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This seminar will pick up some of the themes of Karen and Suzanne’s previous collaboration for a British Academy and Wellcome Trust-funded project that culminated in the publishing of Religion, Spirituality and Public Health: Competing and Complementary Epistemes (2025).
Karen will frame the questions of epistemology in relation to health and healthcare and point to some implications for studying lived religion. Suzanne will discuss how rigorous critical understandings about experiential ways of knowing have been undermined and obscured by attempts to justify yoga under the rhetorics of science. Together they will lead a discussion about the ways of knowing and the nature of knowledge in religious and yogic traditions.
When it comes to health and healing, we are all pragmatic pluralists to some extent. Most humans look for simple, practical and accessible ways to alleviate suffering and increase happiness. However, if lived experiences of suffering are left unaddressed or dismissed by medical professionals, it is rational to turn to other places to alleviate the discomfort (which might have overlaps between physical, psychological, ecological and spiritual aspects).
(O'Brien-Kop and Newcombe, 2025: 10).
Dr Karen O'Brien-Kop is Senior Lecturer in Asian Religions at King's College London. She researches early South and Central Asian Sanskrit texts and culture on meditation, philosophy of mind, and mind-body practices – in particular exploring the interconnections of Hinduism and Buddhism. More broadly, her research interests are global philosophies, the health humanities and sustainability in relation to religion. Between 2020-2025 she was co-chair of the Spalding Symposium on Indian Religions in the UK, as well as co-chair of the Indian and Chinese Religions in Dialogue research unit at the American Academy of Religion. She is a co-editor of the journal Religions of South Asia. She has published various journal articles and edited volumes and her monographs are Rethinking ‘Classical Yoga’ and Buddhism: Meditation, Metaphors and Materiality (Routledge 2021) and The Philosophy of the Yogasutra (Bloomsbury 2023). During 2025-26 she was lead investigator for a British Academy Small Grant: ‘Plant ontologies, material practices, and knowledge circulations in Ayurveda: Towards sustainable futures’.
Suzanne Newcombe is a Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at The Open University and Director of INFORM, an independent educational charity based in TRS at King’s College London. A sociologist and social historian by training, her initial research focused on the popularisation of yoga and Ayurveda in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century. Her current work project is exploring new religiosity and the digital study of human flourishing through the John Templeton Foundation funded-project New Religiosity and the Digital Study of Eudaimonia, undertaken in collaboration with the Database of Religious History at the University of British Columbia (www.newreligiosity.org).
