Sarah Best

I am a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, with an MRes in Social Anthropology and an MA in English and the Digital Humanities. This interdisciplinary background allows me to think critically and creatively across traditional boundaries, and to take innovative approaches to research and writing.

While I have numerous research interests in a variety of fields, my current doctoral project focuses on various eco-spiritual groups, intentional communities, and earth-centred community initiatives in North America concerned with ecological regeneration, social change, and community resilience. This ethnographic research seeks to understand how such alternative communities use stories and storytelling to challenge dominant cultural systems and narratives that reinforce a separation between humans and nature, such as modern Western colonial and capitalistic frameworks. It explores how they use stories, both old and new, to reimagine or "re-story" relationships with their environments, navigating the tensions of colonialism and modernity as they find deep spiritual and ethical meaning through relations with the Land, and a sense of belonging in community and nature.

Along with earth-based spirituality and environmental community initiatives, my research interests include culturally responsible education, digital storytelling, game studies, Indigenous studies, ecomaterialism and ecofeminism, ecology and religion, animisms, feminist theories of posthumanism and new materialism, ecotopian narratives and the solarpunk movement, cognition and embodiment, community land trusts, intentional communities, new religious movements and contemporary Pagan studies.