Dr Peter J. Collins is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Durham University, UK. completed an MA in development studies and a PhD in social anthropology at Manchester University. His research interests include religion (especially Quakerism), ritual and symbolism; historical anthropology; qualitative research methods, particularly narrative analysis; the anthropology of Britain; aesthetics and the built environment. He was recently engaged in an NHS-funded projects looking at hospital design and the space and place of hospital chaplaincies. Recent publications include “On Ritual Knowledge” (inDiskus: The Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religions. Vol 13. 2013), “Acute Ambiguity: Towards a Heterotopology of Hospital Chaplaincy” (in Social Identities Between the Sacred and the Secular, ed. Abby Day, Giselle Vincett and Christopher R. Cotter, Ashgate. pp. 39-60. 2013) and “On the Materialisation of Religious Knowledge and Belief” (in Religion and Knowledge, ed. E.A. Arweck and M. Guest, Ashgate. 2012).
Buildings dominate our skylines, they shape the nature, size, sound and smell of events within their walls, they provide a connection to the recent and distant past, and they serve as a physical, material instantiation of any number of contextual discourses. But what about the relationship between 'religion' and these (generally) human-made structures?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
The views expressed in podcasts, features and responses are the views of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Religious Studies Project or our sponsors. The Religious Studies Project is produced by the Religious Studies Project Association (SCIO), a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (charity number SC047750).
