UNITED KINGDOM

SHILLITOE, RACHAEL

SOCIOLOGY | SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

Rachael Shillitoe is a sociologist and a senior social scientist in the civil service. She was previously a research fellow at the Universities of Birmingham and York (UK). Her research interests focus on the formation of beliefs and values across generations. She is the author of Negotiating Religion and Non-Religion in Childhood with Palgrave Macmillan.

Her research interests focus on the interrelation between religion and secularity, particularly within childhood. Rachael’s research is primarily in the sociology of religion and sits in conversation with childhood studies, education and the anthropology of religion and ethics. Rachael’s PhD was part of a wider Leverhulme Trust funded project and examined children’s experiences of collective worship and assemblies in school. Noting the marginalisation of children’s voices in academic research, especially in the study of religion, Rachael focused her attention on foregrounding children’s perspectives and learning about their experiences of religion in school. In this research Rachael, worked in three primary schools and discovered how adults construct religion for children and how children subsequently encounter religion and secularity in everyday school life. After completing her PhD, Rachael worked as a Research Fellow at York St John University and conducted an evaluation project on the organisation ‘Prayer Spaces in Schools’. Following this, Rachael then undertook a project with Dr Anna Strhan at the University of York, exploring what it means to grow up nonreligious in contemporary Britain. This project investigated children’s beliefs and explored the ways in which children negotiate, construct, and reconstruct forms of religion and secularity, and how this is shaped by the actions of adults in relation to them across spaces of both school and home.