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- Convenor:
-
Vilém Skopal
(University of Pardubice)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Vilém Skopal
(University of Pardubice)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Lambda 3 room
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 5 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Vilnius
Short Abstract:
What are the theoretical and methodological approaches embraced by young researchers in the field of the Study of Religions?
Long Abstract:
Since the inception of the study of religions, scholars have used different methodological and theoretical approaches to understand religious phenomena. The intersection of the study of religions with other fields resulted in a growth of these approaches. Most of them are rooted in ethnography, sociological studies, philosophical and conceptual analysis, or linguistic studies. Most recently, one may find new additions to this list, in the forms of cognitive sciences and through integrations of AI technologies.
Since the so-called ‘reflexive turn’ the study of religions started to be a research object on its own. Inspired by the results of the philosophy of language, linguistics, literal studies, and interpretative ethnology, scholars have assumed a view, that the world is not an objective reality, but a constructed experience, built on meanings given by particular actors. Hence, it is no longer phenomena external to the study of religions, but theories and methods of the field itself that are being investigated. Precisely these theories and methods provide conceptual frameworks for research and as such delimit formulations of research questions and a spectrum of possible answers.
As a result of the above-mentioned situation in the field, young scholars now stand ahead of a difficult task of learning peculiar theoretical approaches and consequently embracing those found useful and appropriate. By this panel, we wish to encourage said young scholars (advanced master students, PhD candidates, post-docs, etc.) to present their theoretical approaches and innovative methodologies and hence to bring forth visions of how the complex and intricate world of both religious phenomena and its studies shall be approached in the upcoming century.
The panel is organised by the Central European Symposium for the Academic Study of Religions (CESAR), a platform connecting young scholars across Central and Eastern Europe.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 5 September, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
Comparative analysis between the results of the 2011 and 2022 surveys conducted within the Hungarian Church of Scientology, highlighting demographical developments over the last decade and their effects on religious activity, social attitudes, and internal values.
Paper long abstract:
In 2011 András Máté-Tóth and Gábor Dániel Nagy published the very first academic study collection about Hungarian Scientology, titled "Alternative religion - Scientology in Hungary." This study collection is still one of the most reliable and objective sources of the new religious movement and its presence in Hungary.
My contribution aims to revisit some of the original questions and findings of this study and introduce a new dataset. Using the results of a survey conducted within the Hungarian Church of Scientology in 2022, I will attempt to outline some of the internal changes and developments within the movement, with a particular focus on religious activity, social attitudes, and internal values. During the presentation, I will discuss these findings within the context of the demographical developments over the last decade and their impact on the movement, while also bringing close attention to the effects of the changes within the Hungarian social, political, and legal atmosphere over this period.
I will conclude my lecture by indicating some prospects and perspectives for the movement's presence and activity in Hungary, while also pointing out several questions and challenges which may complicate any further research.
Paper short abstract:
The paper will lay out a theoretical approach to religion which foregrounds religion as an embodied phenomenon. Spurred by the epistemology of the material turn, the author will suggest a reconceptualised focus on the religious bodies, resulting in a theory of religious body regimes.
Paper long abstract:
Religious studies and social scientific approaches to religion have in recent years taken a particular paradigmatic shift towards a study of material religion. This so-called material turn promises to refocus non-confessional research of religions towards their material aspects - religious spaces, objects, and bodies, for example. While such a shift should be welcomed in itself, this paper will argue that the particular case of the religious body promises to bring about a more fundamental epistemological break in the conceptualisation of religion, resulting in new theoretical and empirical possibilities. The advent of embodied religion spurred by the advances in the cognitive sciences and psychology of religion, has become one of the key conceptual novelties since the material turn. Embodied religion enables us to move beyond the mind-body dualism, traditionally manifested within religious studies as the so-called protestant bias, which gave rise to the reduction of religion to mere beliefs. This paper will argue that while such a conceptualisation relegated the religious matter, and in particular the body, to the secondary role of mere expression of prior beliefs, contemporary research on embodied religion enables us to think of the body as the constitutive subject of religions as social phenomena. Thus, the convergence of multidisciplinary approaches to the embodied religion enables sociology (and other approaches of religion) to establish a particular epistemological break in empirical research itself. Based on the example of Charismatic Christianity, both as an object of fieldwork in Slovenia and as a global phenomenon, the paper will outline a potential approach to religious bodies based on the idea that the body can both express and determine religious beliefs. This can be achieved under the rubric of religious body regimes; a conceptual construction by which researchers can see religious beliefs and bodies as equally constitutive subjects of contemporary religions.
Paper short abstract:
Religion is a highly sensitive area of study. Though sensitive research is ethically challenging and may be distressing for both participant and researcher, the topic is little discussed within the study of religion. What protocols could protect participants' and researchers' safety and well-being?
Paper long abstract:
Early career researchers in the study of religion are increasingly engaging with sensitive research topics - such as studying vulnerable and underprivileged religious groups, or religious discrimination, persecution, or violence. At the same time, an increased awareness of researcher subjectivity and positionality, as well as research ethics and data protection, places pressure on young scholars of religion to handle these issues safely and responsibly.
