Revd Dr Alison Walker awarded research grant

27th November 2024

Alison has been successfully awarded a research grant from the University of Birmingham as part of a Cross-Training Psychology and Theology Fellowship. 

The Fellowship hopes to build bridges between the two disciplines, providing the opportunity for theologians to break down disciplinary barriers and engage more deeply with psychological research to further theological exploration and practice. The 16-month fellowships offer support for theologians to participate in psychological cross-training, equipping them with the skills to draw upon insights from psychology and providing them with funding to undertake psychologically informed theological research. Alison’s project is part of Cohort 2, which explores the theme: “The role of religion in human flourishing in social relationships.”

Alison’s project is titled “The Role of Place for Human Flourishing: A Critical Engagement between Theology and Psychology.” Her project will develop an expanded theoretical framework using an established psychological three-dimensional model of place attachment and current Christian theologies of place. This will facilitate a thick description of how bonds to place and their accompanying social relationships inform human flourishing, as well as the role of the church to facilitate such bonds both inside and outside the church. The project will also attend to critiques from theologians concerning antisocial behaviour attributed to territorial bonds to place in church communities. She will investigate the possibilities of other areas of social psychology, such as collective psychological ownership, to describe and explain such exclusionary behaviour. 

The project is needed to demonstrate the critical importance of meaningful bonds to place for human well-being, a factor which has not been readily addressed in social psychology, and with only limited engagement in psychology of religion and Christian theology. Moreover, the project hopes to help equip churches to facilitate bonds to place in ways that do not exclude or marginalise. 

Further information can be found here.