Kenyan Pentecostals between home, London, and the Kingdom of God
This project took as its empirical starting point Kenyans’ conversion to Pentecostalism after migration to the United Kingdom during a period of tightening immigration laws, increasing diversity, xenophobia, and fiscal austerity.
It explored the linkages between migration and religion against a backdrop where migrants’ religious conversion was often understood instrumentally as being compensatory, and where cities are presumed to be secular spaces. Taking their religiosity seriously, the project asked, in what ways do religion and migration stimulate and shape people’s imaginings about the future and the ways in which they go about trying to secure it?
How does religion help migrant women and men locate themselves within and navigate between different socio-spatial scales, between London, Nairobi, and its peri-urban environs; between Kenya and the United Kingdom; between Africa and Europe? How do these born-again migrants live alongside various ‘others’ and cultivate recognised forms of gendered personhood?
[Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) of the UK, 2013-2016]