Discourse! May 2020 with David G. Robertson, Suzanne Owen, and Craig Martin
It’s ideology, religion and conspiracy all the way in this month’s Discourse! David G. Robertson is joined by Suzanne Owen and Craig Martin to discuss the Sun’s mockery of pagans, problems with the Guardian’s headline that people are returning to the Church, coronavirus conspiracies in India targetting Muslims, and how “idiology” (or one idiology, anyway) is pushing the religion out of religious studies.
David G. Robertson
David G. Robertson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Religious Studies department of the University of Edinburgh. His research examines how UFO narratives became the bridge by which ideas crossed between the conspiracist and New Age milieus in the post-Cold War period. More broadly, his work concerns contemporary alternative spiritualities, and their relationship with popular […]
David G. Robertson
David G. Robertson is Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University, co-founder of the Religious Studies Project, and co-editor of the journal Implicit Religion. His work applies critical theory to the study of alternative and emerging religions, and to “conspiracy theory” narratives. He is the author of UFOs, the New Age and Conspiracy Theories: […]
Reflections on REF 2021
In this week’s episode, we reflect on the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 report. Gordon Lynch, the chair of the TRS panel, joins David Robertson to outline the process and tell us what it says about the situation for the discipline, and the social sciences and Arts and Humanities more broadly.
#ClassificationMatters | Discourse! September 2021 (with video)
Kicking off our first episode of Discourse!, RSP co-founder David Robertson, Ting Guo, and Jacob Barrett discuss the effects of classification in vaccination resistance, the Texas abortion ban, and the equation of the hijab with oppression. It’s an exciting episode—be sure to tune in!
The Weakest Link! | Mid-Year Special 2020 (with video)
It’s a COVID-style international spectacular for the ninth(!) annual RSP mid-season special. It’s time to play… the Weakest Link! Join Andie Alexander, Jonathon O’Donnel, Titus Hjelm, Naomi Goldenberg, Sidney Castillo, Russell McCutcheon, Ray Radford, and Megan Goodwin as David Robertson fires questions at them and Chris Cotter remotely operates PowerPoint! Who will win the coveted fictional research funding?
The Roots of QAnon | Discourse! August 2020
What is QAnon? In this August 2020 episode of Discourse!, David Robertson, Megan Goodwin, Savannah Finver and Jonathon O’Donnell discuss this conspiracy movement’s links to American religious history and contemporary political discourse.
How Religious Freedom Makes Religion
Tisa Wenger tells David Robertson how local, national, and international regimes of religious freedom have produced and reproduced the category ‘religion’ and its others in the modern world.
Buddhism in the critical classroom
How do we deal with different cultural languages when teaching an Introduction to Buddhism course? Is cultural familiarity something to be broken immediately and displaced by new concepts and perspectives? Is it to be leveraged as devices for easy onboarding to other, more unfamiliar terms and ideas? Are they to be outright ignored? David Robertson is joined by Matthew Hayes
Religious Studies Opportunities Digest – 13 February 2019
Welcome back to the latest edition of the Religious Studies Project Opportunities Digest! This week you will find twelve conference call for papers, two journal call for papers, and three event opportunities. Be sure to check out the more recent issue of Implicit Religion! The journal is edited by our very own David Robertson and includes an article by Vivian Asimos, whose recent RSP podcast on Slenderman and Online Mythology can found here. The journal can be viewed online at equinox! Thank you so much to everyone who has signed up to support the RSP thus far through our Patreon–and PayPal options. We are aiming for 100 patrons (currently 35) to fund planned developments over the coming year. See our donations page for details of how you can sign up for a regular subscription, leave a one-off donation, advertise with us, or use our Amazon links.
Editors’ Picks, Summer 2018: Studying the “off-the-beaten-track”
In the fourth of our editors’ picks, Ray Radford takes “the soppy route on this choice, as David Robertson’s interview with David Wilson on ‘Spiritualism and Shamanism’ was the very first interview/podcast I heard from the RSP way back in my days as an undergrad. This podcast (along with some amazing lecturers and tutors) helped cement that religious studies was the right choice.
Editors’ Picks, Summer 2018: Shifting from religions to ‘religion’
In the third of our editors’ picks, David Robertson picks “the interview that I wished I had done. Reading Tim Fitzgerald’s The Ideology of Religious Studies (2000) as an undergrad was part of a seismic shift in my perspective, from an interest in religions to an interest in ‘religion’ […]. This is a dense interview that rewards another listen.”
The first meeting of the RSP Trustees
This afternoon we had the first meeting of the Trustees of the Religious Studies Project Association (that’s the name of the Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation that produces the RSP). Besides Chris Cotter and myself (David Robertson), the Trustees are Carole Cusack (Sydney), Russell McCutcheon (Alabama) and Dominic Corrywright (Oxford Brooks), so getting them all in the same virtual room was quite a feat.
Drone Metal Mysticism
In this interview, Owen Coggins joins us to talk about the use of religious (and sacrilegious) language and imagery in Drone Metal, a genre which stretches metal to low, slow, repetitive extremes. Drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau, he tells David Robertson that the prevalence of language relating to mysticism and “spiritual experience” may be due to the genre’s focus on the physicality of the musical experience.
The BASR and the Impact of Religious Studies
A panel on the public impact and engagement of Religious Studies/Study of Religion/s led by committee members of the British Association for the Study of Religions, including Dr Stephen Gregg (Wolverhampton), Dr Christopher Cotter (Edinburgh), Dr Suzanne Owen (Leeds Trinity), Dr David Robertson (The Open University) and Dr Steven Sutcliffe (Edinburgh).
Issues discussed include why RS continues to be a “muted voice” …