Edward A. David

I’m delighted to share that I’ve been selected as an Impact Fellow in the third cohort of KCL’s Humanities Impact Fellowship programme. It’s a six-month programme that helps researchers deepen and extend the public impact of their work — I’ll be using the opportunity to focus on the Gen Z Role Models project.

If you’ve followed the project so far, you’ll know it’s centred on how young people think about religious and spiritual role models — particularly in a time when traditional religious affiliation is in flux. We’ve already learnt a great deal through our participatory workshop and story completion method. But what has been most moving to me is how much the process itself mattered to participants. Many told us that just taking part helped them learn how to conduct qualitative research and gave them a safe, non-judgemental space to talk about spirituality with people from very different backgrounds.

In this fellowship, I want to ensure that those experiences aren’t lost in the usual write-ups and research outputs. I’m prioritising ways to share impact from the participants themselves — amplifying their voices and letting their own reflections shape how we talk about what the project has achieved.

Alongside that, I’m dreaming big. I plan to develop a new iteration of the Gen Z project, this time in partnership with Anglican and Catholic dioceses throughout the UK. The vision involves co-hosting a series of local summits where young people from different communities come together to reflect, share, and learn. Over the course of the fellowship, I hope to design this next phase of the project, gain ethical approval from King’s, and lay the groundwork for funding and partnerships. Ideally, I’d like the first of these diocesan summits to take place in Q1 or Q2 of next year.

Ambitious? Definitely. But I like a challenge — and with the support of the fellowship and some brilliant colleagues, I’m excited to see what’s possible.