Religious lives and transnational (im)mobilities: migrant religiosity in ‘austerity’ Britain

Abstract

The extensive scholarship on migration and religion has demonstrated the multi-faceted role of religion and spirituality in migrants’ transnational lives: from influencing their initial decision to migrate, to its role in migration journeys, to enabling a sense of community and belonging for migrants in new contexts. Within such work, the politics and poetics of religious practice have emerged as central foci, including research that has highlighted the importance of religion in processes of place-making in urban contexts as well as the role of religious institutions within wider structural contexts shaped by neoliberal policies, the ‘roll-back’ of the state and increasingly hostile migration regimes. Challenging a widespread ‘secular’ bias across the social sciences – including geography - such work has contributed to disrupt tendencies to separate the ‘secular’ and the ‘sacred’. This chapter provides a critical engagement with these debates, drawing out some of the key ways in which the relationships between transnational migration and religion have been conceptualised in relation to structural, institutional and everyday contexts. In so doing, it considers how these insights might explore the entanglements of spiritual and material realms, by drawing on some examples of our empirical research on the relationship between Pentecostal churches and the lives of migrant entrepreneurs in the UK.

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ORCID for Maria Villares-Varela: orcid.org/0000-0002-0137-7104

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