Exploring New Challenges and Methods in the Study of Religion

Details about the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies' postgraduate workshop, "Exploring New Challenges and Methods in the Study of Religion" are now available here. Hosted by Birkbeck's Centre for Religion and Contemporary Society on May 16th 2009, the day runs from 10.15 to 4.30pm and includes a plenary from Linda Woodhead, workshops and postgraduate papers. Andy Dawson, who is an editor of Fieldwork in Religion, told me to let him know if I thought of anything arising from the event to turn into an article. Here's the preliminary programme:



10.15am Registration


10.30am Welcome and plenary talk:

Prof. Linda Woodhead, "Current and future directions in the study of religion"

Lancaster University and Director of the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme.


11.30am Plenary workshops:

Katharine Moody, Lancaster Universty, "Studying religion and the Internet"

Serena Hussain, University of Oxford, "Accessing and using census data for research on religion"



12.50pm Lunch


1.30pm Panel sessions:

Doctoral student presentations on work in progress and methodological issues.

Papers will include:

Jane Cameron, University of Edinburgh: "Visualising Buddhism in India: contesting categories in the field"

Saleem Khan, London Metropolitan University: "Accommodation, competition, and conflict: sectarian identity in Pakistan, 1977-2002"

Lois Lee, Cambridge University: "How religious is non-religion? Non-believing and belonging in modernity"

Helen Purcell, Open University: "Balancing the narratives – a methodological approach to the emic and etic issues of being a Pagan academic"

Denise Ross, University of Birmingham: "A study of the impact of missionaries among the Chin tribe in Myanmar"

Anna Rose Stewart, University of Sussex: "Fieldwork and the network: Contextualising online religion"

Ingrid Storm, University of Manchester: "Using survey data to identify and construct scalar indices of religiosity"



3.00pm Tea and coffee


3.30pm Final plenary panel discussion


4.30pm End