Sandra Grimminger

Sandra holds a Master’s degree in Sociology from Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. After graduating, she engaged in ethnographic research projects centred on the subject of digitalisation. Her research is driven by the question of why we believe what we believe and how social reality is created. Since April 2025, she has been doing her doctorate as part of the DFG Research Training Group “The Sentimental in Literature, Culture and Politics”.

Project: The Influence of Sentimental Narratives on Collective Identity Formation in Spiritual Volunteering

The research project investigates how emotionalized narratives and sentimentally framed experiences contribute to the creation of belonging and identity in the context of spiritual volunteering. The focus is on the question of how longing, nostalgia and affective connectedness are staged, experienced and negotiated in ritualized practices and communal communication. Spiritual volunteering – for example in yoga retreats or ashrams – offers an exemplary experiential space in which romanticized notions of closeness to nature, inner authenticity and transcendent community are cultivated. The project pursues a sociology of knowledge and symbolic-interactionist approach in order to analyze the performative power of feelings and sentimentality in these social processes. Through ethnographic fieldwork and the evaluation of affectively charged interactions, the aim is to show how emotional experiences are collectively interpreted, shared and condensed into an element of identity-forming community. The focus is particularly on the social practices and narratives through which spirituality is experienced and embodied as a perceived truth.