *The promise of happiness*. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bregman, R. (2025) *Moral ambition: stop wasting your talent and start making a difference*. Translated by E. Moore. London: Bloomsbury.
Cabanas, E. and Illouz, E. (2019) *Manufacturing happy citizens: how the science and industry of happiness control our lives*. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) *Flow: the psychology of optimal experience*. New York: Harper & Row.
Davies, W. (2015) *The happiness industry: how the government and big business sold us well-being*. London: Verso.
Layard, R. and De Neve, J.-E. (2023) *Wellbeing: science and policy*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McMahon, D.M. (2006) *The pursuit of happiness: a history from the Greeks to the present*. London: Allen Lane.
Nussbaum, M.C. (2011) *Creating capabilities: the human development approach*. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Raworth, K. (2017) *Doughnut economics: seven ways to think like a 21st-century economist*. London: Random House Business.
Seligman, M.E.P. (2011) *Flourish: a new understanding of happiness and well-being*. London: Nicholas Brealey.
Waldinger, R. and Schulz, M. (2023) *The good life: lessons from the world’s longest study on happiness*. London: Rider.
Journal articles
Brown, N.J.L. and Rohrer, J.M. (2020) ‘Easy as (happiness) pie? A critical evaluation of a popular model of the determinants of well-being’, *Journal of Happiness Studies*, 21(4), pp. 1285-1301. doi: 10.1007/s10902-019-00128-4.
Diener, E., Lucas, R.E. and Scollon, C.N. (2006) ‘Beyond the hedonic treadmill: revising the adaptation theory of well-being’, *American Psychologist*, 61(4), pp. 305-314. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.61.4.305.
Lomas, T. (2016) ‘Towards a positive cross-cultural lexicography: enriching our emotional landscape through 216 “untranslatable” words pertaining to well-being’, *The Journal of Positive Psychology*, 11(5), pp. 546-558. doi: 10.1080/17439760.2015.1127993.
Lyubomirsky, S., Sheldon, K.M. and Schkade, D. (2005) ‘Pursuing happiness: the architecture of sustainable change’, *Review of General Psychology*, 9(2), pp. 111-131. doi: 10.1037/1089-2680.9.2.111.
Ryan, R.M. and Deci, E.L. (2000) ‘Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being’, *American Psychologist*, 55(1), pp. 68-78. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68.
Ryff, C.D. (1989) ‘Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being’, *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, 57(6), pp. 1069-1081. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.57.6.1069.
Reports
Fancourt, D. and Finn, S. (2019) *What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being? A scoping review*. Health Evidence Network synthesis report 67. Copenhagen: WHO Regional Office for Europe. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
Helliwell, J.F., Layard, R., Sachs, J.D., De Neve, J.-E., Aknin, L.B. and Wang, S. (eds.) (2026) *World happiness report 2026*. Oxford: Wellbeing Research Centre, University of Oxford. Available at: https://www.worldhappiness.
Marmot, M., Allen, J., Boyce, T., Goldblatt, P. and Morrison, J. (2020) *Health equity in England: the Marmot review 10 years on*. London: Institute of Health Equity. Available at: https://www.health.org.uk/
World Health Organization (2025) *From loneliness to social connection: charting a path to healthier societies*. Geneva: World Health Organization. Available at: https://iris.who.int/items/
Historical sources
Clarkson, T. (1786) *An essay on the slavery and commerce of the human species, particularly the African*. London: J. Phillips.
Websites
School for Moral Ambition (no date) *Start solving the world’s biggest problems*. Available at: https://www.moralambition.org/ (Accessed: 26 September 2026).
Film
*My Beautiful Laundrette* (1985) Directed by S. Frears. [Feature film]. London: Working Title Films.
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