Researching Religious Diversity

In Martin Stringer’s Discourses on Religious Diversity (2013a), and in further elaborations (2013b; 2014), he paints a picture of some of the prevalent everyday discourses on ‘religious diversity’ which he and his doctoral students have encountered over several years working in Birmingham, Manchester, London and other cities, bringing a large body of variously ‘circumstantial data’ (Stringer 2013a, 2) into conversation with new and innovatively gathered material (Stringer 2013b) and broader academic literature from anthropology and urban studies. In this interview, we discuss the broad topic of diversity, contrast this with concepts of ‘difference’, and ask what on Steven Vertovec might mean by the concept of ‘super-diversity’ (2007). We then ask why scholars might be interested in situations of ‘religious diversity’, how they might avoid becoming mere puppets of the state, how this differs from ‘multiculuralism’, and how we might go about doing such research. Using examples from case studies in the Birmingham districts of Highgate and Handsworth, Stringer argues that scholars need to pay attention to the particularities of the localities in question, and that we need to rehink just how we disseminate the results of our research for public usage. This interview was recorded at the BASR Annual Conference at the University of Wolverhampton, and draws on Professor Stringer’s keynote lecture “Beyond Difference: Challenging the Future for Religious Studies.” Check out Martin’s previous podcast on ‘Situational Belief’ here. References Stringer, Martin D. 2013a. Discourses of Religious Diversity: Explorations in an Urban Ecology. Farnham: Ashgate. ———. 2013b. “The Sounds of Silence: Searching for the Religious in Everyday Discourse.” In Social Identities between the Sacred and the Secular, edited by Abby Day, Giselle Vincett, and Christopher R. Cotter, 161–71. Farnham: Ashgate. ———. 2014. “Religion, Ethnicity and National Origins: Exploring the Independence of Variables in a Superdiverse Neighbourhood.” Diskus: The Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religions 16 (2): 88–100. Vertovec, Steven. 2007. “Super-Diversity and Its Implications.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6): 1024–54. doi:10.1080/01419870701599465.