Architecture of Contemporary Religious Transmission

Funded by NORFACE as part of the programme:
Re-emergence of religion as a Social Force in Europe?

Professor Roger Hewitt
Professor Caroline Knowles
Vicky Skiftou
Britt Hatzius
With partners at the Universities of Hamburg and Bergen

http://www.relemerge.org/project_02

March 2007 – March 2009
This project is concerned to identify how far religion can be seen to be re-emergent amongst young people in three European cities: London, Hamburg and Oslo. The research areas within those cities are all areas of high immigrant settlement and activity. The project lays particular stress on the accounts and perceptions of young people in the 18-25 age band both inside and beyond religious affiliation, and is employing qualitative methods including visual sociological techniques.

The over-arching research question for this project is:
How do the young users and non-users of urban places of religious worship regard the importance of religion, of (other) local religions, of secularism, and - where they are practising believers - the relationship of their own place of worship to the community at large?

Under this heading, constituent issues are:

• What evidence is there that new themes and/or new members are influencing the development of the relationship of religious organisations to their local communities.
• How does spatial organisation and the architectural symbolism of religious buildings interact with young people’s concepts of identity and belonging?
• How significant are young people to any locally evident upsurge in religious activity, and, if significant, how does this vary across the groups studied?
• Is there any evidence that young people who live in urban localities in which religious organisations are active, believe that those organisations are coming to have an equal or better claim to social relevance than, say, other NGOs?
• How do local non-religious young people view the presence of places of religious worship?

By the architecture of contemporary transmission in our project title we mean ‘architecture’ in both the visible, physical sense – its presence particularly in the urban spaces with which we are concerned - and in the metaphorical sense of the structure of social relationships across which religious practices and beliefs circulate and have their embodied social reality.

Each partner team is examining urban areas where both Christian and Muslim worshipers are to be found alongside other major and minor religions. The project will produce answers to questions not simply about attendance levels at places of worship but about complex forces, ideas, social and technological relays that are guiding young people’s reflections on the meanings of their lives and the sources of value, old and new, which they wish to draw on and promulgate, protect, produce and reproduce. These are also inevitably interwoven with issues of identity and of the contexts within which these are valorised, recognised and misrecognised.

The visual methodology being employed includes documentation, photo elicitation within ethnographic interviews and the production of a video record of the research process alongside other visual outputs of the research.