Religion, Science, and Truth: where does Yoga fit within a context of contested and competing epistemes?
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
7:00 pm to 8:30 pm
- Venue
- SOAS University of London
- Room
- Khalili Lecture Theatre
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies is delighted to host Dr Karen O'Brien-Kop (King's College London) and Dr Suzanne Newcombe (The Open University and INFORM) for an in-person seminar.
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).
Dr O'Brien-Kop will frame the questions of epistemology in relation to health and healthcare and point to some implications for studying lived religion. Dr Newcombe 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.
Speakers
Dr Karen O’Brien-Kop is Senior Lecturer in Asian Religions at King’s College London. Her research examines early South and Central Asian Sanskrit texts and cultures, focusing on meditation, philosophy of mind, mind-body practices, and the interconnections between Hinduism and Buddhism. Her broader interests include global philosophies, health humanities, and sustainability and religion. She co-chaired the Spalding Symposium on Indian Religions and the American Academy of Religion’s Indian and Chinese Religions in Dialogue research unit (2020 to 2025). She is co-editor of Religions of South Asia and author of two monographs on yoga, Buddhism, meditation, and the Yogasutra.
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 20th 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.
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