This thesis examines the work of the Churches in the working-class London Borough of Bermondsey. Opening chapters trace their development to 1860 and explore the social background. stressing the stratification within the working class. The Anglican Church in the late nineteenth century was a paradox. Extensively used by the working class for its social services, non-church going religious activities and for rites of passage, this was the 'Golden age of the Parish'. But despite attractiveness to sections of the working class, it was still middle-class dominated and was retreating into a closely-defined community. Traditional nonconfona1ty could not compete, but the new central halls and missions succeeded, through social work and modernised religious activity, in attracting larger numbers. Undermined by the effects of W.W.I, the loss of outside support, new alternatives and by their inability to overcome the restraints of respectability, all the Protestant Churches fell into decline by the l930s. Conversely. the Roman Catholic Church reached its peak by the l920s and retained its Irish working-class membership, based around the powerful relationship between priest and people. Analysis is also made of the different approaches to organised religion according to gender and of the relationship between the Churches and Socialism

The broad aim of the thesis is to examine the impact of class, caste and religious identity in constructing notions of Muslim identity in a small town in central Gujarat, India and to challenge wider assumptions about the primacy of religious identity in ordering sociality in 'everyday life' in the region following the large-scale violence against the Muslim minority in 2002. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic research, the thesis engages with debates about the impact of violence on inter-ethnic relations and the construction of a minority identity. My research focuses particularly on the Muslim Sunni Vohras in the town of Mahemdabad, a community whose language, residential patterns, dress and kinship system defy, both locally as well as more generally, dualistic notions of what constitutes 'Hindu'/'Muslim' modes of conduct. As a merchant group, Sunni Vohras in the town have traditionally maintained closer ties with local Hindu merchants rather than other Muslims with whom they commonly eschew close affiliation. Through an analysis of various spheres such as kinship, gender, religious practice and local politics, the thesis examines how different notions of 'Muslim identity' are at once predicated on an opposition to 'Hindu identity' but likewise how competing definitions are brandished as a means of establishing status and honour. On a wider level, the thesis presents an examination of how 'everyday coexistence' between different religious groups in the town following the 2002 violence and the way in which such coexistence is sustained and managed through informal networks. Unlike nearby cities, the town in which research was conducted had not previously experienced wide-scale attacks in the past and prided itself on the 'communal harmony' between Hindus and Muslims. The thesis argues that the ongoing salience of caste and class links between the two communities constitute a central factor in explaining how, despite the wider social and political context, religious identity has not succeeded in trumping previous forms of social stratification.

Although embodied knowing is fundamental to our experience, no previous study has detailed its role in a specific spiritual group. This thesis offers a new model of embodied situated cognition, and develops an embodied hermeneutics which uses Focusing in phenomenological research. I apply these tools to the first detailed ethnography of Eco-Paganism to reveal powerful processes of connection which have considerable significance for religious studies and ecopsychology. Chapters 2 and 3 survey the literature on Eco-Paganism and embodied cognition. Chapter 4 uses the latter to synthesise a model of embodied situated cognition which I call the 'enactive process model', because it draws primarily on enactivism (inter alia, Varela et al., 1991), and Gendlin's process philosophy (Gendlin, 1997). Current research shows that key aspects of cognition are situated and embodied (inter alia, Varela et al., 1991), such that we often think with place (inter alia, Preston, 2003). This raises epistemological questions which I address in a discussion of embodied philosophy in Chapter 5. I then explain my embodied hermeneutics methodology, and the practical application ofthe Focusing Interview technique, in Chapter 6. My fieldwork auto ethnography, Chapter 7, provides an intuitive, felt understanding of life on a road protest site, and is followed by ethnographies of urban and protest site Eco-Paganism in Chapters 8 and 9. Chapter 10 discusses six processes which create a sense of connection to the organic environment, which include the felt sense (Gendlin, 1981) and the wilderness effect (Greenway, 1995). I conclude that a type of wilderness effect can catalyze the emergence of a complex 'nature based' spirituality amongst site Eco-Pagans, while a less intense form affects urban Eco-Pagans. Eco-Pagans sometimes use these processes of connection to think with a place. The processes of connection and thinking with place are fundamental to embodied situated knowing in Eco-Paganism, and help explain many of its distinctive aspects. By demonstrating the importance of embodied situated knowing in Eco-Paganism, I highlight the potential for further research into processes of connection and the impact of different physical spaces on religious practice in general.

