> [!Meta]+ Meta > PageType:: #organisation > Country:: USA > Website:: https://www.thejugaadproject.pub/ ### About **The Jugaad Project** is a digital journal, experimental working group and editorial team for diversity and innovation in the study of material culture and belief. Our volunteer, women-led team is incredibly dedicated and knowledgeable, and aims at scholarly rigor as well as dialog. Through this approach, we have fostered permanent channels of exchange, connecting those within and beyond academia in the Global South and North. (See [testimonials](https://www.thejugaadproject.pub/testimonials) from our collaborators.) We work with creators from diverse backgrounds to showcase their works and ideas, and create exchange across theory and practice. Our focus is on the importance of lived reality (bodily and material) in the study of religion. Our approach to the study of ‘Material Religion/belief in Context’ is inspired by the practice of [_Jugaad_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad) as frugal innovation in South Asia, and its equivalents in other parts of the world. While there are socio-cultural differences, we are broadly interested in how subjects and objects interact through improvisation, bricolage, diy, making do, and hacking. As such, we resist the ‘colonizing’ or siloing of knowledge through inter-disciplinary collaborations across material culture studies, anthropology, sociology, cultural history, classics reception, archeology, religious studies, political science, and design, art, and craft studies. We define **Material Religion** as how and why people use material interfaces/mediums, such as objects, bodies, spaces, and senses to connect the reality of their lives with **_beliefs_** of various kinds. By focusing on beliefs and the ways they are imagined, evaluated, mediated, and manipulated we explore how people deal with the invisible, spiritual, supernatural, magical, mystical, ancestral, and/or divine to achieve certain goals. By adding the word **context** we draw attention to the historic and contingent nature of terms such as ‘religion’ as well as interrogating the relevance of place, practice, knowledge, and experience. That is, our study of beliefs (secular, civic, spiritual), and their objects and subjects is in dialog with how materialities are diverse, transformative, and productive as well as attendant concerns of power and relationality. How do humans imagine, manifest, and mediate realms such that they are perceived as tangible, efficacious, and real? How are humans shaped in turn?