Project description
By analysing the contested histories of faith-based civil-society institutions in the East End of London from the late nineteenth century to the present, we will enhance understanding of the impact of faith-based community organizations on diaspora inclusion and exclusion in a world city.
Standard views of migration and diaspora often ignore complex and multivalent affects of belonging, identification and faith – especially the ways in which journeys are rarely simply in one direction. Sometimes such journeys remain within traditions, and sometimes take people across boundaries of nation, denomination or ethnicity. We will challenge the hegemony of such conventional markers of identity, and tease out the complexity of diasporic experience.
We focus on Christianity, Judaism and Islam and our chronological span is the ‘long twentieth century’ – from the late Victorian period to the present.
Key research questions
- What are the different faith models, models of associational politics, forms of family life, practices of spatiality, lines of connectivity and modes of communication within and across the three faiths? The thesis to be tested is that these differences do not map simply on to the faiths, but can sometimes work within and sometimes across them; sometimes following diasporic routes, sometimes departing from them.
- How have different waves of migration responded differently? And how have they been shaped by the shift from an officially monocultural Christian Britain to an officially multicultural secular Britain? Exploring these continuities and contrasts will illuminate both the diasporic communities and shifts in wider society.
Methodology
Our sites will include formal places of worship, associational spaces and domestic spaces. We will use a combination of documentary archival research, oral history interviews, mapping techniques, visual methods and ethnography. We will track how movements, individuals, faiths and communities move through and between spaces, sometimes along diasporic routes and sometimes against the grain of diasporic routes.
We will develop a programme of community engagement in partnership with innovative interfaith and community cohesion work already going on in the area, with which the research team already has extensive contact. We will learn from the responses as we feed our findings back to the communities we are working with - both our accounts of their own histories, but also our comparative analysis of their neighbours’ histories. This will help in understanding continuities and discontinuities, comparisons and contrasts. We will create opportunities for interfaith and intercultural dialogue. We propose to use drama-based methods and photography. Using visual and oral research methods can generate research data that is vivid and meaningful for participants and greatly facilitates this sort of engagement work.