Several ethical issues arise when conducting research on sensitive topics. Such research carries the risk of emotional distress for both participants and researchers, as recalling or collecting traumatic experiences may trigger symptoms of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress or vicarious trauma.
This paper builds upon the experience of two doctoral researchers. Eckerström focuses on the narratives of musicians persecuted for religious transgression in Iran and Saudi Arabia and conducts in-depth interviews with her participants. Halonen studies the assessment of religious persecution in asylum interviews and decision-making, working with highly confidential secondary data that contains detailed descriptions of traumatic events.
Together they reflect on their experiences of dealing with emotional accounts. What happens when the voices of the participants live inside your head? What ethical issues were raised during the development of their research? The presentation also discusses protocols currently in place for safeguarding researchers in universities across Europe. What are the current institutional shortcomings in supporting researchers who work with distressing data? And are there protocols that could safeguard both participants' and researchers' security and emotional well-being?
Nor are these questions relevant only for studying religious persecution. As 'religion' counts as a 'special category of personal data' under GDPR, and as scholars of religion often handle deeply personal accounts, questions of how to safeguard both researchers and participants are pertinent to most researchers in the field.
Paper short abstract:
In the contemporary study of religion it has become common to talk of concepts as tools that we use for the purposes of research. This is seen as a preferable and useful way how to think of the academic vocabulary. This paper intends to take a closer look at what this appears to actually mean.
Paper long abstract:
In the past few decades it has become common to talk of the words and terminology scholars use for the study of religion as conceptual tools. This development is analogous to the understanding and talk about concepts in other disciplines. Yet, in the context of the study of religion this is also clearly an attempt to avoid and overcome problems apparent in earlier study of religion scholarship where far too often concepts were assumed to be straightforward and problem-free conceptual references and depictions of realities. The more recent understanding of concepts as tools – thus not just as representational designations – has certainly been helpful, but it has not been completely free of issues either. In this presentation I intend present an analysis of this currently very attractive way of talking about concepts and I will offer an analysis of some of the more noteworthy issues that threaten to undermine this kind of thinking if not addressed properly. The most significant potential issue has to do with the idea of ‘usefulness’ in relation to conceptual tools. This idea is used to evaluate and determine whether one or another notion provides a tool for analysis or not and thus, in case of a negative assessment, is seen as grounds for the dismissal of the analysed notion. However, rarely is the criteria of usefulness actually discussed in detail. This omission clearly can become a problem. In the latter part of my paper I will highlight the importance of a proper criterion and discuss some of the ways how it could be possible to conceptualize the idea of usefulness in a more meaningful way. It will be argued that without a proper criterion the argument of usefulness risks becoming nothing more than a rhetorical tool for the dismissal of unwanted conceptualizations.
Paper short abstract:
Is virtual reality a useful technological tool when dealing with research of basic phenomena underlying religion? Our paper will put its functionality to a test, examining the problem of agency detection, theoretically related to religious experiences and supernatural beliefs.
Paper long abstract:
While previous research linked supernatural beliefs and experiences to agency detection, there are two major views on what kind of neurocognitive mechanism underlies our ability to see beings around us even if they are not empirically present. In the first view, we are equipped with a Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD), triggered by ambiguous data and feeling of threat, automatically causing such illusory perceptions. The second approach, based on the predictive processing (PP) framework, does not assume any innate bias, explaining agency detection in terms of interplay between prior expectations and unreliable incoming data. Despite many merits of the second view, the available empirical data leaves it unclear if there are indeed no innate agency detection biases. Therefore, we designed a novel study that revisits this problem using a new and promising technological tool in the experimental research of religion: virtual reality. Participants primed to expect the presence of agents explored a sensorially unreliable, agentless virtual forest and pressed a button whenever they felt they had detected an agent. The feeling of threat was manipulated by introducing the agents as hostile (vs. neutral). Our preliminary data will shed light on a problematic question if an innate, threat-related agency detection bias – possibly a "hyperprior" – is still worthy of discussion and if using virtual reality can be considered as a useful technological tool in the study of religions.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores differences between the commercial image recognition of Google, Amazon and Microsoft in categorizing images on religion. Based on our findings we discuss the empirical and ethical implications of the potential use of these services for the study of religion.
Paper long abstract:
Since the so called visual turn in the construction of meaning in media-saturated societies, the study of religion is also faced with new methodological challenges. Development of AI technologies and readily available automated image recognition services would appear to provide one solution for the study of large amounts of image data currently available in digital form.
Visual recognition services, however, like other machine learning systems are not just tools, but also systems of representation that take part in constructing perceptions of religion as they organize and categorize the data available to them. This paper studies the empirical and ethical implications of employing commercial visual recognition systems to the study of religion.
Empirically, we conduct a comparison of categorizations of religion related images by three commercial image recognition services: Google Vision AI, Microsoft Azure Computer Vision and AWS Rekognition. Our study focuses on how the services represent religion by labeling the images and on the differences and similarities between the three services. Based on our findings it is safe to say that in the context of religion the image recognition systems of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are in many ways problematic in ethical terms and (re)produce cognitive and cultural, representational biases.