Anna Strhan
My research interests lie in the relations between religion, secularism, ethics, and moral life. My work draws together approaches from sociology, anthropology, and philosophy to explore how religion, ethics, and values interact with the social world.
I joined the University of York in 2018, having previously worked at the University of Kent. My first PhD was primarily philosophical, examining the implications of the work of Emmanuel Levinas for how we think about the relations between subjectivity, ethics, and education. This was the subject of my first monograph, Levinas, Subjectivity, Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical Responsibility. After completing my PhD, I decided to move into the sociology of religion and completed a second PhD which developed my interests in morality and ethical life through an ethnographic study of a large conservative evangelical congregation in London. My book, 'Aliens and Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals,' was based on this research and was shortlisted for the British Sociological Association/BBC Thinking Allowed Ethnography Award in 2016. I took up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Kent in 2012, followed by a lectureship in 2015.
My most recent monograph, 'The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Evangelicalism,' was published in 2019, drawing on Leverhulme Trust funded ethnographic fieldwork carried out with three contrasting evangelical churches in the UK. The book advances understanding of how some faith communities seek to maintain religious commitment across generations against a backdrop of greater detachment from religion among younger age groups across Europe, and examines how evangelicals engage with children across the spaces of home, church, and broader political life.
My current book project (with Rachael Shillitoe) is entitled 'Growing Up Godless: Nonreligious Childhoods in Contemporary England,' and is under contract with Princeton University Press. The rise of the avowedly non-religious - especially amongst younger age cohorts - across many formerly Christian liberal democracies has prompted growing research interest in ‘non-religion’, atheism, and other forms of so-called ‘unbelief’. Yet although we know that growing numbers of children are growing up non-religious, we know little about how this change is taking place in everyday life, or its significance for children and their families. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with children, parents, and schoolteachers, our book addresses this gap through examining how, when, where, and with whom children learn to be non-religious, and considers what this means both for children and their parents.
From January 2022, I am leading a three-year Leverhulme Trust funded project, 'Becoming Citizens of ‘Post-secular’ Britain: Religion in Primary School Life,' together with Peter Hemming (Surrey), Sarah Neal (Sheffield), and Joanna Malone (York). This study aims to investigate the role of religion in the work that schools do to foster notions of citizenship and national identity, how children and their parents experience these processes, and what this means for children’s sense of belonging in wider society.
I joined the University of York in 2018, having previously worked at the University of Kent. My first PhD was primarily philosophical, examining the implications of the work of Emmanuel Levinas for how we think about the relations between subjectivity, ethics, and education. This was the subject of my first monograph, Levinas, Subjectivity, Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical Responsibility. After completing my PhD, I decided to move into the sociology of religion and completed a second PhD which developed my interests in morality and ethical life through an ethnographic study of a large conservative evangelical congregation in London. My book, 'Aliens and Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals,' was based on this research and was shortlisted for the British Sociological Association/BBC Thinking Allowed Ethnography Award in 2016. I took up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Kent in 2012, followed by a lectureship in 2015.
My most recent monograph, 'The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Evangelicalism,' was published in 2019, drawing on Leverhulme Trust funded ethnographic fieldwork carried out with three contrasting evangelical churches in the UK. The book advances understanding of how some faith communities seek to maintain religious commitment across generations against a backdrop of greater detachment from religion among younger age groups across Europe, and examines how evangelicals engage with children across the spaces of home, church, and broader political life.
My current book project (with Rachael Shillitoe) is entitled 'Growing Up Godless: Nonreligious Childhoods in Contemporary England,' and is under contract with Princeton University Press. The rise of the avowedly non-religious - especially amongst younger age cohorts - across many formerly Christian liberal democracies has prompted growing research interest in ‘non-religion’, atheism, and other forms of so-called ‘unbelief’. Yet although we know that growing numbers of children are growing up non-religious, we know little about how this change is taking place in everyday life, or its significance for children and their families. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with children, parents, and schoolteachers, our book addresses this gap through examining how, when, where, and with whom children learn to be non-religious, and considers what this means both for children and their parents.
