The Science & Belief in Society Podcast

In this episode, Richard and Will talk with Professor Adam Chepkwony, a Full Professor of Religion at the University of Kabianga in Kenya. Professor Chepkwony's work covers a wide range of topics including African Religion, Inter-religious Dialogue, Science and Religion, and more. In this episode, Professor Chepkwony provides his perspective on how issues like climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic have affected, and are perceived by, people in Kenya. Additionally, Professor Chepkwony discusses the impacts of colonialism and missionary work in Kenya, including how rigid conceptualizations of Christianity, democracy, and science can sometimes lead Africans to feel like they are living "double lives".

In this episode, Rachael and Richard talk with Dr Sarah Qidwai, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg, Germany. Sarah’s work explores transnational and local perspectives on scientific disciplines during the long nineteenth century. In this episode, we discuss the focus of Sarah’s doctoral thesis, the Muslim polymath Sir Sayyed Ahmad Khan (1817-1898), and her latest project entitled ‘Scientism and Empire’ while examining how disciplines such as astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology operated within the confines of Empire in the 19th Century.

Understanding public attitudes towards science has become an increasingly important area of research in recent decades, and the importance of this kind of work has only been heightened by the emergence of COVID-19, and the diverse and unpredictable public responses to scientific and medical advice during the pandemic. In this episode Will and Richard talk to Dr Baastian Rutjens, who investigates public attitudes to science around the world, with a focus on what he describes as ‘science scepticism’. Baastian explains how tools and methods from social psychology can help us to understand the motivations which underlie scepticism of science, and we discuss the wider social and political implications of these kinds of attitudes.

In this episode James Riley and Richard Grove talk with John Stenhouse, Associate Professor of History at the University of Otago, New Zealand.  John's research interests centre on the interconnections between science, religion, race, politics and gender in the modern world, particularly using New Zealand as the major site of study. We talk about the history of creationist and evolutionary ideas in New Zealand, and how a nation cannot be separated from larger complexities of empire and globalisation when thinking about the reception of scientific ideas.

In this episode, hosts Richard Grove and James Riley meet with Dr. Vivian Dzokoto, a Cultural Psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University in the United States, to discuss her work on the cultural differences in how people think about "the mind." Dr. Dzokoto has published research on a wide range of topics. However, one of the key characteristics of her research is the examination of culture and religion. Much of her research focuses on people from West African countries, such as Ghana. In this episode, Dr. Vivian Dzokoto chats with Richard and James about her research on emotions and Ghanaian understandings of the mind based on an analysis of Akan proverbs.

In this episode, hosts Rachael Shillitoe and Richard Grove, meet with Elaine Howard Ecklund, Professor of Sociology at Rice University and David R. Johnson, Associate Professor of Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University, to discuss their new book, Varieties of Atheism in Science, out now with Oxford University Press. Elaine and David reflect on the findings of their study which draws on surveys and interviews with atheist scientists in the UK and USA. Chatting with Rachael and Richard, Elaine and David, challenge some of the commonly held assumptions about the interrelation between atheism and science and by exploring atheist scientists’ diverse views of religion, their perspectives on the limits to what science can explain, and their views of meaning and morality.

New-age spirituality, wellness and alternative health practices have been cast in a new light as the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded. The relationship between these practices and established or mainstream science and public health has tended to be an uneasy one, and this unease has only increased during the pandemic, with online spiritualist and wellness communities providing fertile ground for the growth and spread of increasingly anti-establishment and conspiratorial ideas. To discuss these issues with James and Will is today's guest, Dr Anna Halafoff, Associate Professor in Sociology at Deakin University, Melbourne, who explores these issues in the Australian context. Anna dissects the rise and development of ‘(con)spirituality’ online, the shifting political make-up of these communities, and how, beyond the pandemic, these communities and the individuals participating in them can be seen as responding to the social and economic conditions imposed by neoliberalism.

The Media of Mediumship project is running jointly at the University of Stirling and the Science Museum Group. The project team comprises Principal Investigator Professor Christine Ferguson, Co-Investigator Dr Efram Sera-Shriar and Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Emma Merkling. In this very spooky episode, Christine, Efram and Emma tell us how from the late-19th Century on, novel technologies of the period - including photographic cameras, radio transmitters and devices for producing and recording different types of electromagnetic radiation such as X-rays - were used to explore what we now think of as the 'supernatural'. The team show that during this period, phenonema such as the ability of a medium to channel the spirits of the dead, or the physical manifestations of this ability such as the production of ectoplasm, were open to scientific debate, having not yet fallen outside the boundaries of legitimate scientific study. Similarly, what phenomena it was possible for novel technologies such as radio and photography to record or capture was not yet settled. Spiritualists, occultists, scientists, as well as magicians and outright con-artists (with more than one of these labels often applying to the same individual) used these novel technologies variously to evidence or debunk various claims, draw boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate scientific and spiritualist or occult practises, whilst also satisfying a Victorian public for whom attending a séance, for example, was a popular form of entertainment. The team discuss this fascinating history with reference to some of the technological artefacts and other objects of the period, which are held by the Science Museum Group and Senate House Library, and which were implicated in some of the most high-profile contemporary controversies e.g. the Cottingley fairies.

A sneak peak of what's coming up in Season Two of The Science & Belief in Society Podcast

In the final episode of Season 1 of the Science & Belief in Society Podcast, we’re re-joined by Dr Tom Aechtner, Senior Lecturer in Religion and Science in the School Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. Tom talks us through the persuasive and rhetorical tactics used by both pro- and anti-evolutionist media and explains what science communicators can learn from their anti-evolutionary counterparts. Alongside his work on science and religion in mass media, Tom’s currently working on a project investigating vaccine hesitancy and vaccine scepticism in Australia titled “Improving Vaccination Rates in Australia: Analysing Media, Religion and Policy.”. You can listen to a special podcast we recorded with Tom on this topic here. You can read Tom’s Researcher Profile here.