Near each other in Ealing, London, and both dating from the 1930s, the Ealing Christian Centre (E... more Near each other in Ealing, London, and both dating from the 1930s, the Ealing Christian Centre (ECC) and the Anglican Church of St Thomas the Apostle show contrasting relationships between interior design and Christian faith. Architect Edward Maufe’s St Thomas’s was a purposeful quest to create numinous sacred space in suburbia. The ECC, a branch of the Elim Pentecostal Church, took over the old Avenue cinema, one of the finest British examples of the ‘atmospheric’ style. At the ECC, the distinctiveness and theatricality of the building makes an important contribution to the nature of collective worship, but the Church resists on theological grounds any suggestions that the space itself has sacred qualities.
This article reflects on creative arts practice as a means to research the interrelationships of ... more This article reflects on creative arts practice as a means to research the interrelationships of creativity and faith through discussion of a textile-based arts project undertaken with women of diverse religious backgrounds in West London. Building on research on the significance of vernacular religious textiles in community space and in domestic religious practice, the arts project developed a collective embroidery installation exploring the theme of prayer and its intersections with embodied practices of creativity and biographical narratives of faith, migration and home.
Religious activity, particularly as associated with what might be called everyday organized relig... more Religious activity, particularly as associated with what might be called everyday organized religion, has been unconsidered in recent discussions of the geographies and policies relating to creativity, and has been almost absent in the discipline of Geography’s recent ‘creative turn’. We argue both that religion has been given little or no attention in academic discussions of vernacular creativity, while arts policy as it developed in the United Kingdom in the post-war period has had a strongly secular focus. This continues in more recent policies and initiatives that have sought to promote the amateur and voluntary arts sectors. We explore the reasons for these absences, before turning to examples of strongly creative practice in a range of case studies, focused in a small area of suburban West London. These show a remarkable diversity of creativity including the design, construction and transformation of buildings and spaces for religious worship, but also in ritual, performance a...
Book chapter: Nazneen Ahmed with Jane Garnett, Ben Gidley, Alana Harris and Michael Keith, &q... more Book chapter: Nazneen Ahmed with Jane Garnett, Ben Gidley, Alana Harris and Michael Keith, "Historicising diaspora spaces: performing faith, race and place in London's East End" in Religion in Diaspora: Cultures of Citizenship. 2015, London: Palgrave. In this chapter, we focus on how diasporic religious affiliations of Muslims have been performed in public and institutional spaces in east London in various historical moments since the late nineteenth century. Rereading self-presentations and contemporary commentaries reveals migrant stories which cut across the imagined borders of the ethnic mosaic and which defy the tidy chronology of ethnic succession: these are stories of diasporic Muslims out of place or untimely, and involved in messy contingent alliances with diverse others in the metropolis. We focus here principally on South Asian Muslims: nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century seamen and nursemaids who travelled repeatedly to and fro from the Indian subcontinent and sometimes settled; and late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century British Bengali women. The intersectionality between religion, gender, ethnicity, and nationality is seen to be fundamental to their self-understanding and engagement with dominant imperial, British, and Christian cultures, even as the languages of British power and citizenship have drawn on the strategically deployed overlaying of these characteristics. This excavation also raises methodological questions regarding the problems and possibilities of resistant readings, challenging assumptions made about the ways in which subalterns speak and are heard in the archive (Joseph, 2004, p. 10; Spivak, 2010, pp. 18, 256). Emphasis upon space and encounter can unsettle the established narrative of displacement and segregation by instead retrieving moments of tension, affiliation, and resistance in communities across difference in east London. Publisher page: http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/religion-in-diaspora-jane-garnett/?K=9781137400291 Press release: https://www.wadham.ox.ac.uk/news/2015/november/religion-in-diaspora
Near each other in Ealing, London, and both dating from the 1930s, the Ealing Christian Centre (E... more Near each other in Ealing, London, and both dating from the 1930s, the Ealing Christian Centre (ECC) and the Anglican Church of St Thomas the Apostle show contrasting relationships between interior design and Christian faith. Architect Edward Maufe’s St Thomas’s was a purposeful quest to create numinous sacred space in suburbia. The ECC, a branch of the Elim Pentecostal Church, took over the old Avenue cinema, one of the finest British examples of the ‘atmospheric’ style. At the ECC, the distinctiveness and theatricality of the building makes an important contribution to the nature of collective worship, but the Church resists on theological grounds any suggestions that the space itself has sacred qualities.
This article reflects on creative arts practice as a means to research the interrelationships of ... more This article reflects on creative arts practice as a means to research the interrelationships of creativity and faith through discussion of a textile-based arts project undertaken with women of diverse religious backgrounds in West London. Building on research on the significance of vernacular religious textiles in community space and in domestic religious practice, the arts project developed a collective embroidery installation exploring the theme of prayer and its intersections with embodied practices of creativity and biographical narratives of faith, migration and home.
Religious activity, particularly as associated with what might be called everyday organized relig... more Religious activity, particularly as associated with what might be called everyday organized religion, has been unconsidered in recent discussions of the geographies and policies relating to creativity, and has been almost absent in the discipline of Geography’s recent ‘creative turn’. We argue both that religion has been given little or no attention in academic discussions of vernacular creativity, while arts policy as it developed in the United Kingdom in the post-war period has had a strongly secular focus. This continues in more recent policies and initiatives that have sought to promote the amateur and voluntary arts sectors. We explore the reasons for these absences, before turning to examples of strongly creative practice in a range of case studies, focused in a small area of suburban West London. These show a remarkable diversity of creativity including the design, construction and transformation of buildings and spaces for religious worship, but also in ritual, performance a...
Book chapter: Nazneen Ahmed with Jane Garnett, Ben Gidley, Alana Harris and Michael Keith, &q... more Book chapter: Nazneen Ahmed with Jane Garnett, Ben Gidley, Alana Harris and Michael Keith, "Historicising diaspora spaces: performing faith, race and place in London's East End" in Religion in Diaspora: Cultures of Citizenship. 2015, London: Palgrave. In this chapter, we focus on how diasporic religious affiliations of Muslims have been performed in public and institutional spaces in east London in various historical moments since the late nineteenth century. Rereading self-presentations and contemporary commentaries reveals migrant stories which cut across the imagined borders of the ethnic mosaic and which defy the tidy chronology of ethnic succession: these are stories of diasporic Muslims out of place or untimely, and involved in messy contingent alliances with diverse others in the metropolis. We focus here principally on South Asian Muslims: nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century seamen and nursemaids who travelled repeatedly to and fro from the Indian subcontinent and sometimes settled; and late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century British Bengali women. The intersectionality between religion, gender, ethnicity, and nationality is seen to be fundamental to their self-understanding and engagement with dominant imperial, British, and Christian cultures, even as the languages of British power and citizenship have drawn on the strategically deployed overlaying of these characteristics. This excavation also raises methodological questions regarding the problems and possibilities of resistant readings, challenging assumptions made about the ways in which subalterns speak and are heard in the archive (Joseph, 2004, p. 10; Spivak, 2010, pp. 18, 256). Emphasis upon space and encounter can unsettle the established narrative of displacement and segregation by instead retrieving moments of tension, affiliation, and resistance in communities across difference in east London. Publisher page: http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/religion-in-diaspora-jane-garnett/?K=9781137400291 Press release: https://www.wadham.ox.ac.uk/news/2015/november/religion-in-diaspora
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