Plotting belonging : interrogating insider and outsider status in faith research

Fifteen years ago an outpouring of new academic material asserted the value of being an insider in religious research. Conventional assumptions that linked objectivity with outsider status were challenged. This valuable burst of scholarship worked hard to critique the kind of research that preceded it, where faith or identity was seen to compromise research values, and undermine integrity and rigour. This special edition interrogates the legacy of the shift towards practitioner-research with religious-spiritual-magical-secular communities, particularly, but not only, when research examines broader social, historical and political concerns as well as the processes of faith and belief. It examines some more experiential dynamics of research to consider how the insider/outsider debate plays out from the inside of the research process.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

"When the orthodox went away" : histories of displacement and extermination on the Polish/Belarusian border

This article asserts that the current rise of right wing nationalism in Poland utilizes a set of nested historical erasures and silences. As Trouillot demonstrates, all history making is about selective acts of remembering and forgetting, and close attention to specific “unthinkable” histories reveals how power infuses the process of history making (1995:29). In the Polish case, the authorized historical record produces a homogeneous model of Polish identity by excluding specific histories of dispossession and destruction. Here, I focus on two places that relate to the horrors of Operation Vistula and the Holocaust. I begin by introducing these two silent spaces which trouble a small town on the eastern Polish border. The article moves first to explore how local people engage and evoke these silent spirits via the fragmented and intricate materiality of these haunted spaces and through acts of remembrance and forgetting. I argue that these practices are an attempt to negotiate a complex multi-ethnic history of conflict and cohesion. Yet they also reveal that some conflicts are more unsayable than others. Finally, the article demonstrates the different qualities of silence around these two historical atrocities. It draws on this difference to understand how local memory interacts with, and is undermined by, the historical narrative espoused by the current government.PostprintPeer reviewe

Plotting Belonging: Interrogating insider and outsider status in faith research

Fifteen years ago an outpouring of new academic material asserted the value of being an insider in religious research. Conventional assumptions that linked objectivity with outsider status were challenged. This valuable burst of scholarship worked hard to critique the kind of research that preceded it, where faith or identity was seen to compromise research values, and undermine integrity and rigour. This special edition interrogates the legacy of the shift towards practitioner-research with religious-spiritual-magical-secular communities, particularly, but not only, when research examines broader social, historical and political concerns as well as the processes of faith and belief. It examines some more experiential dynamics of research to consider how the insider/outsider debate plays out from the inside of the research proces

Border Landscapes: Religion, Space and Movement on the Polish Belarusian Frontier

Based on fieldwork carried out in a small town on the Polish border with Belarus, this thesis is concerned with the negotiation of a sense of place in a multi-religious municipality. My fieldsite was a well-known local Roman Catholic Mariological cult site and pilgrimage centre, yet many of the town’s residents were Eastern Orthodox Christians. The wider area also contained a number of important Eastern Orthodox and Greek Catholic religious sites. The negotiation of the pluralistic religious nature of my fieldsite is also influenced by representations of the area as a “frontier”. The idea of the borderland plays an important role in shaping regional attitudes to place, the EU, Belarus, Ukraine and the Polish state. The margin is conceptually important in this region and the shifting of state borders, the residues of socialism, changes to international border policies, and the presence and absence of diverse religious groups form multiple border landscapes. I argue that these landscapes are produced through the careful management of plurality. Plurality must be managed as it is constantly threatening to come apart. The relation between the periphery and the margin, or the inside and the outside, is constantly shifting through what I have called everyday religion, approaches to the border, and incorporation of visitors. A sense of place is messy, contradictory, and fragile, as the shape of the place is by no means fixed, and this thesis aims to explore how it is created, maintained, and recreated. This thesis starts by exploring the dominant religious landscape of my fieldsite, excavating underlying religious tensions and contradictions by paying close attention to Church buildings and cemeteries. I then turn to the forest, the river and the border to examine these tensions in light of attempts to link religious differences to ethnicity and larger EU boundary projects. In the final two chapters I draw out the hegemonic position of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, and the ongoing silencing of the Eastern Orthodox population through a “heritagisation” of their spaces, looking specifically at pilgrimage, household religious objects and religious events

Global urban environmental change drives adaptation in white clover

Urbanization transforms environments in ways that alter biological evolution. We examined whether urban environmental change drives parallel evolution by sampling 110,019 white clover plants from 6169 populations in 160 cities globally. Plants were assayed for a Mendelian antiherbivore defense that also affects tolerance to abiotic stressors. Urban-rural gradients were associated with the evolution of clines in defense in 47% of cities throughout the world. Variation in the strength of clines was explained by environmental changes in drought stress and vegetation cover that varied among cities. Sequencing 2074 genomes from 26 cities revealed that the evolution of urban-rural clines was best explained by adaptive evolution, but the degree of parallel adaptation varied among cities. Our results demonstrate that urbanization leads to adaptation at a global scale

