Projects
The INSBS has funded 59 research projects investigating science & belief around the world. Explore the details of each project below
2024
Summary: This project explores the attitudes of religious people in Turkey toward scientific issues that have generated controversy in recent decades, and assesses the political implications of these attitudes. The contentious topics that the project focuses on are vaccination (mRNA vaccines in particular), climate change, and the question of “normalcy” in gender and sexuality. As
Summary: The main goal of this project is to organise three short “Spring Schools” on Science and Religion in Spain, Greece and Poland with the following aims in mind: (1) to test a short version of a syllabus on science and religion, formerly supported by the INSBS, in different geographical and cultural (and non-English speaking)
Summary: African publics have been described as “notoriously” (Mbiti, 1990) and “incurably” (van den Toren, et al, 2020) religious. However, as religious institutions rank number one of 17 institutions on trust levels, scientific institutions also rank in the top four (Falade, 2018) and many prominent religious leaders are also scientists and have established universities. The
Summary: This qualitative research project probes the views about science and religion among Muslim mystics in the Nordic countries. The project team will interview 12 Sufis or students in Sufi circles in Finland, Denmark and Sweden about how they negotiate or imagine the boundary between science and belief. It also investigates how these views are
Summary: Sociological studies of Islam and science are limited in number and scope, with existing studies reinforcing a “deficit model approach” that shows religion as an obstacle to public understanding and acceptance of science (Carlisle et al. 2019 p. 150, Jones et al. 2023). This project locates the study of Islam within the growing field
2023
Summary: The principal aim of the Research Network on Science, Religion and Health (RN-SRH) is to foster exchange and collaboration among researchers working at the intersection of science, religion, and health. The project builds up on the experience of a previous project funded by the INSBS Regional Network Grant programme but aims to go much
Summary: Building on a previous grant, this project applies novel social network theory and methods (Wasserman & Faust, 1994) to increasing the socio-academic impact of the established Latin-American Research Network for the Study of Science, Belief and Society (LARNSSBS – https://www.crysnetwork.org/). Informed by this theoretical perspective, improved network efficiency is pursued by strengthening interconnections among
Summary: We are requesting funding to support a series of events, aimed at expanding the network activities of MENA S&R. During 2023-2024, we will organise an international hybrid workshop, an onsite tour, a virtual seminar series, a student writing essay prize and a writing retreat. Inspired by recent studies of non-Christian contexts in the study
Summary: In 2021, we received a small research grant from INSBS to conduct a pilot study on children’s cognitive understanding of death as the cessation of agency. In part 1 of the project, we began fieldsite development in Tana Toraja in Indonesia and assessed the feasibility of future research on similar concepts. We request additional
Summary: Numerous large-scale surveys in the United States and Europe suggest steady generational declines in religiosity and religious social participation, with visible shifts from one cohort to the next (Idler, 2022). And yet, research considering the secularization of society has largely ignored age and ageing as important points of inquiry (Idler, 2021). Similarly, beliefs in
2022
Summary: Some people see teachings from religion/spirituality (r/s) as conflicting with science, but others see r/s and science as independent—or even complementary. Prior research on positions about the relationships between r/s and science is limited in several key respects: This work (a) relied mainly on Christian samples from the United States (U.S.), (b) measured positions
Aim of the project: This project will study the socio-historical evolution of ‘Jesuit science’ (scientific activity of Catholic missionaries belonging to the Jesuit Order) in India, after India gained freedom from British rule in 1947. Specifically, the project will examine the nexus between scientific research and the social justice mandate of the Jesuits in the
Summary: We are requesting funding from INSBS to support an innovative study examining how religious groups legitimize science by themselves, and for themselves. Whereas most scholarship on religion and science focuses on perceived theological ‘tensions’ between science and religion, we develop a nuanced and bottom-up understanding of the ways religion and science are negotiated and
Summary: US research reveals a significant relationship between university STEM (science, technology, engineering or mathematics) disciplines and the development of students’ religious or spiritual characteristics and interfaith competencies. Yet, in the UK, as university applications for STEM disciplines hit a record high, little research has considered belief diversity (defined as the diversity of religious, spiritual
Summary: The relation between science and religion has traditionally been portrayed as a conflict. At the heart of this conflict thesis is the belief that science and religion are two fixed categories of knowledge that are incompatible, and thus an increase in one would necessarily lead to a decrease in the other (Evans, 2018; Harrison,
2021
Summary: The Brazil Indigenous Science and Religion Network (BISREN) aims to increase our understanding of the relationship between knowledge and belief within a Brazilian indigenous context. Its planned activities across 24 months will attract a range of academics from various subjects, such as the anthropology, psychology, and sociology of religion, the philosophy and history of
Summary: In Israel, the UEA, Turkey, and many other countries in the MENA region, the study of the interface of science and religion from a social science perspective is not yet developed into an established field of inquiry. The proposed network seeks to help encourage research that studies the social and cultural dimensions of the
Summary: The principal aim of the European Network on Science, Religion and Health is to foster collaboration among researchers working at the intersection of science, religion and health in Europe. The network has three main lines of action. First, to stimulate communication and theoretical cross-fertilisation between researchers in order to advance the understanding of social
Summary: The project will set up a research network for the study of the relationships of science, and belief in Latin American societies. Network’s aims are: To analyse regional research agendas on the relationships and impact of science and belief in Latin American societies. To improve public communication capacities of Latin American researchers working on
Summary: We propose to establish a multidisciplinary network of scholars to collaborate on research concerning the social and cultural aspects of the intersection of religion and astrobiology. Despite the great cultural traction and public interest in this topic, it has received little attention within the social sciences and allied disciplines (e.g., history). Our network will
2020
Summary: With the support of the International Research Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society, I will pursue two interrelated goals. First, I will conduct field research in Seoul, South Korea to explore the critical social role that Christianity has played in social and political responses to SARS-CoV-2. Megachurches have been central
Summary: The proposed project will investigate how atheist and other non-religious individuals in the UK involve ‘science’, broadly conceived as a cultural institution represented in various mediated forms in public, in their identities, world-ordering and meaning making. The project will seek to complexify understandings of the role ‘science’, as a mediated cultural institution, can and
Summary: Buddhist meditation practices have made an important entrée into Western discourses about science and belief: they are often portrayed as being entirely, and exceptionally, compatible with science, while simultaneously offering a spiritual teaching that is consistent with humanistic norms and values. Although relationships between religion and science are often described in terms of “conflict”
Summary: Knowing and believing in contemporary African settings involves negotiating traditional, religious, and scientific influences. This study will investigate narratives about knowing and believing inherent in proverbs of the Akan of Ghana (West Africa). The analysis will be informed by psychological perspectives about knowledge and belief. Using a compendium of 7015 Akan proverbs- the largest
Summary: This project seeks to conduct a sociohistorical analysis of the relationships between science and religion in Roman Catholicism through the use of multiple case study analysis. In order to do this, we will explore the articulation among beliefs, scientific disciplines and theological perspectives by studying institutional spaces and the main trajectories1 of actors (both
