AAG abstract

Below is the abstract that I have submitted to the Association of American Geographers for their annual meeting in NYC, February 2012:

Mitch Rose (2010) invites us to see how “exteriorities invite us to take up our subjectivity in various meaningful forms” through an understanding of sacredness. For him, sacredness offers a way to listen: he suggests that we see his account of visitors to Egypt as much a method as formal empirical work. In an earlier paper, Slater (2004) notes that “few geographers speak as ‘insiders’ when writing about religious geography”. In both of these accounts of spirituality and religious understanding, we can see echoes of the sacred in the profane (Holloway, 2003). Sacred spaces are made of the materiality of the time-space we find ourselves in.

In this paper I highlight the features of Holloway’s sacred topologies where “embodied practices of the everyday that are sensed” are the sources of signification, focusing on everyday occurrences of spiritual practice in unfamiliar contexts. I walked eight days of the Camino de Santiago de Compostella last September. During this time, I tried to be both geographer-in-training and pilgrim, but found both difficult. Moving through sacred space, I faced unexpected physical and emotional demands. The purpose of my paper is to address Holloway’s suggestion that researching the sacred in the everyday brings about greater richness than confining research to ‘officially sacred’ places. Using fieldnotes and pictures, my paper proposes that geographies of religion and belief are still neglecting the everyday sacredness of embodied space.

It is a part of a session I am co-organising with Dr David Butler, University of Limerick entitled New perspectives on the geographies of religion and faith. Here’s a sense of the kind of thing I want to discuss:

Lucerne colloquium 1

I want to write a more substantive post of my experience of the Lucerne colloquium but will not get around to it this week. For now, here are the rough notes used for the paper that I gave and the slides themselves (Lucerne slides).

Symposia article

Delighted to see the article (‘Being’ religious and ‘becoming’ secular in Ireland and France: rescaling secularisation theory) I wrote for Symposia published earlier this week. You can download the articles and reviews as PDFs.

UPDATE: working paper on the Association of Catholic Priests also now available here.

I’ve also been out snapping statues again, rounding off the last few in Dublin’s residential areas. A new blog Marian Ireland has been doing something similar.

Swiss time

To round off a very intense two month period at work and for the thesis, I am off to Lucerne in the next few days to attend the 6th International Colloquium of Geography of Religion. For the first time the group is meeting out of the lofty and colonial spires of Oxford and going all continental. This is quite exciting for me because I have never been in Switzerland and the gathering should be a good opportunity to meet with some non-Anglophone geographers of religion.  Over the last few months, I’ve been beset by English geographers struggling with anything other than a stiff upper lip or north American writing which tends to reflect the US constitutional principle of non-endowment. My paper and presentation is about a Catholic Diocesan mapping project (hi Omar) and Marian statues and how these point to a need for a rescaling of ‘processes’ of secularisation.  I fly out tomorrow evening and return Sunday.

Over the last month or so, I have handed in ethical approval forms, completed an intense GY802 course and received feedback from The Supervisor on the literature review. On the last one, although initially deflated by the prospect of it going through another two drafts before it is ready, I am happy with the way it turned out and I think I have found the corner of the emergent geographical literature on the public realm, religion and Christianity that I find most comfortable. The ethical approval forms, which I had a mental block about, went in on the last day that they could possibly have been submitted – June 2. If they did not get there by then, I would have to wait until September at least before jumping through the somewhat opaque hoop. The planned fieldwork for this summer includes long-form interviews with those living in and around particular Marian statue sites, recruiting people at pilgrimages to provide some experiences in written form at three sites and a two week stint on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in September. It is going to be a long summer but am confident that with some more work in spring 2012, that will be it in terms of interviews and defined fieldwork. Perhaps over ambitiously at this stage, I’m projecting a completion date in late 2013.

The ethical approval process was not particularly transparent. Aside from the forms being needlessly repetitive, there is no sense for the applicant that there are defined stages in this process. If they had included a process laid out in the forms themselves, it would help, particularly for those not doing this on a full-time basis / with some vocational perspective. It did help me to clarify what it is I wanted to achieve and how this might be attained, the forms are not explicit enough for hand holding you through the next stages of a seemingly detached process, that exists alongside other doctoral degree commitments to participants, the department, progression processes etc.

All that and three projects completed to report stage at work. One for the Catholic Schools’ Partnership on parental understandings of school patronage (publicly available later this summer), one for Cura with their volunteer counsellors as part of a strategic review process and one combined project analysing three sets of ESS and ISSP data. The reports on these will public very soon. Nothing surprising in these: they chart a further decline in regular Mass attendance amongst Catholics in the Republic and Northern Ireland. Census 2011 results will confirm declining numbers of people in Ireland declaring themselves Catholic. By some queer definition of failure, 49 % of the Catholics in the Republic not attending Mass every single week is a headline. I am increasingly disinterested in these modes of analysis, particularly for the material I have read for the thesis so far, but they do provide meaningful signposts to longer term trends. In the last few weeks Joan Roddy has also retired from her work at the Irish Bishops’ Conference and last week in particular I realised how much I am going to miss her around here. She provided a helpful check to my increasing cynicism.

All of this really of course is to admit that I have not been able to find the time to reply to Eoin’s Daly’s excellent recent op-ed in the Irish Times on religion in Irish schools. Were I working full time on the doctorate I might have stood some chance to arguing against his engaging and strict Rawlsian outlook. I think in the end though that those trained in law and those in social sciences think in quite different ways about the pliability of the human will. To whit, my current reading is William Connolly’s  Why I Am Not A Secularist. I thought I really, really needed to read this book but then realised half way through it that it is a compendium of other articles from his work in the 1990s. His unquestioning belief in the state is beginning to grate but I have the sense that I might approximate a feeling like satisfaction near the final chapter. Next book on that teetering pile? Judith Butler’s Frames of War.

CIG 2011

Typographical errors aside, my CIG notes and slides from the Conference of Irish Geographers (pdf).