This study examines qualitatively several case studies of young Muslims in Germany who strongly identify with Islam and Germany and who are publicly active. It analyses the ways in which the research participants use the public sphere in the context of German Muslim identity. It focuses on three main fields within the public sphere, namely media, the arts and culture, and civil society. Various forms of engagement as well as different contents are investigated. Two theoretical frameworks are used. The first one deals with identity, looking at theories of minority identity, hybrid identity, multiculturalism and secularism. Secondly, the concept of the public sphere is tackled, considering the Habermasian public sphere as well as Habermas’s critics and their emphasis on counterpublics and the public sphere’s cultural- performative nature. The study takes into account the German context, particularly public attitudes towards Islam and their influence on German Muslims’ public expressions. It finds that the examples of young individuals identifying as German Muslims, who are involved in public activities, display different forms of publics. While some German Muslims are strongly engaged in counterpublics, others illustrate only some or no elements of ‘countering’. To understand public engagement that goes beyond counterpublics the study uses Henry Jenkins’s theory of participatory culture, which proves to be more helpful. In spite of the fact that all case studies identify as German Muslims and attach great relevance to their identities as well as to public discourses concerning Muslims in Germany, they refer differently to their German Muslim identity in their public involvement. The more individuals are involved in counterpublics, the stronger references are made to German Muslim identity and associated discourses about identity recognition and multiculturalism. The less their publics represent typical counterpublic features, the weaker the relevance of German Muslim identity is. As regards Islamic content and challenges to secularism, they can play an equally important role in the different forms of publics.

From 9/11 to Cameron’s post multiculturalism (2011), British Asian Muslim identities and belonging have increasingly been questioned, stereotyped and vilified. Historically, their identities, agency and belonging formation have been seen in terms of passiveness and identity conflict, whereas, more recently their identities are coming to be seen in the frames of radicalism, fundamentalism, segregation, and disloyalty. In this research, I critically studied the life histories of four British Pakistani Muslim teachers, both male and female, in their educational and social contexts. Data were collected using four ethnographic ‘problem centred’ interviews for each participant. The study drew on normative ideas from misrecognition theory to build a critical argument about their identities, agency and belonging in Britain. My participants counter performed the naturalised cultural-political, and socio-historical discourses outlined above. Furthermore, I claim that my participants perform multicultural liberal conception of difference about their identities through four specific strategies; performance of interruptive and strategic existentialism; performance of resilience and adaptability; performance of hybridisation and creativity; and the performance of ‘strategic essentialism’. My thesis challenges the dominant Western thinking which mainly views religion in terms of belief. I argue that my participants perform religion as culture and practice. My understanding of the participants’ data is that religion is an identity orientation along with other identities which I reveal through my data analysis. My analysis leads me to a new perception to which I call the participants’ performance of ‘Multilingual social consciousness’. I argue that they perform multilingualism as an engaged plural form of social consciousness that helps them perform their identities in pluralising and synthesising ways, register their belonging in terms of forging and re-forging their cultural and cross-cultural connections, and manifest their politicisation over redistributive justice. I recommend that educators and policy actors should advance civic praxis that opens possibilities for communities and individuals to manifest their belonging in diverse ways.

The dissertation constitutes a narrative study on the complex experience of being Irish and Protestant and the author initially draws on a number of his own formative life experiences to introduce the investigation. The study uses the research genre of narrative inquiry, commenting on its relevance to the discipline of education, to explore the experience and identity of the tiny, but socially significant Protestant minority, in a country where religious identity is still highly significant. Stories, conversations arid autoethnography, which make up the core of the disseJ1ation, are drawn from the author's life experience and more particularly from a year-long period of field work. Presented in both traditional ethnographic and in non-traditional forms, using both direct and sometimes re-constructed or re-imagined voices from the fieldwork, they describe concrete lived experience of research participants. Each chapter constitutes an experiment in layered meaning making with a number of clear components. These include: i) A brief presentation of the chapter's purpose; a description of the particular methodology used including its definition, limitations and the ethical issues entailed; comment on the specific purposes involved in its use at this juncture and a description of what the method reveals which others may not ii) The presentation of data as story, discussion or re-constructed conversation which allows the emergence of a range of particular issues in an evocative way iii) A commentary on the emerging issues and a theoretical analysis using one of a range of lenses drawn from the conceptual repertoire of poststructuralism. Concluding sections of each chapter comment on what has emerged and form links with what is to follow in ensuing sections of the study. Each chapter thus represents a further step in elaborating a variety of emerging perspectives on the complexity of Irish Protestant experience. Not every theme embodied in the stories and conversations at the core of dissertation is the subject of explicit analysis or comment; instead they go to create a backdrop which expands the consciousness of readers concerning the context and experiences of Irish Protestantism. The titles of the work's five chapters (and in "general the second quotation at their outset) are all extracts from fieldwork conversations. C Responses from fieldwork suggest a community which has responded variously to Ireland's dramatic changes since Independence. Initially Protestants, as visible remnants of colonial occupation, were catapulted from a position of former security and influence to one of extreme marginality and fragility. Initial violence, murder and persecution modified over time to a less potent marginality (coupled at times with remarkable generosity) where the minority were generally defined as aliens and outsiders in what was to become an increasingly hegemonic Catholic Gaelic state. In order to survive (particularly against the draconian application of the Ne Temere papal decree) and to preserve a distinctive ethos, the minority withdrew into a hermetically sealed range of interconnected communities which simultaneously catered for virtually all their religious, educational, medical and social needs, as well as constituting a clearly recognizable alternative to the all-prevailing meta-culture. Despite these measures, continued emigration and the depredations of intermarriage (and the implied enforced signing over of children and consequently property) to the majority Catholicism led to a situation where slow extinction appeared inevitable. In this constrained context Protestants rarely spoke out publicly against oppressive policies or practices. Stories collected from the fieldwork also suggest that silence increasingly came to be employed within the community to minimize a recognition of the prevailing unpleasant realities with which the religious minority lived. Views expressed by participants suggest that this silencing resulted in a diminished ability for reflexivity and agency within the community and limited contribution to public debate and policy formation from what was, for many years, the largest minority voice in the country. Recent economic shifts, cosmopolitanism and crises in Catholicism have contributed to an era in which Protestantism finds itself an acceptable other, its schools and churches thronged with disillusioned erstwhile Catholics. In this unexpected space stories of transformation and opportunity appear to compete with old tales of discrimination, extinction and depression in defining its identity.

