Siobhan Chandler

Short Biography

Siobhan Chandler is a third-year doctoral student in the joint University of Waterloo/Wilfrid Laurier program, Religious Diversity in North America. After graduating from the University of British Columbia with an MA in religious studies in 2001, she worked professionally researching spirituality and healing at a cancer treatment clinic. This experience contributed to a deepening awareness that despite legitimate empirical interest in spirituality, progress is hampered by lack of clear analytic frameworks. Siobhan returned to graduate school in 2005 to study contemporary spirituality. Her field research focuses on individuals who describe themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’, and will examine how they understand the relationship between their social obligations and their self-deterministic spiritual ethos. She currently holds an Ontario Graduate Scholarship.