Sacred communities:connected practices across time and place. A joint review and scoping study.
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Sussex
Department Name: Sch of Global Studies
Abstract
The project's purpose was to jointly review existing qualitative and quantitative data from two separate projects, providing new insights on grounded and embodied community practices in the context of everyday religion and belonging. Researchers engaged in knowledge exchange and dialogue with new and former research participants, other researchers involved in similar research and wider academic networks beyond the core disciplines represented here, principally anthropology and geography.
Key concluding themes related to the ambivalent nature of 'faith'; connections over place and time and the contested nature of community. The collaboration was useful to allow mutual engagements and important insights about religion, place, space, and faith. Implicit in terms like faith, community and life course are larger interwoven narratives of space, time, place, corporeality and emotion. In conclusion, we found that understanding how places, 'communities' and 'faiths' differ and intersect requires an understanding of social 'relatedness', including the social boundaries through which relationships are formed, experienced, mediated and transmitted. Further research is necessary, potentially cross-culturally, on the sometimes invisible roles of community volunteers and activists, particularly older women and young people.
Key concluding themes related to the ambivalent nature of 'faith'; connections over place and time and the contested nature of community. The collaboration was useful to allow mutual engagements and important insights about religion, place, space, and faith. Implicit in terms like faith, community and life course are larger interwoven narratives of space, time, place, corporeality and emotion. In conclusion, we found that understanding how places, 'communities' and 'faiths' differ and intersect requires an understanding of social 'relatedness', including the social boundaries through which relationships are formed, experienced, mediated and transmitted. Further research is necessary, potentially cross-culturally, on the sometimes invisible roles of community volunteers and activists, particularly older women and young people.
Organisations
Publications
Day A
(2014)
Sacred Communities: Contestations and Connections
in Journal of Contemporary Religion
| Description | This was the result of an experimental interdisciplinary collaboration between Abby Day, an anthropologist, and Ben Rogaly, a geographer, instigated by the consortium on Connected Communities, led by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Substantively we set out to compare our original studies based on a total of 143 interviews in the mid-2000s with children, teenagers, and adult men and women in two separate projects in two English counties: North Yorkshire and East Anglia. Rogaly's work in Norwich, East Anglia, was already a collaborative interdisciplinary study with historian Becky Taylor. Day's work continued through an ESRC grant, allowing her to re-visit participants first studied between 2002 and 2005. While Day's work made central issues of belief and belonging and the relation between them and thus provided deep insights into faith and religion (see e.g. Day, Believing), these were only bi-products of Rogaly and Taylor's work, the central concern of which was a critical analysis of the construction of the study's location in a 'deprived white community' (Rogaly and Taylor, Moving). As part of our joint study, we reviewed our separate projects and contrasted their findings on the themes of community and faith. We then tested our emerging findings among former and new research participants through informal interviews and group discussions in our 'home' county of East Sussex. Restrictions of time and funding allowed only a small number of new interviews and we therefore sought a range of gender, religiosity, and age: one middle-aged female rabbi known for her community engagement; one middle-aged Muslim male medical doctor actively engaged in environmental activism and in a spiritual community; one elderly retired policeman nominally attached to a Christian church; one young agnostic female university student and one young atheist male student, both involved in academic and voluntary work concerning international development. Following the interviews, we discussed and reflected on our impressions. Key concluding themes related to the ambivalent nature of 'faith', connections over place and time, and the contested nature of community. Implicit in terms like 'faith', 'community', and 'life course' are larger interwoven narratives of space, time, place, corporeality, and emotion. The authors found that understanding how places, communities, and faiths differ and intersect requires an understanding of social relatedness and boundaries. |
| Exploitation Route | Community building. Faith Communities. Social cohesion. |
| Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Education |
| Description | Mainly through teaching, research, writing. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2013 |
| Sector | Education |