Sophie Gilliat-Ray

Since its launch in 2005, the Islam-UK Centre at Cardiff University has initiated a range of projects concerned with issues of leadership, pastoral care, and the training of religious professionals working in British Muslim communities (Gilliat-Ray 2006; Gilliat-Ray 2010; Gilliat-Ray 2011; Ali and Gilliat-Ray 2012; Gilliat-Ray et al [...]

This article examines the question of sleeping (or not) during the course of ethnographic fieldwork. It is argued that the concept of what is termed here ‘sleepwork’ has yet to be fully addressed or adequately problematised in the fields of sociology and social anthropology, in particular. The first part of the article highlights the relative silence about sleeping and fieldwork in the literature on qualitative research methods, and reflects upon why this subject is largely absent from the ethnographic corpus. I then make a number of propositions about some potential methodological strategies for incorporating ‘sleepwork’ into fieldwork. The second part of the article suggests that data analysis should not be seen as an activity that only occurs in states of wakefulness, but rather as a 24/7 activity that is undertaken with varying intensity.

In 2005, I documented my unsuccessful attempts to conduct qualitative research in a particular group of British Islamic seminaries responsible for training future imams and scholars ('ulama). These seminaries or "darul uloom" (in Arabic, "house of knowledge", often abbreviated "DU") reflect the "Deobandi" tradition due to their origins in the town of Deoband, India, in the nineteenth century. My article, published in the journal Fieldwork in Religion, considered the circumstantial, contextual, and historical factors that might explain why access was apparently impossible for social science researchers, at the time. In this article, twelve years on, I explore why research access is now more possible in at least some Deobandi institutions. These include developmental changes within and outside these seminaries, and aspects of personal and professional biography. My article considers the processual nature of research access, and the need for ...

Some sociologists of religion would argue that there has been a move away from ‘religion’, in terms of institutionalised dogmas and established corporate ways of believing, towards ‘spiritualities of life’ where the emphasis lies on the personal, the individual and the experiential ( Heelas, 2002 ; Wuthnow, 2001 ). Given the evidence for the apparent popularity of spirituality in contemporary Western society, it is surprising that between 1996 and 2000, the Zone concerned with religion at the Millennium Dome in Greenwich was re-named from ‘The Spirit Zone’ to ‘The Faith Zone’. A range of political, economic and religious interests lay behind the Zone's re-naming, and both the name (and the content) changed to reflect ‘religion’ rather than ‘spirituality’. The process of constructing the Zone thus moved in a diametrically opposite direction to some of the trends associated with religious belief in modern Britain. An investigation of the dynamics behind the construction of the Fai...

Detailed accounts of fieldwork relationships can be helpful reading for those embarking on research with a similar population. In this spirit, the article presents reflections on the process of conducting qualitative research with 60 Muslim families. The main research aim was to describe and explain how children (aged 12 and under) are brought up to be Muslims. Fairly detailed reflections are presented about four main aspects of the research process: research team members’ identities and the implications of these, the recruitment of families to take part in the research, the conduct of fieldwork (interviews and observation) and the use of child-friendly techniques, such as interviews with young children, oral diaries and photo elicitation.

If secularization is increasing over time, this should be observable in patterns of religiosity across the generations. The Home Office Citizenship Survey (of adults in England and Wales) and its accompanying Young People’s Survey provide a relatively rare example of individual-level and intergenerational British data on religious transmission, with indications of religious affiliation or practice across three generations. Secondary analysis was conducted on the 2003 data, looking at religious transmission in four groups: Christians, Muslims, those from non-Christian non-Muslim religions and those with no religion. Associations between religious transmission and a range of social factors are presented, with these including ethnicity, gender, country of birth and socio-economic characteristics. The data suggest a complex pattern of religious transmission over the three generations and a higher transmission of Islam than any of the other religious categories. There is, therefore, a fo...

Many public institutions in British society provide facilities for worship and contemplation. Historically, chapels were at the heart of many gaols and hospitals, but in recent times, other kinds of institution, such as airports, shopping centres, and more recently, the Millennium ...

Abstract As the religious diversity of English towns and cities has grown over the past thirty years due to the establishment in some places of sizeable communities of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, as well as other faiths, there have been important changes to local public ...

Some recent commentary on the relevance of religion and spirituality to social work emphasizes a liberal Western individualized notion of spirituality, rather than the significance of formal religion. Evidence from sociological research on religious nurture in British Muslim families challenges this emphasis. Sixty Muslim families from diverse backgrounds in one UK city took part in a qualitative study, consisting of interviews with adults and children aged 12 and under; observation of formal learning and oral and photographic diaries. The article focuses in particular on the importance of religious nurture in Muslim families and parents’ views about ‘spirituality’.

Utilizing Putnam's concept of bonding social capital, this article explores the under-researched topic of the history of migrant men's reproduction of social capital in Cardiff, Wales. Drawing upon a series of oral history interviews with a respected imam of more than fifty years, and informed by existing research on Muslim migrants, we explore both the advantages and disadvantages of community relationships between Yemeni men in relation to trust, reciprocity and interpersonal well-being. By examining these complex bonds, this article contributes to the literature on religious and ethnic social networks by challenging the assumption that migrants always benefit from social resources (Wilson 1978; Shah 2007), and offers an alternative account of religiously underpinned social capital to those of studies of majority ethnic Christians in North America (Smidt 2003). Uniquely, this article also points to the divergences between religious and ethnic capitals in the context of Yemeni migrants' social resources during 1939–1970.

‘The body’ has become a significant topic of theoretical discussion within social scientific writing, as well as within qualitative research methods debate (especially in the sociology of health and illness). This paper argues that these trends are, paradoxically, far less apparent with the sociology of religion, and virtually non-existent within the study of Islam and Muslims in Britain. On the

Bringing together a decade of research on religion in prisons, hospitals, universities and, more recently, at the Millennium Dome in 2000, in this paper I look at some of the ways in which sacred spaces in public institutions have changed over time, particularly in terms of how they are ...

This paper brings together a diverse range of different sources to profile some of the centres of Islamic religious training in Britain. It distinguishes between dar ul-uloom (literally, ‘house of science’, or seminary) on the one hand, and Islamic ‘colleges’ on the other, the defining quality of the latter being their provision of undergraduate and postgraduate degree schemes which have