Spectral borders:history, neighbourliness, and discord on the Polish Belarusian frontier

Based on ethnographic research conducted in a town on the Polish-Belarussian border, this book examines borders and the lingering echoes of conflict. Using hauntology as a guiding framework to understand how people live amidst the histories and reverberations of conflicts, the author investigates the role that landscape, with its material presences and absences, plays in evoking and maintaining the border. The ethnography probes themes of ethnicity, religious practice, memory and space, investigating the border as a dynamic social process. By immersing herself in the everyday lives of the borderland, Joyce unravels how traces - lingering imprints of the past - shape local relationships in the present, influencing shared understandings of history and the future. Introducing the concept of the spectral border as a lens to shed light on the ambiguous presence of afterlives and memories tied to a historical boundary, the book unveils its present-day ghostly forms in local ideas and practices of neighbourliness and the borderland identity. Spectral Borders interrogates the use and limitations of these practices by exploring points of tension, where the meanings and uses of 'being a neighbour' and 'being from the borderland' are tested and challenged. In doing so, the book raises questions about how conviviality is created and managed in a place with a long and unresolved history marked by ethnic and religious violence, war, and civil unrest

"When the orthodox went away":histories of displacement and extermination on the Polish/Belarusian border

This article asserts that the current rise of right wing nationalism in Poland utilizes a set of nested historical erasures and silences. As Trouillot demonstrates, all history making is about selective acts of remembering and forgetting, and close attention to specific “unthinkable” histories reveals how power infuses the process of history making (1995:29). In the Polish case, the authorized historical record produces a homogeneous model of Polish identity by excluding specific histories of dispossession and destruction. Here, I focus on two places that relate to the horrors of Operation Vistula and the Holocaust. I begin by introducing these two silent spaces which trouble a small town on the eastern Polish border. The article moves first to explore how local people engage and evoke these silent spirits via the fragmented and intricate materiality of these haunted spaces and through acts of remembrance and forgetting. I argue that these practices are an attempt to negotiate a complex multi-ethnic history of conflict and cohesion. Yet they also reveal that some conflicts are more unsayable than others. Finally, the article demonstrates the different qualities of silence around these two historical atrocities. It draws on this difference to understand how local memory interacts with, and is undermined by, the historical narrative espoused by the current government

Spectral borders:history, neighbourliness, and discord on the Polish Belarusian frontier

Based on ethnographic research conducted in a town on the Polish-Belarussian border, this book examines borders and the lingering echoes of conflict. Using hauntology as a guiding framework to understand how people live amidst the histories and reverberations of conflicts, the author investigates the role that landscape, with its material presences and absences, plays in evoking and maintaining the border. The ethnography probes themes of ethnicity, religious practice, memory and space, investigating the border as a dynamic social process. By immersing herself in the everyday lives of the borderland, Joyce unravels how traces - lingering imprints of the past - shape local relationships in the present, influencing shared understandings of history and the future. Introducing the concept of the spectral border as a lens to shed light on the ambiguous presence of afterlives and memories tied to a historical boundary, the book unveils its present-day ghostly forms in local ideas and practices of neighbourliness and the borderland identity. Spectral Borders interrogates the use and limitations of these practices by exploring points of tension, where the meanings and uses of 'being a neighbour' and 'being from the borderland' are tested and challenged. In doing so, the book raises questions about how conviviality is created and managed in a place with a long and unresolved history marked by ethnic and religious violence, war, and civil unrest

Silent traces and absent places:materiality and silence on Poland's eastern border

This article explores how silence is held and transmitted through the materiality of deserted and abandoned places along the Polish frontier; and the generative role that silencing plays in local practices of tolerance. The article discusses two specific sites of silence in a town on Poland’s eastern border. Both sites were abandoned or destroyed at the same time, and are part of a larger landscape of religious and ethnic conflict in the area. This history of conflict is managed through small everyday acts of forgetting, minimising and silencing. Yet, the two sites at the centre of this article demonstrate that silencing is an incomplete process. The fragmented materiality of the two places undercuts local silences, actively invoking experiences and memories of the Holocaust. The objects missing and present in these haunted places are too inconsequential to be considered ruins – one site is notable only because it is an empty field. Yet these sites and objects act as powerful silent traces. Traces, as Napolitano (2015) has observed, are knots of history with an ambiguous auratic presence, located between memory and forgetting, repression and amplification. Traces conjure that which we can and that which we cannot say. The deserted places of the town draw attention to the silences that conviviality is built upon. This article considers how paying close attention to the specific silences concerning ‘unthinkable’ histories can reveal the power relations embedded in the process of history making and community building not just nationally, but also at the local level (Trouillot 1995).<br/