This thesis argues that in the 1990s, British Muslim young people who wanted to take their religion seriously and participate in collective religious activism could choose between four distinct influential revivalist currents, The Young Muslims UK, radical pan-Islamist movement Hizb ut-Tahrir, Salafi oriented JIMAS organisation and the neo-Sufi "Traditional Islam" network, were national trends that became indigenised adaptations of orientations rooted in the Middle East or Indian sub-continent. These trends had a paradigmatic influence upon second and third generation Muslim youth and were instrumental in wider re-Islamisation processes in British Muslim communities. My core research questions are to examine how these trends emerged, how they functioned, how they recruited, how they evolved and what affect they had on forms of Islamic activism today. This research provides an integrated history and analysis of these underesearched trends from their beginnings in the mid-1980s to the end of the first decade of the 21 st century, demonstrating their continuity and change, illustrating their convergences, divergences and their contribution to the growth of an acculturated "British Islam"

The political actions of the Druze of Israel have formed the focus of a large body of research. Despite this, academic studies to date have failed to explain why so many Druze resorted to a politics of loyalty when Israel was first established but have, in more recent years, resorted to a politics of violence. The research herein proposes that a model of the politics of accommodation is able to explain the political actions of the Druze during the first three decades of the Israeli state. Data from The Israel State Archives and the archives of leading Druze families show that many Israeli-Druze resorted to a politics of loyalty. This loyalty was inextricably linked to the perception of the new state and its government's policy as creating a new structure of opportunity for the economic, social and political progress of the Druze community whilst also safeguarding the Israeli-Druze community as a distinctive cultural and religious group on its own land. Similarly, it is proposed that the ethnic state supremacy model is able to explain the recent rise in the politics of violence within the Israeli-Druze community. Data from personal interviews with state officials and Druze activists confirmed that many Israeli-Druze resorted to a politics of violence because they perceived the Israeli government's policy as a threat to their preservation as a cultural and religious group on its own land. This study of Druze political action is intended as a contribution to the debate surrounding the Israeli state's politics in relation to Israel's Arab minority. This research also seeks to address wider issues in that it proposes a model that is applicable to the general question of ethnic conflict resolution in divided societies and polarised states.

Since the events of 11 September 2001 Islam and Muslims have been the subject of intense scrutiny and open to pervasive institutional construction, both on a domestic and global level. Such constructions implicate the identities of British-Muslims, the ummah and Muslim countries. The all-encompassing nature of this institutional construction, most notably within the media, mainstream political discourses and State security measures has left little space for British-Muslims to publically express their beliefs, feeling and perceptions in an arena untainted by dominant discourse. This project strives to fill this void by rooting the research in the experiences of British-Muslim youth as narrated by themselves and their peers. This primary research study used a combined method of both focus groups and semi-structured interviews to examine the young British-Muslim views on three interrelated research questions: firstly, ‘To assess the impacts of counter-terrorism legislation and security measures on British-Muslims post 9/11’; secondly, ‘To examine how British-Muslim identities have been institutionally represented since 9/11’; and, thirdly, ‘To analyse the micro-level strategies deployed by young British-Muslims to maintain and de-stigmatise identities which have been rendered suspect.’

This thesis examines the concept of ‘Islamophobia’ using statistical data from available large-scale social surveys. The primary aim of the presented research is to determine the extent to which available statistical data support or challenge assertions and conclusions concerning ‘Islamophobia’ found within recent scholarly and policy literature. It uses five large social survey datasets containing data collected and made available between 2006 and 2011. In total, these data relate to the reported attitudes and experiences of over 15,000 Muslim respondents in respect of crime victimization, discrimination and attitudes towards British society and the British state, and the reported attitudes of over 300,000 non-Muslim respondents towards Muslims and Islam. The central contention of this thesis is that available statistics challenge the scholarly literature in that they suggest a more nuanced and complex picture of Muslim victimization and discrimination than the one offered by the various conceptualizations of ‘Islamophobia’ within the literature. Although there is an expansive and expanding body of published research concerning British Muslim communities, ‘Islamophobia’, anti-Muslim discrimination and anti-Islamic sentiment, recent studies have been dominated largely by political, rhetorical or polemical writing, and by qualitative research designs that have used only small samples. This study of nationally representative survey data aims to make a contribution towards criminology and the social sciences by offering a large-scale quantitative study of ‘Islamophobia’ and British Muslim communities and the foundation of an evidence base for future research in this area.