Chapels: the Practices and Politics of Small Spaces

What is a chapel? Despite the ubiquity of chapels worldwide, there has been comparatively little scholarly effort to study chapels as a type or uncover their spatial politics. Often small in scale and built by “laypeople” outside of the purview of religious hierarchies, chapels and other small sacred spaces offer scholars a way of reading religious architectural history from the bottom up. Chapels uplift underrepresented subjectivities of lived religion and bring religious architecture’s entanglements with race, gender, and class to the forefront of study. Chapels exist at the nexus of the individual and the collective, the local site and global mobilities and networks, the singular structure and the complex. This roundtable will be structured around a series of chapels, each discussant presenting one case study. These presentations will be followed by a conversation about what a “chapel studies” based around this collection of sites might look like.