The Department of Religious Studies is delighted to announce that Rachel Hanemann has completed her PhD with a project entitled ‘Educating Catholics for a Liberal Society: An Ethnographic Study of Religious Transmission’, supervised by Professor Gordon Lynch.
Current debates in the UK about faith schools often focus on whether they are able to promote liberal values while maintaining the values and doctrine of their religious tradition. These debates, worked out through education policy, legislation and the media, are typically conducted at the level of macro or meso-level generalisations, but are not informed by micro-level studies of how the transmission of religious tradition in relation to liberal values takes place through specific interactions between staff and students.
Rachel’s thesis seeks to contribute to such a knowledge-base through an ethnographic study of interactions between staff and students in relation to processes of religious transmission in a Catholic secondary school in London. Drawing on a Bourdieusian theoretical framework, informed by related work on the transmission of religious memory and the formation of religious emotion, her study examines how staff in this school try to enable students to develop a religious habitus in which Catholicism and liberal values are not experienced as being in tension with each other.
The thesis contributes to existing research on religious transmission in schools by extending an understanding of how this can take the form of particular kinds of interaction relating to students’ embodied and emotional formation. It also generates a typology of staff approaches to managing potential tensions between their religious tradition and liberal values that could be utilised in other studies and contributes to wider policy debates.
Our congratulations to Dr Hanemann.
For more details on the PhD in Theology and Religious Studies, please see the page here:
www.kent.ac.uk/secl/thrs/postgraduate/research-theology-and-religious-studies.html