Religion in everyday life
Religion is preserved in doctrine, ritual and grand architecture, but it lives in everyday acts, thoughts and interactions.
We have led and participated in large collaborative research projects that explore religious practices in Africa and its diasporic communities, with a special focus on relations between Muslims, Christians, and followers of endogenous or ‘traditional’ practice in everyday life. Committed to research ‘from the ground up’, we explore how people put their and other religions to use in ways that support their lives and ambitions.
DASA research on religion is often ethnographic and historical, but we also utilise innovative and interdisciplinary research methods, including a combination of a large-n ethnographic survey and computer-led corpus linguistics to shed new light of religious pluralism in intimate, domestic and local contexts.
Researchers
Academic staff
- Leslie Fesenmyer: transnational migration, kinship, belonging, and religion (especially Pentecostalism)
- Juliet Gilbert: youth studies, religion, insecure livelihoods, and aspects of popular culture
- Insa Nolte: Yoruba history, culture and politics
Doctoral research
- Ellis Richards - The impact Black Majority Churches have on Black communities in Birmingham
- If you are interested in pursuing a PhD related to Religion in Everyday Life, please contact a member of staff above.
Projects
- Multi-religious encounters in urban settings (MEUS)
- Conjugal histories. Gender, Yoruba religion, and the embrace of Islam and Christianity in West Africa, 1780s-1920s
Previous projects
- Knowing each other: everyday religious encounters, social identities and tolerance in southwest Nigeria
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Kenyan Pentecostals between home, London, and the Kingdom of God
- Muslim men, Christian women: an African history of gender and coexistence
Publications
Monographs and other books
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Fesenmyer, L. 2023 Relative Distance: Kinship, Migration, and Christianity between Kenya and the United Kingdom (Cambridge University Press).
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Nolte, Insa; Olukoya Ogen and Rebecca Jones (eds), 2017. Beyond Religious Tolerance: Encounters between Muslims, Christians and Traditionalists in an African Town, Rochester, NY: James Currey Publishers/ Boydell and Brewer, 309 pp. Also published separately in Nigeria (Adeyemi College Academic Publishers Ltd. 2017), UK paperback version published 2020.
Articles and book chapters
- Fesenmyer, L 2022 ‘Ambivalent belonging: Born-again Christians between Africa and Europe’. Journal of Religion in Africa.
- Pickles, A.J. and P. Santos da Costa, 2021. ‘It is Christ or Corruption in Papua New Guinea: Bring in the Witness!’, Oceania 91(3): 349-366.
- Fesenmyer, L 2020 ‘Living as Londoners do’: The prosperity gospel as a mode of being in East London. Social Anthropology 28(2): 402-417.
- Fesenmyer, L, Liberatore, G, and Maqsood, A. Eds., 2020. Crossing religious and ethnographic boundaries: The case for comparative reflective. Special Issue. Social Anthropology 28(2).
- Nolte, Insa 2019, “Learning to be Muslim in West Africa. Islamic engagements with diversity and difference”, Islamic Africa 10(1-2), 11-25.
- Nolte, Insa and Olukoya Ogen, 2017. “Views from the shoreline: Community, trade, and religion in coastal Yorubaland and the Western Niger Delta”, Yoruba Studies Review 1(2), 1-16.