Constructing Data in Religious Studies - Examining the Architecture of the Academy - Leslie Dorrough Smith
"If I had a Nickel for Every Time...": Thinking Critically about Data
Constructing Data in Religious Studies - Examining the Architecture of the Academy - Leslie Dorrough Smith
Leslie Dorrough Smith [+]
Avila University
Leslie Dorrough Smith is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Avila University, USA, where she is also the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She is the author of Compromising Positions: Political Sex Scandals and American Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2020), Constructing “Data” in Religious Studies: Examining the Architecture of the Academy (Equinox Publishing, 2019), and Righteous Rhetoric: Sex, Speech and the Politics of Concerned Women for America (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Description
It is commonplace for scholars in the field of Religious Studies to quote Jonathan Z. Smith’s phrase “….there is no data for religion” and yet simultaneously fail to take seriously the call to analytical rigor that such a phrase was intended to invoke regarding how and why we construct the concept “religion.” This introduction presents the reader several key theoretical and methodological issues scholars of religion must face as they consider what constitutes their data – that is, the object of their study -- and provides an overview of the structure of the book.