BSA Socrel Study Group

At the time of writing the UK news media has been closely following the story of protests by Muslim and Christian parents concerned by the teaching of an LGBT rights programme in a Birmingham primary school. This controversy and the storm of commentary it has provoked should remind us that sexuality education has a deep historical entanglement with the political influence and public claims of the religious. Given the imminent implementation of statutory guidance for the teaching of Relationships and Sex Education in all English schools, this is clearly an important time for sociology of religion to attend to sexuality education. So what sort of questions might sociologists of religion want to ask regarding sexuality education? In the flurry of commentary much attention has been given to the rights/bigotry/homophobia of the protesting parents and little to the young people who lie at the centre of this issue. As such, one important inquiry concerns the way in which social constructs ...

Last July, while the quasi-religious fever of a then imminent football ‘homecoming’ swept the country, sociology of religion scholars from all over the UK (and indeed the world) gathered at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow for a homecoming of their own. The Sociology or Religion Study Group of the BSA was once more reunited, this time to discuss the relationship between religion and education. What follows is an account of what for me, a newcomer to this exciting collegiate environment, are but a few of the highlights from the gathering. The conference had a great start with  Yvette Taylor  as the keynote speaker of the first plenary session. Taylor’s presentation on queer religious youth in different schools in the UK was very relevant both theoretically and methodologically, with a call for intersectionality in the study of religious groups. Taylor’s findings from her research of queer religious youth in both faith and community schools pointed towards a ‘multi-face...