The Science & Belief in Society Podcast

Recently, we caught up with Dr Tom Aechtner, Senior Lecturer in Religion and Science at the University of Queensland, to record an episode for the Science & Belief in Society podcast series. That episode, on Tom’s work around persuasion tactics in science and religion mass media communication, will be launched in Summer 2021. Tom has also been researching vaccination scepticism and anti-vaccination movements and media. Given that this is such timely work in the winter of 2020, James, Rachael and Will also discussed this with Tom, and we are sharing this discussion with the network now as a separate Science & Belief in Society Podcast: COVID, Conspiracies & Vaccines Special.

In this episode, we talk with Dr Shiri Noy about the value of quantitative and qualitative methods in understanding public attitudes to science and religion in the US; how theoretical insights from political and cultural sociology help to better make sense of this relationship, and, for reasons that will become clear, we also talk quite a lot about Battenberg cake. Dr Shiri Noy is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at Denison University, Ohio. Her research interests are in political culture, globalization, and development.

In this episode, Professor Fern Elsdon-Baker introduces the Network and explains the importance of multi-disciplinary and international research into science and belief. Professor Fern Elsdon-Baker is the Director for the International Research Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society and the Principal Investigator on the Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum of Global Perspectives project. She is a Professor in Science, Knowledge and Belief in Society and is the Director of the Science, Knowledge and Belief in Society Research Group at the University of Birmingham.

Trailer for the Science and Belief in Society Podcast.