An International Comparative Ethnography of Places as Intentional Lifelong Learning Environments that Cultivate Meaning-Making and Human Flourishing

Soulful Dwelling explores a deceptively simple question: what is it about some places that helps human beings to live, learn and flourish well?

Across cultures, people create places in which ways of living, learning, relating and caring become deeply intertwined. Such environments may cultivate belonging and purpose, invite contemplation and connection, nurture relationships with the natural world, and support forms of learning that unfold through everyday life. Soulful Dwelling asks what we might learn from these places — and from the people who create and sustain them.

This project develops Soulful Dwelling as an analytical framework for understanding how places can function as intentional environments of lifelong learning and cultivate meaning-making and human flourishing across diverse cultural contexts. Through international comparative ethnography, the study examines both the qualities of these environments and the everyday practices through which they are created and sustained.

It 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.