With ethnic differences in mortality and hospitalization for Covid-19 rising, increased awareness of racial discrimination following the murder of George Floyd, and stigmatization and scapegoating being regularly reported, attention needed to be paid to “assessing impacts on the perceptions and self-perceptions of Black and Muslim people in response to both media coverage and government actions”.

Key Findings:

1. Perceptions of division and unity between different social groups

2. Perceptions of discrimination as a serious issue

These findings are indicative of “cumulative rather than multiplicative effects of belonging the multiple groups that face discrimination”. As shown in finding 2E, respondents do not generalize the sense of seriousness against their own group to their perception of seriousness of discrimination towards others. The authors further note that there seems to be some social of psychological obstacles to people’s perceptions across different groups and categories. In turn, this may make it more difficult to reach consensus on the overall impact of prejudice and discrimination and the policies required…

Read the full report HERE.

Continue reading at: euro-islam.info

The role of empirical research in the study of religion has become increasingly important in recent years. In the discipline of Religious Studies, more postgraduate students are undertaking field-work based projects, and in other social science disciplines there has been a renewed interest in religion as an area of study. There have been relatively few resources available however to support methodological training in this specific field.

This project, funded by an AHRC Collaborative Research Training award, has been designed to address this gap. With support from the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society program, this website was designed by the project co-ordinator, Professor Gordon Lynch, to provide an easily accessible resource to support individual researchers as well as courses in research methods in the study of religion. Training materials and position papers on the site were initially trailed for use through an intensive residential workshop held for PhD students from across the UK and Europe run in Oxford in September 2010. The discussion papers and exercises on the site are intended as introductory resources to give readers an overview of key issues and approaches.

Postgraduate users of the site, particularly at doctoral level, are encouraged to follow up with further reading using additional resources and links suggested for each topic. We hope to be able to add further relevant resources to the site over time, and welcome any feedback or suggestions for development of the site’s content.

Project Topics

– Conceptualizing religion
– Politics and ethics
– Rigor and validity
– Research design
– Comparative research
– Sampling
– Quantitative methods
– Ethnography
– Objects and space
– Visual methods
– Researching media

Website: https://www.kent.ac.uk/religionmethods/

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic (June 29, 2017)

Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Religion, Space and Place

This is the first book to explore how religious movements and actors shape and are shaped by aspects of global city dynamics. Theoretically grounded and empirically informed, Religion and the Global City advances discussions in the field of urban religion, and establishes future research directions.

David Garbin and Anna Strhan bring together a wealth of ethnographically rich and vivid case studies in a diversity of urban settings, in both Global North and Global South contexts. These case studies are drawn from both ‘classical’ global cities such as London and Paris, and also from large cosmopolitan metropolises – such as Bangalore, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, Singapore and Hong Kong – which all constitute, in their own terms, powerful sites within the informational, cultural and moral networked economies of contemporary globalization.

The chapters explore some of the most pressing issues of our times: globalization and the role of global neo-liberal regimes; urban change and in particular the dramatic urbanization of Global South countries; and religious politics and religious revivalism associated, for instance, with transnational Islam or global Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity.

About the Authors:

David Garbin is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent, UK. His research focuses on the interplay of migration, ethnicity, diaspora, space and religion, in a diversity of ethnographic contexts in Europe, North America, South Asia and Central Africa.

Anna Strhan is Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Kent, UK. Her research explores the interrelations between space, religion, ethics, and values. She is the author of Aliens and Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals (2015).

Table of Contents:

Introduction, David Garbin (Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Kent, UK) and Anna Strhan (Lecturer in Religious Studies, University of Kent, UK)

• Part One: Power, visibility and the politics of space

1. On the Road: Pentecostal Pathways through the Mega-City, Simon Coleman (Chancellor Jackman Professor, University of Toronto, Canada) and Manuel A. Vásquez (Professor of Religion, University of Florida, USA)

2. Urban Planning and Secular Atheism in Shanghai, Beijing, and Singapore, Peter van der Veer (Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, and University Professor at Large, Utrecht University, Netherlands)

3. Occupying the Global City: spatial politics and spiritual warfare among African Pentecostals in Hong Kong, Benjamin Kirby (University of Leeds, UK)

4. Pentecostal Productions of Locality: Urban Risks and Spiritual Protection in Cape Town, Marian Burchardt (Post-doctoral Researcher, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany)

• Part Two: Religious media, publics, and global cultural flows 

5. ‘The Future as news’: Astrology and mediated religion in Global Bangalore, Sahana Udupa (Associate Professor, Central European University, Hungary, and Senior Research Partner, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany)

6. Theorizing Mediatization and Religious Agency in European Global Cities, David Herbert (Professor of Sociology, Kingston University, UK and Professor of Religion and Society, University of Agder, Norway)

7. Godlessness in the Global City, Lois Lee (Lecturer in Secular Studies, University of Kent, UK)

• Part Three: Centralities, peripheries, and religious reterritorialization

8. Marching for Jesus in Paris: Religious territorialization, public space, and the appropriation of centrality in a fragmented city, Yannick Fer (CNRS Researcher, GSRL, France) and Gwendoline Malogne-Fer (post-doctoral research student, GSRL, CNRS-EPHE, France)

9. Transnational religion, multiculturalism, and global suburbs: a case study from Vancouver, Claire Dwyer (Reader in Geography and Co-Director of the Migration Research Unit, University College London, UK)

10. Place And The (Un-)Making Of Religious Peripheries: Weddings Among Kenyan Pentecostals In London,Leslie Fesenmyer (ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellow at COMPAS, University of Oxford, UK)

• Part Four: Global migration, everyday multiculturalism, and religious place-making

11. At Home in The Multicultural City: Islam and Religious Place-Making in Stuttgart, Germany, Petra Kuppinger (Professor of Anthropology, Monmouth College, USA)

12. Religion as ‘urban white noise’ – material practices of everyday religion at the ‘unquiet frontiers’ of the hyper-diverse city, Chris Baker (William Temple Professor of Religion and Public Life, University of Chester, UK and Director of Research for the William Temple Foundation)

13. Between wandering and staying put: Piety and urban mobility among young Somali women in multicultural London, Giulia Liberatore (Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at COMPAS and Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, University of Oxford, UK)

14. Religion, Migration, and the ‘Worlding’ of Urban Daily Life: Local and Transnational Pentecostalism in Rio De Janeiro, Gerda Heck (Assistant Professor of Sociology and Migration and Refugee Studies, American University in Cairo, Egypt) and Stephan Lanz (Senior Lecturer, Europa-Universität Viadrina, Germany)

Reviews

– “This volume opens up the world of urban religions, showing how they connect globalization and urbanization through everyday acts of place-making, co-operation and conviviality. Impressive in its geographical purview and inter-disciplinary ambition, this is an important collection and one that deserves to be read by all those interested in the state of our cities.” (Phil Hubbard, Professor of Urban Studies, King’s College London, UK)

– “By taking on what makes a city truly religiously ‘global’ and what makes a global religion truly urban outside the west, on a variety of scales and in a variety of places, Garbin and Strhan’s edited volume successfully reframes our understanding of the urban religion-globalization nexus.” (Peggy Levitt, Luella LaMer Slaner Professor in Latin American Studies and Professor of Sociology, Wellesley College, USA and author of God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape (2007))

Source: Bloomsbury Publishing