From January 2022, I am leading a three-year Leverhulme Trust funded project, 'Becoming Citizens of ‘Post-secular’ Britain: Religion in Primary School Life,' together with Peter Hemming (Surrey), Sarah Neal (Sheffield), and Joanna Malone (York). This study aims to investigate the role of religion in the work that schools do to foster notions of citizenship and national identity, how children and their parents experience these processes, and what this means for children’s sense of belonging in wider society.
less
InterestsView All (17)
Uploads
The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Evangelicalism explores the lived realities of how evangelical Christians engage with children across the spaces of church, school, home, and other informal educational spaces in a dechristianizing cultural context, how children experience these forms of engagement, and the meanings and significance of childhood. Providing insight into different churches’ contemporary cultural and moral orientations, the book reveals how conservative evangelicals experience their understanding of childhood as increasingly countercultural, while charismatic and open evangelicals locate their work with children as a significant means of engaging with wider secular society. Setting out an approach that explores the relations between the figure of the child, children’s experiences, and how adult religious subjectivities are formed in both imagined and practical relationships with children, the book situates childhood as an important area of study within the sociology of religion and examines how we should approach childhood within this field, both theoretically and methodologically.
Through focusing on their interactions within and outside the church, the book offers unique insight how the experiences of conservative evangelicals are simultaneously shaped by secular norms and by moral and temporal orientations of their faith that rub against these. Thus their self-identification as 'aliens and strangers' both articulates and constructs an ambition to be different from others around them in the city, rooted in a consciousness of the extent to which their hopes, concerns, and longings are simultaneously shaped by their being in the world. Moving beyond stereotypes of conservative evangelicals as reactionary fundamentalists, the book reveals the practices through which the members of St John's learn to understand themselves as 'aliens and strangers' in the world, and demonstrates the precariousness of projects of staking out boundaries of moral distinctiveness.
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 neoliberal 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.
Divided into five thematic parts, it provides classic, contemporary, and specially commissioned readings from a range of perspectives, including the sociological, anthropological, historical, and theological. Case studies range from Augustine's description of childhood in Confessions, the psychology of religion and childhood, to religion in children's literature, religious education, and Qur'anic schools.
- Religious traditions covered include Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, in the UK and Europe, USA, Latin America and Africa
- An introduction situates each thematic part, and each reading is contextualised by the editors
- Guidance on further reading and study questions are provided on the book's webpage
Levinas, Subjectivity, Education examines how the philosophical writings of Levinas lead us to reassess the concept of education, paving the way for a new understanding of ethical and political responsibility. Offering a new interpretation of Levinas’s philosophy that addresses the importance of the figure of the teacher in his writing, Anna Strhan demonstrates the challenge of his work for contemporary debates on autonomy, marketization, and political subjectivity in education. She draws also on Levinas’s writings on religion - both to analyse its practical implications within religious education and to consider how this philosophy relates to his pedagogy. By broadening the interpretive aspects of Levinas’s educational writings, Levinas, Subjectivity, Education sheds important new light on the on-going relevance of one of the towering figures of twentieth-century philosophy.
- Religion, spirituality and consumer culture
- Media and the transformation of religion
- The sacred senses: visual, material and audio culture
- Religion, and the ethics of media and culture.
Situated in debates about subjectivity and modernity in the sociology of religion, the anthropology of Christianity and urban theory, I analyse how conservative evangelicals faith is patterned through their being shaped as modern, urban subjects according to norms of interaction internalized outside the church and their development of moral and temporal orientations that rub against these. Their self-identification as 'aliens and strangers in this world thus, I argue, both articulates and constructs a desire to be different within the metropolitan contexts they inhabit, rooted in a consciousness of the extent to which their habituated modes of practice, hopes and longings are simultaneously shaped by their being in the world. I demonstrate how focusing on both their embodied, word-based practices and their experience of the personality of God helps develop understanding of this form of religious intersubjectivity and its social effects, and argue that this approach opens up new avenues for understanding evangelicalism, lived religion and everyday ethical practice.
The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Evangelicalism explores the lived realities of how evangelical Christians engage with children across the spaces of church, school, home, and other informal educational spaces in a dechristianizing cultural context, how children experience these forms of engagement, and the meanings and significance of childhood. Providing insight into different churches’ contemporary cultural and moral orientations, the book reveals how conservative evangelicals experience their understanding of childhood as increasingly countercultural, while charismatic and open evangelicals locate their work with children as a significant means of engaging with wider secular society. Setting out an approach that explores the relations between the figure of the child, children’s experiences, and how adult religious subjectivities are formed in both imagined and practical relationships with children, the book situates childhood as an important area of study within the sociology of religion and examines how we should approach childhood within this field, both theoretically and methodologically.
