Women, migration and well-being: building epistemological resilience through ontologies of wholeness and relationship

This paper offers some reflections on the contextual issues and approach to a social action research initiative, the Ecology of Well-being Project (EWBP), active in Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand, which seeks to address psycho-spiritual well-being among these communities. Specifically, it focuses on building epistemological resilience among these groups and, by extension, society at large, through adopting an Indigenous Life-World approach. This worldview refers to an experience of reality that includes the material and discursive nature of human interaction, but significantly sees this as underpinned by a much deeper metaphysical ecology that views all living beings – animate and in the Western sense inanimate – as being energetically connected.