Research Methods Residential

In September, the Centre for Religion and Contemporary Society at Birkbeck College (where I did a workshop on studying religion and the internet last year, see here and here), and the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society programme (where I failed to get a job, see here) are running a residential training event for UK PhD students involved in the empirical study of contemporary religion. The residential will run from 6-10 September at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and students who are accepted onto it will have their residential and travel costs paid (nice!). Places are strictly limited and application forms can be downloaded from here and must be received before Feb 19.

Sessions will include:

• theorising religion and the role of the researcher of religion
• choosing/combining research methods
• the research agenda for religion and contemporary society
• sampling
• using quantitative data-sets
• rigour and validity
• ethical and political contexts of researching religion
• ethnography
• visual methods
• researching religion and media, and
• studying spaces and objects

Confirmed speakers include:

• Linda Woodhead,
• Kim Knott,
• David Voas,
• Sophie Gilliat-Ray, and
• Peter Collins (I think this is him, unless he's an expert in gambling or neuroscience!)

Here's some blurb: "Funded by the AHRC’s Collaborative Research Training scheme, the aim of this event is to provide PhD students in this field with advanced methods training in the study of religion not normally available at any single university and represents a major investment in training a significant cohort of PhD students currently working in this field. The event is open to students working across a wide range of disciplines including theology and religious studies, sociology, anthropology, C20th religious history, social policy and geography."

I'm not sure whether I'll be allowed to go on this, as I will have already submitted by thesis, but I'm going to check with Gordon Lynch.