Religion and Society Research Cluster

In our post-secular society, sociologists of religion act as public intellectuals when presenting their research outside of academia, and/or when acting as experts in the field. In the area of religion, academics are in competition with other knowledge brokers such as journalists, bloggers  and a host of social commentators on YouTube; they are certainly no longer the ‘omnispeakers’ that existed in the time of Zola.

Drawing from life experiences as sociologists of religion in various parts of the world and covering the works of Bauman, Gramsci  and Habermas, this workshop will address current social and cultural issues as to the role of sociologists of religion as public intellectuals.

Speakers

Adam Possamai: “From Zola as the epitome of the secular public intellectual, to sociologists of religion struggling to be heard in post-secular societies. “

Julia Howell: “Sound bite Sociology: Exploring the Limits of What Can Be Heard about Religious Life in the Information Age”

Paul Heelas: “Worlds Apart? The Burnely Project and the 'relationship' between policy makers and sociologists of religion”

Paul Heelas (opens in a new window) is currently Senior Research Professor in the Sociology of Contemporary Spirituality at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is a member of the research group CROCUS (The Centre for Rotterdam Cultural Sociology), a group which aims to continue to develop the study of spirituality, value-politics, and religion in a distinctive way. Paul has been studying spirituality since the 'sixties', always with an eye on broader cultural change.

Professor Julia Howell is a specialist in the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion at the University of Western Sydney and has worked for over thirty years on movements of religious reform in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim majority society, and on New Religious Movements both in Indonesia and the West. She has published widely in leading international journals. Her edited volume, Sufism and the ‘Modern’ in Islam (with Martin van Bruinessen), has been translated into Indonesian, as have several of her chapters and essays.

Adam Possamai is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Western Sydney. He is the author of Sociology: A Down-to-Earth Approach (Pearson, 2010 with James Henslin and Alphia Possamai-Inesedy), Sociology of Religion for Generations X and Y (Equinox, 2009), Religion and Popular Culture: A Hyper-Real Testament (Peter Lang, 2007) and In Search of New Age Spiritualities (Ashgate, 2005). He is the President of the International  Sociological Association’s Research Committee 22 on the Sociology of Religion and is the Acting Director of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies.