News

Call for abstract, the bi-annual BU-RVS seminar

Published: 23 April 2019

The call for abstract is now out for the bi-annual BU-RVS seminar. Deadline is 30 April.

The 2019 joint seminar between Boston University (BU) and the Research School Religion, Values and Society (RVS) will investigate the field of religion, values and social practices. The ambition of this seminar is to analyze how theories of practice enable expanded understandings of religion and values.

Within the broad field of religion, values and society the seminar looks for empirical contributions to the analysis of religion and/or values as social and material, as practice and inter-acted, and as hybrid and negotiated. This means that the seminar is open to a broad range of issues.

The 2019 seminar will investigate religion and values as social practices. By “social practice” we refer to the broad and heterogeneous tradition which understands practice as a collective phenomenon, as something more than the sum of individual actions. Practices, not the human mind, are understood as the central phenomenon in human life (Schatzki 2001). Social here also includes the material, natural and embodied.

The seminar aims at exploring different theories of practice, at different ways of theorizing practice. The broad range of practice theories come from education, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and so on. This means that a typical paper will start with one or more explicit practice theory/theories and use that theory in the empirical study of a case of religion or values.

Interdisciplinary approaches are useful in practice-research in order to clarify how sociological, psychological, educational, theological and philosophical aspects interplay in the making of religion and values. Different kinds of empirical methodologies are wanted, and the papers should have a theorizing aim. This means that the focus is contemporary and empirical-theoretical.

Abstracts

At this point, we invite BU students and RVS students to submit abstract of papers. The seminar is restricted to a limited number of participants, so the abstracts are also applications for participation. The abstracts will be evaluated by the seminar committee. We encourage co-authorship with a supervisor or senior researcher – but also accept individual PhD-student abstracts and papers. The abstract should describe the theme, aim, research questions, theoretical perspectives, data material and methods and possible contribution of the research and how it is situated in existing research. The abstract should not exceed 500 words and submitted to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by April 30th.

Full papers

The full paper (6000 words) is due Oct 15.

On atheism, gender and social media. We congratulate Evelina Lundmark with her defense!

Published: 15 February 2019

RVS member Evelina Lundmark defended her thesis “This is the Face of an Atheist”: Performing Private Truths in Precarious Publics at the University of Uppsala 1st February 2019. For more about her work, visit this link

Annual Seminar and Autumn Seminar 2018: a small report

Published: 12 December 2018

Please follow this link for this news item which was published on the MF website (in Norwegian only).

Want to join the RVS? New call out now

Published: 14 February 2019

An new call for application is out now. The deadline for applying is 13 March 2019. Read more about the call and find the application form here:

Call for Applications 2019

We live in a world and in societies where religion and values are changing. There is an increased emphasis on, and appreciation for, acquiring knowledge to understand these processes in their many forms and on their many levels. Currently, empirical studies of religion, values and society are spread across a number of institutions, in relatively small communities. The Research School Religion-Values-Society (RVS) is an initiative by the major Norwegian academic institutions within this field, as well as important institutions in Sweden and the United States, to bring together PhD-students and established scholars in order to develop better research and foster national and international cooperation, primarily through a strengthened and more comprehensive PhD education. For more, please visit our website https://rvs.mf.no/

RVS welcomes members researching either religion or values (or both) in a contemporary and empirical perspective. The research school is now open to 10 new PhD-students members that are already enrolled in PhD programs at the participating institutions at RVS. These are: the University of Agder, VID Specialized University, Volda University College, Umeå University, University of Oslo, University of Tromsø, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, University of Bergen, MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society, and Uppsala University, with Boston University as an international partner. There are approximately 60 PhD-student members in RVS.

RVS is a national research school, with a grant of over NOK 23 million over eight years from the Norwegian Research Council. This grant ensures that the costs connected to participating in RVS courses and seminars will be covered by the RVS for our members.

The RVS Research School offers both mandatory and voluntary courses. Members are eligible to participate in the annual summer school in Lesbos, Greece, which focuses on questions of methodology, theory and practical research in empirical studies, as well as one course each spring and fall that deal with a specific interdisciplinary theme related to religion and/or values, and society. These courses consist of lectures by top international scholars and group sessions that discuss the participants’ own projects and work. In addition, there will be an annual national PhD-seminar for all RVS-students and supervisors, two thematic courses each year, a bi-annual seminar in Boston with Boston University and one online group-session each semester.

Members are required to participate in the annual PhD seminars, the online group-sessions and at least one of the thematic spring/fall-courses each year, with the possibility to take part in more courses of course. This means that members will get a better and more comprehensive education, but the RVS is still an addition to the regular PhD-program at their institutions.

We then invite PhD-students to apply to become members of the RVS. Please fill in the form below, and return it to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. before March 13th 2019. The main criteria of evaluation are the academic quality of the project, relevance for RVS and institutional affiliation. The evaluation process will be finished by end of March 2019.

Application Form

Name:

Project title:

Main discipline:

Contact details:

Institution & PhD-program:

Supervisor(s):

Start date of PhD-project and Project Schedule:

Presentation of PhD-project (1-2 pages)

(including research question(s), data material, theoretical perspectives, methods and possible research contribution)

Motivation for Joining RVS (1 paragraph)

Relevance of RVS for your project (1 paragraph)

Gender and marriage: a case from Ghana. RVS member Dominic W. Amonzen (UiO) defended his PhD-thesis

Published: 13 November 2018

RVS member Dominic Wemochiga Amonzem defended his PhD at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo, on 30 November 2018.

We warmly congratulate Dominic with his efforts!

The title of his PhD is "Gendering Marriage: Exploring Kasena Marriage Practices in North-East Ghana"

This thesis outlines the major elements in the academic, African feminist, and popular discourses on marriage in Africa, focusing on two core issues: the conceptual divide between the marriage practices of the Kasena, a Ghanaian ethnic group, and the context-dependent social construction and production of gender in marriage through the marriage practices of the Kasena people of North-East Ghana.

By comparing the functionalist assumptions of the purpose of marriage in the literature on marriage in African societies with ethnographic material from Navrongo, this thesis demonstrates that marriage in Kasena society does more to individuals and the society than it has been seen to do in the functionalist explanations of marriage offered by earlier anthropologists researching on marriage in Africa.

For more about the project and the public defence visit this link