Dominic Pasura, University of Glasgow
I write as Principal Investigator of The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Transnational Young People of African Migrant Background. This post outlines how we frame interviews and read fieldnotes across Lagos, Harare, Johannesburg, London and Birmingham. The aim is to question categories, outline working concepts and ground them in what young people say and do.
Why question categories
Scholarship on migration and religion often travels from the global North to the global South, which has shaped current debates about the decolonising agenda (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013).Measures of religiosity tend to prioritise attendance and affiliation, with limited attention to informal practice and non-Western settings. Our stance is to start from local terms and practices. We treat young people as agents, theorists and critics in their own right. We take their words seriously even when they fall outside familiar frames.
Youth as social agents
We ask what religion does in the lives of young people and what young people do with religion. Identity is treated as relational and layered, both individual and collective. Belonging is examined as it is made through ties and routines that cross borders. We use labels such as “first generation”, “second generation”, “left-behind”, “global North/South”, and “transnational social field” as provisional tools. We test them against accounts of movement, care and obligation.
Religion, spirituality and measures
We question taken-for-granted categories by separating the definition of religion from the concept of religion. We read the material through lived religion, following Meredith McGuire’s focus on what people practise, experience and express in everyday life (McGuire 2008). We frame “religion/spirituality” in African terms as plural and mobile, relational andpractice-centred (Olupona 2014). We read transnational religion as networked affiliation and everyday practices sustained by the infrastructures, media, and organisational forms of translocal diasporas (Pasura, 2022; Adogame, 2013).
We work within a transnational social field perspective. Peggy Levitt proposes five levels, from individual practice to global culture and institutions, and urges researchers to trace how practices and ideas circulate across these levels (Levitt 2003). We also use Wong and Levitt’s (2014) three “hooks” for studying religion in motion: carriers (people, objects, ideas, spirits, technologies), geographies of circulation, and sites of encounter. In our notes, carriers include livestreams, prayer lists and WhatsApp groups; geographies range from high streets and townships to campuses and suburbs; sites of encounter include mosques, churches, markets, barber shops and timelines.
Space and materiality
Following Kim Knott, we think spatially about religion and pay attention to how states, markets and media shape practice. Cities are treated as landscapes where sacred, secular, public, private, official and informal spaces intersect. Our focus on youth includes suburban prayer rooms, rented halls, student flats and phone screens, and the histories and cross-border trajectories of African-background faith communities in those spaces (Knott 2005).Following Manuel Vásquez, we place material cultures and embodied routines at the centre of research design and analysis (Vásquez 2011). This orients the work toward what people do with texts, media, clothing, food, artefacts, and bodies, and how those things move, wear, break, or get stopped at borders.
What our fieldwork shows
Across Lagos, Harare, Johannesburg, London and Birmingham, religious and spiritual life moves across distance through phones, platforms and mediated ties. Interviews in the UK recorded participants who did not join a local congregation but continued to attend services from home countries online. Teams in Zimbabwe described co-presence during worship by praying in church while on the phone with parents abroad and noted the role of church spaces and online links in support for some left-behind youth. South Africa fieldwork recorded accounts of young people travelling, praying together en route and using objects such as crosses or rosaries for protection. In our Lagos and Harare work, religion actively shapes why and how youth migrate. It provides meaning, motivation and material capabilities. These observations are read alongside constraints such as documentation regimes and access to education and healthcare, particularly for those in South Africa, as well as the roles of congregations, peer groups and digital communities.
Method and stance
As African scholars, we situate our method within decolonial and Africa-centred approaches.Our method is multi-sited ethnography. We use observation, interviews, document analysis and platform traces, and we follow people, objects, metaphors and plots across sites. We work reflexively, recognising that our data are our constructions of participants’ constructions. Recruitment and consent procedures address visibility, stigma and risk, and are grounded in community accountability and language practices (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013; Ngugi 1986).
Implications
1. Treat online participation as participation. Streams and platform groups link young people to congregations and kin when work patterns, distance or booking systems limit attendance.
2. Link mobility and theology without reduction. Prayer, counsel and ritual can organise plans, paperwork and timelines. This requires documentation that avoids collapsing religion into economics.
3. Keep scales in view. Use Levitt’s levels to connect individual practice with congregations, national frameworks, cross-border ties and global institutions. Map carriers, geographies and sites of encounter to see what moves, where, and under what conditions.
4. Define “religion/spirituality” through local languages and practices, ancestors, divinities, obligations, objects and spaces. Treat “first/second generation”, “left-behind” and “North/South” only as provisional labels to be tested against transcripts, fieldnotes, mobility histories and city contexts.
5. Attend to material and spatial contexts. Track how objects, media and bodies feature in practice, and how spaces, public and private, official and informal, digital and physical, enable or limit what young people do with religion.
The project uses a comparative, multi-sited design to follow young people of African migrant background across multiple urban contexts. The combination of lived religion, a transnational perspective, spatial analysis and multi-sited ethnography helps relate individual practices to congregations, states and global circuits. The task is to continue questioning, de-centring and decolonising the categories we use, to hold multiple scales together, and to let participants’ words guide analysis and policy.
References
Adogame, A. (2013). The African Christian Diaspora: New Currents and Emerging Trends in World Christianity. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Levitt, P. 2003. “You Know, Abraham Was Really the First Immigrant.” International Migration Review 37(3): 847–873.
McGuire, M. B. (2008). Lived religion: Faith and practice in everyday life. Oxford University Press.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. (2013). Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa. African Books Collective.
Ngũgĩ wa T. (1986) Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey
Olupona, J. K. (2014). African religions: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.
Pasura, D. (2022). Transnational religion. In B. S. A. Yeoh & F. L. Collins (Eds.), Handbook on Transnationalism (pp. 262-275). Edward Elgar Publishing.
Vásquez, M. A. (2011). More than belief: A materialist theory of religion. Oxford University Press.
Wong, D., & Levitt, P. (2014). Travelling faiths and migrant religions: the case of circulating models of da’wa among the Tablighi Jamaat and Foguangshan in Malaysia. Global Networks, 14(3), 348-362.
