Judith Ellen Brunton is a scholar of religious studies and its intersections with the environmental humanities and cultural studies of science. Judith’s research and writing examines how religions, spiritualities, and worldviews shape how people come to know and be in relation with the world around them. Her current book project takes an ethnographic and archival approach to describe how oil extraction influences contemporary imaginaries of the good life in Alberta. Judith follows how oil companies, government agencies, and community organizations in Alberta use oil to describe a specific set of morals and values. This includes case studies on: Imperial Oil’s publications, Energy Heritage sites, The Calgary Stampede fair and rodeo, and various corporate aspirational initiatives in Calgary. Judith is also pursuing research towards future writing on dowsing traditions and resource extraction ghost towns. Judith is broadly interested in questions of secularity and enchantment, cosmologies of land and extraction, capitalism and labor, religion-making, and method in the North American West. In her research and teaching, Judith focuses on ethnographic methods and thinking in place.
![judith.ellen.brunton](/sites/g/files/bxs3881/files/2024-07/IMG_6608.jpeg)
Research Areas
Religion and Environment; Magic, Science, Religion; North American Religion; Method and Theory in the Study of Religion; Material Religion; Technology; Colonialism; Capitalism; Cultural Anthropology; Ethnography; Sacred Spaces; Infrastructure; Yeehaw topics.
Education
PhD. University of Toronto, Study of Religion
M.A. University of Toronto, Study of Religion
B.A. Wilfrid Laurier University, Religion and Culture
Teaching Areas
Religion and Science