Peter Collins

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 Seculared. 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).

 

Contributions by Peter Collins

podcast

Peter Collins on Religion and the Built Environment

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?

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