Space, place and the communicative (re)production of Christian practices.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the function of space and materialism in organizing the practices of Christian church members. Using the combined lenses of the Montreal School Model of CCO (Putnam & Nicotera, 2008) and semiotic analysis (Sebeok, 2001) this study examines how the meaning and interpretation of architecture and artifacts of a sacred space, such as a Christian church, can constitutively shape the practices of church members. Using ethnographic observations as a participant-witness and semi-structured interviews (Tracy, 2020), this study produces insights on the effect of designed spaces and furthers a combined CCO-semiotic framework to be applied to religious studies. To accomplish this, this study first reviews relevant literature on different CCO schools of thought, materiality and CCO, semiology, and religious literature on sacred spaces. Following the literature synthesis, participant-witness methods, interview structure, and the coding process for post-data collection are presented.