Ruby Livingston is the winner of the Sue Benson Prize 2026 for most outstanding dissertation.
The winner of the Sue Benson prize for 2026 has been announced. The prize has been awarded to Ruby Livingston, Christ's College.
The Sue Benson prize is awarded annually to the undergraduate with the most outstanding dissertation. Ruby's research took place amongst a spiritual community in the ecovillage of Findhorn in northeast Scotland. Her dissertation title is Making community in a Scottish ecovillage: the politics of a collective in crisis.
Commenting on her dissertation Ruby said, "I conducted my dissertation fieldwork at Findhorn, a spiritual community and ecovillage in the northeast of Scotland, and the largest intentional community in the UK. I had originally planned to study Findhorn’s sustainability initiatives, but by chance I arrived during an acute debate over what it meant to govern Findhorn as a “spiritual community”.
I was often told by community members that all aspects of Findhornian social life - from daily meditations, to the sale of organic produce, to conservation of the nearby woodland - flowed from a “uniquely Findhorn” spiritual ethos. However, in conversation I found this ethos strikingly hard to pin down: people tended to express contradictory beliefs, or struggled to articulate clearly what they believed in. Here the puzzle of my dissertation emerged: how could Findhorn be governed according to spiritual principles if nobody agreed on, or even knew what these principles were?
I began by arguing against a “propositional” idea of belief, which imagines belief to be a coherently structured and consistently held mental framework which can rationally motivate people’s actions. I suggest that belief at Findhorn did not follow this model: rather than sharing a distinct set of ideas about the world, community members shared an attitude to belief itself. Findhornian believing permits beliefs to be neither defined nor coherent, and does not aspire to confident commitment.
I suggest that the tension between people’s individual, ambiguous style of believing and the community’s perception of a shared spiritual ethos is reconciled by a particular mode of speaking and listening which I call “Findhornese”. Community members discussed beliefs using a vocabulary of ambiguous terms, which allowed people to perpetuate the impression of shared beliefs by using the same words without having to mean the same thing. This was supported by a polite mode of listening which discouraged challenging others’ truth claims.
I then argue that Findhorn’s governance does indeed echo characteristics of its spirituality, particularly through its efforts to preserve indeterminacy and individual agency in the division of political responsibility. I find that the efforts of a vocal minority to render governance bureaucratically legible therefore threatened these “spiritual” qualities.
I feel very honoured to have won the Sue Benson prize, and I absolutely couldn’t have done it without the guidance of my supervisor, Professor Matei Candea, and my Director of Studies, Professor Susan Bayly. I am grateful to them and to the Department for supporting my learning. Finally, my heartfelt thanks go to everyone at Findhorn who kindly welcomed me into their homes, council meetings, sociocratic processes, beehives and work teams! It was truly a privilege to get to know the community and to try to understand a little about how it works."