Through focusing on their interactions within and outside the church, the book offers unique insight how the experiences of conservative evangelicals are simultaneously shaped by secular norms and by moral and temporal orientations of their faith that rub against these. Thus their self-identification as 'aliens and strangers' both articulates and constructs an ambition to be different from others around them in the city, rooted in a consciousness of the extent to which their hopes, concerns, and longings are simultaneously shaped by their being in the world. Moving beyond stereotypes of conservative evangelicals as reactionary fundamentalists, the book reveals the practices through which the members of St John's learn to understand themselves as 'aliens and strangers' in the world, and demonstrates the precariousness of projects of staking out boundaries of moral distinctiveness.
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 neoliberal 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.
Divided into five thematic parts, it provides classic, contemporary, and specially commissioned readings from a range of perspectives, including the sociological, anthropological, historical, and theological. Case studies range from Augustine's description of childhood in Confessions, the psychology of religion and childhood, to religion in children's literature, religious education, and Qur'anic schools.
- Religious traditions covered include Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, in the UK and Europe, USA, Latin America and Africa
- An introduction situates each thematic part, and each reading is contextualised by the editors
- Guidance on further reading and study questions are provided on the book's webpage
Levinas, Subjectivity, Education examines how the philosophical writings of Levinas lead us to reassess the concept of education, paving the way for a new understanding of ethical and political responsibility. Offering a new interpretation of Levinas’s philosophy that addresses the importance of the figure of the teacher in his writing, Anna Strhan demonstrates the challenge of his work for contemporary debates on autonomy, marketization, and political subjectivity in education. She draws also on Levinas’s writings on religion - both to analyse its practical implications within religious education and to consider how this philosophy relates to his pedagogy. By broadening the interpretive aspects of Levinas’s educational writings, Levinas, Subjectivity, Education sheds important new light on the on-going relevance of one of the towering figures of twentieth-century philosophy.
- Religion, spirituality and consumer culture
- Media and the transformation of religion
- The sacred senses: visual, material and audio culture
- Religion, and the ethics of media and culture.
Situated in debates about subjectivity and modernity in the sociology of religion, the anthropology of Christianity and urban theory, I analyse how conservative evangelicals faith is patterned through their being shaped as modern, urban subjects according to norms of interaction internalized outside the church and their development of moral and temporal orientations that rub against these. Their self-identification as 'aliens and strangers in this world thus, I argue, both articulates and constructs a desire to be different within the metropolitan contexts they inhabit, rooted in a consciousness of the extent to which their habituated modes of practice, hopes and longings are simultaneously shaped by their being in the world. I demonstrate how focusing on both their embodied, word-based practices and their experience of the personality of God helps develop understanding of this form of religious intersubjectivity and its social effects, and argue that this approach opens up new avenues for understanding evangelicalism, lived religion and everyday ethical practice.
Abstracts are invited for a volume on Religion and the Global City, edited by David Garbin and Anna Strhan (University of Kent, UK). The volume will explore how religious movements and actors shape and are shaped by particular aspects of global socio-spatial landscapes. These might include (but are not limited to): migration, transnationalism, multiculturalism and superdiversity, urban interconnections and nodes, media and publics, socio-economic polarization, centre-periphery dynamics, urban restructuring, privatization, globalized convergent geographies and architectural aesthetics, urban economies and city branding, and modes of urban visibility and invisibility.
The focus of the book will be Religion and the Global City - not simply religion in the city - and will adopt a non-reductive stance in exploring ‘global city’ dynamics of religious presence, in both Global North and Global South contexts. The proposal for this volume has been invited for a new Bloomsbury Academic book series, ‘Place, Disruption and Religion’.
We welcome empirically-grounded case study chapters, comparative approaches, or chapters exploring connections between religious global city spaces within wider cartographies. Theoretical chapters critically engaging with the relevance of a global city lens to make sense of contemporary religious lifeworlds will also be considered.
Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words no later than 5 January 2015 to David Garbin (D.Garbin@kent.ac.uk) and Anna Strhan (A.H.B.Strhan@kent.ac.uk). Accepted chapters in full (6000-7000 words) will be due by 1 November 2015.