Soulful Dwelling: An International Comparative Ethnography of Places as Ecologies of Lifelong Learning, Collective Meaning-Making, and Human Flourishing.

Drawing on Heidegger’s philosophical understandings of dwelling as a meaningful way of being in relation to place,  Soulful Dwelling asks how physical places might become educational ecologies through the interactions of people, practices, relationships, expertise, service and the natural environment. Rather than treating place simply as the setting in which learning occurs, I am interested in how place itself participates in lifelong learning and collective meaning-making. 

 Soulful Dwelling is envisaged as an international comparative ethnography of intentional places, with case-study sites identified collaboratively by an interdisciplinary research team through a series of working groups. Within these places, physical environment, community, shared practice, service, and diverse forms of expertise interact to create ecologies of lifelong learning and collective meaning-making. Its interdisciplinarity is fundamental. Scholars and practitioners in education, ecology, architecture, geography, anthropology, design and other relevant fields would investigate these environments through distinctive lenses. The deeper inquiry concerns what happens between those perspectives. Sustained dialogue would enable an understanding that no individual researcher, discipline or epistemological position could generate alone; the research process would therefore itself become an inquiry into collective intelligence.

Documenting existing Soulful Dwelling from multiple perspectives could illuminate the conditions through which places enable collective forms of learning and knowing, belonging, purpose, connection, meaning-making and service. The research could, in turn, contribute conceptual principles, comparative case studies and practical resources for educators, community leaders, designers and others seeking to regenerate physical environments for meaningful collective life. Soulful Dwelling therefore represents more than a new research project. It develops my underlying inquiry from educating for individual interiority towards investigating the conditions through which collective forms of practice-led knowing, consciousness and intelligence might emerge.

This study explores community care, conscious design, environmental psychology, belonging, contemplation, generosity, spirituality, ecological attunement, lifelong learning, and relationship building as interconnected dimensions of lived environments rather than isolated aspects of human experience.

The Research

The study comprises a series of comparative ethnographic case studies across diverse cultural and geographical settings. Methods include participant observation, semi-structured interviews, visual and spatial documentation, field notes, and comparative analysis.

Through attention to both place and practice, the research asks how physical environments, community life, everyday rituals, ecological relationships and shared values interact to create distinctive conditions for meaning-making, belonging and human flourishing. Comparative analysis will explore both recurring patterns and culturally distinctive ways in which such environments are formed, experienced and sustained.

Why Soulful Dwelling?

Research on meaning-making, wellbeing, community life, and environmental design remains largely fragmented across disciplinary fields, leaving an integrated comparative framework for understanding the lived environments of human flourishing underdeveloped.

Soulful Dwelling brings these areas into conversation. Rather than understanding human flourishing solely as an individual psychological state, the project approaches it as something that is also relational, spatial, cultural and ecological, shaped by where and how we live, what and how we learn, the relationships we cultivate, and the meanings we create together.

By developing an interdisciplinary framework for understanding these relationships, the project seeks both to advance scholarship and to illuminate possibilities for cultivating places characterised by relational life, purpose, lifelong learning, ecological attunement and human care.

Project Outputs

The project will generate:

• a conceptual framework and analytical framework of Soulful Dwelling,

• an international comparative ethnographic dataset,

• peer-reviewed publications,

• an open-access repository of case studies,

• conference presentations, and

• a practitioner-oriented synthesis for educators, community leaders and designers.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the incredible artist Kimvi Nguyen for first introducing me to the creative possibilities of dwelling.