Dr Claire Wanless (BA, BSc, PGCE, MA, PhD)
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Religious Studies
Address
- Street
-
School of Divinity
Mound Place - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH1 2LX
Background
After a prior career in educational and web publishing, I completed my PhD on individualized religious practitioners around Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire and am now working as a postdoctoral researcher, through a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.
My PhD research has been published by Bloomsbury Academic in monograph form titled: Individualized Religion: Practitioners and Their Communities (2021). It provides a case study of co-located religious individuals working outside of formal institutions and shows how, in the absence of top-down hierarchical structures, they are able to create their own personal religious journeys while successfully collaborating to develop and utilize community in sustainable and socially significant ways.
Qualifications
PGCE (UCL Institute of Education)
MA (Open University)
PhD (Open University)
Responsibilities & affiliations
Former member of Executive Committee of the British Association for the Study of Religions (BASR)
Research summary
Contemporary, alternative and non-institutionalized forms of religion; Secularization and theories of secularization; Religious networks and communities; Theory of the subject in religion; The relationship between the individual and community; The structure and functioning of religious community; Alternative religion as a driver of social cohesion, and as a source of subversive and countercultural activity.
Current research interests
My current research focuses on an ethnographic study of Quaker involvement in climate change activism around Edinburgh and London. The aim is to further explore the intersection between ‘horizontal’ religious community and political praxis, and to improve our understanding of the encounter that grassroots activity based on subjective moralities has with hierarchical models of authority.Past research interests
My earlier work explored how social constructivist theories of learning can inform our understanding of the functional viability of individualized religion in secularized societies – see for example my paper titled: Individualized Religion and the Theory of Learning (2017), and my PhD thesis (http://oro.open.ac.uk/66156/).-
Individualized Religion: Practitioners and Their Communities
(208 pages)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350182530
Research output: › Book (Published) -
[Review of] J. Stolz, J. Könemann, M. Purdie, T. Englberger and M. Krüggeler, (Un)believing in modern society Religion, spirituality, and religious-secular competition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016)
(5 pages)
In:
Culture and Religion, vol. 20, pp. 124-128
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2019.1572099
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Book/Film/Article review (E-pub ahead of print) -
Individualized religion and the theory of learning
(14 pages)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18792/jbasr.v18i1.6
Research output: › Conference contribution (Published) -
[Review of] J. Rieger and P. Kwok, Occupy religion Theology of the multitude (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013)
(3 pages)
In:
Critical Research on Religion, vol. 4, pp. 109-111
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F2050303216630071
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Book/Film/Article review (Published)