Chaplaincy Studies - Research Activity

Current Centre research activity includes the following:

Research Network: Military Chaplains and the Ethics of Conflict

January 2009 – June 2010, supported by a British Academy small grant. Series of three residential workshops involving chaplains and academics; bringing chaplains' experience, of addressing moral questions in the delivery of military training and in relation to operations, to bear on the ethics of international conflict (including, for example contemporary developments in the Just War tradition). An edited collection of papers from, this workshop is in preparation, to be published as a book by Ashgate.
Commissioned Research into Prison Chaplaincy

December 2009 – March 2011. This is a research contract (£71k) with the National Offender Management Service, to conduct a qualitative investigation of the contribution of prison chaplaincy to the prison service. This is an evaluation of prison chaplaincy after ten years of development of multi-faith practice. This has involved the appointment of a full-time PDRA and a programme of interviews and focus groups with chaplains, prisoners and prison staff. The Project report was published to all chaplains by NOMS during 2011, and is available here.
Research Project: The Practice of Spiritual Care

May – August 2009, internally funded by Centre for Chaplaincy Studies

Postdoctoral Research Associate conducted literature review and initial fieldwork for a major research project bid relating to healthcare chaplaincy. Proposed major project: a linguistic ethnography of spiritual care in the NHS; which will investigate the practice and discourse of spiritual care, in order to provide an empirically derived, theoretical basis for the public understanding of this area of healthcare. Next stage is a funding bid for a pilot project to establish the methodology for the major project. First jointly-authored journal article is in preparation.
AHRC/ESRC-funded PhD: Spiritual Care in Healthcare and Public Policy

Full-time PhD, 2007-2010 under the AHRC/ESRC Religion & Society Programme, co-sponsored by the Hospitals Chaplaincy Council; investigating the impact of public policy on healthcare chaplaincy (on, for example, models of chaplaincy and public understanding of spiritual and religious care, in a multi-faith context). This was completed and passed (with no corrections required) in 2010. Publications will follow.