The everyday urban spiritual: placing spiritual practices in context.

The 'spiritual sector' is growing in economic, social and cultural significance in the UK. Large numbers of people participate regularly in some form of spiritual practice, and particularly significant are those practices named as 'spiritualities of life' (e.g. yoga, meditation, t'ai chi and forms of massage). These practices are distinguished from formalised religious systems by the idea of 'right' conduct that they entail. In religious practice, individuals assess their conduct with reference to ethical codes or external rules formulated by the religion, whereas in spiritualities of life an inward gaze means that conduct is determined in relation to individual feelings, emotions and bodily states. This means that multiple spiritualities are being formed through individual and context specific practices, and it is these multiple spiritualities that this research addresses.

This sector has become one of the most contested areas of life, often dismissed as self-indulgent, irrational or even dangerous by the media, researchers and key religious figures such as the Pope. The limited research existing into spiritualities of life has often tended to caricature the spiritual sector as non-authentic, exploitative or without meaning. With only a few exceptions to this, there has been little research that interrogates what these spiritualities of life mean to those individuals that engage with it, and what experiences people draw from participation in these practices. While the growing numbers of participants in spiritualities of life suggests that they are filling some kind of individual and social need, little in-depth research has been undertaken to find out what that need is, how it is related to everyday lives of participants, and how it differs with different dimensions of social difference (in particular gender and socio-economic difference).

Using Brighton - a city known for its holistic milieu - as a case study, the research will address this gap by looking in detail at how ordinary people negotiate the spiritual in their everyday lives, and use the spiritual as a means of coping with their family and work commitments. This case study approach will allow interrogation of spiritualities of life as practices that are embedded within, rather than separate from, the context of ongoing everyday lives. The research will ask whether the spiritual is an individually experienced and understood dimension of life, dependent on context and situation, or if there are commonalities of experience held between people. The research will use diaries to understand how people negotiate and locate the spiritual within their working and family lives, offering support for, or contradicting these.

The project will use qualitative methods to achieve this fine-grained analysis. Specifically, in-depth interviews will be conducted with teachers and pupils of practices that are classed as spiritualities of life (e.g. yoga, t'ai chi, meditation), a diary-based study will locate the spiritual alongside everyday work and life, and ethnographic research which will interrogate the formal and less formal spaces of spiritual practice. The outputs from the project include a data archive on the experiences of the spiritual in everyday context that will be beneficial for future research into spiritualities across the social sciences, research papers in academic peer reviewed journals, and presentations at appropriate conferences. Final reports on the project's findings will be written and disseminated to local communities and organisations concerned with urban welfare and social justice, and also to practitioner communities. These reports will suggest some of the benefits and costs of spiritualities of life in the urban context, and will draw out some examples of how the experiences and meanings arising from spiritual practices can be usefully used to reshape the urban towards wellbeing, greater equality and social justice.

Beneficiaries:
It is possible to foresee wider economic and societal impacts arising from this research around quality of life, and best practice in the areas of spiritual practices. The research will allow a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between the spiritual and urban life, with the potential of changing ways of thinking and acting. There are two main groups for whom the research will have impacts:

1) Practitioner communities - This research is concerned with the tangible effects of spiritualities of life on everyday urban lives. At present, while there is much anecdotal or experiential evidence, there is little formalised or written documentation of this. In providing this, the research will allow the practitioner community to relate better to the needs of the people it serves. It will also contribute to the debates currently ongoing about practitioner identities and ethical teaching codes. The research will draw out some of the costs and benefits of the current methods of teaching spiritualities of life, and will develop some examples of good practice in relation to these.

2) Communities concerned with urban welfare - Spiritualities of life are increasingly being used by actors such community groups, charities, and businesses, to provide ways to decrease stress, increase wellbeing, and develop social capital. This research traces how spiritual practices are being used within the community, and are coming to shape public and private urban lives and spaces. It will create an evidence base that will help these organisations understand the way in which spiritual practices relate to ideas of wellbeing, equality and social justice. The evidence will help direct the use of such practices, and might also be mobilised to gain funding for further community projects. The research also has the potential to impact positively on quality of life and health in the urban context. It will illuminate aspects of 'good living' in urban spaces and times, and suggest elements of spiritual practice that might be integrated more generally into the urban everyday.

Dissemination:
The research will draw on existing links with the practitioner community, and will develop new links with local government and NGOs. The impact of the research will be delivered throughout the period of the grant. Communication and engagement with both sets of beneficiaries will work through the development of informal feedback on the ground, and the more formal production of an end of project report (distributed in physical and electronic formats). These reports will be distributed to local organisations in Brighton who are known to be concerned with such issues, and through snowballing, will be distributed on a national scale. Council departments (concerned with culture, sport, health and wellbeing) will also be targeting on a national level (here, existing links with, for example, Edinburgh city council, will be utilised). Given that the spiritual milieu in Brighton is relatively well established, the research will also speak more widely to other urban areas in which the spiritual is less well established.

In addition, these research links will provide lasting impacts, providing potential for future research into the relationship between religion and society in the case of spiritualities of life, and meaning that the findings of the research may reverberate through policy and practice (in both sets of actors) over the coming years. The research will also develop the career of the named RA in particular, adding value to funding provided by research councils for masters, PhD and postdoctoral training, and equipping them with valuable research skills that will help to build a lasting research career.