Robert M Vanderbeck
Biographic Data
| ID | 110462 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert M Vanderbeck |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert M |
| FAMILY NAME | Vanderbeck |
| SIGNATURE | VANDERBECK R M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Leeds |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0274-3505 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 407 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The queer afterlives of public art: The spaces and times of Warsaw’s Tęcza (Rainbow)
Gay monuments in queer times: Amsterdam’s Homomonument and the politics of inclusive social practice
Despite growing debate about the role of monuments in diverse societies, there has been insufficient attention to contestations that have emerged involving ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ monuments. This article examines the politics of inclusion and exclusion that can stem from the social practices that evolve around these monuments, particularly as the imperatives and priorities of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) activism evolve while mo…
The Experience of Religious Same-Sex Marriage in England and Wales: Understanding the Opportunities and Limits Created by the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013
Following the enactment of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, same-sex couples in England and Wales have the same opportunities as different-sex couples to marry by way of a civil ceremony. However, same-sex couples who wish to marry by way of a religious ceremony are at a significant disadvantage to different-sex couples because only a small number of religious organisations, and a tiny number of places of worship, permit same-sex marriag…
Girls have powers’: Using research-led arts to connect policymaking with girls’ lived experiences in Uganda
This article offers new methodological directions for generating difficult-to-capture evidence on the hidden dimensions of young people’s lives in challenging circumstances. We explore how research-led applied arts can advance participatory methodologies to bridge the gap that often exists between participatory research engaging girls meaningfully within the research process, and knowledge exchange processes that connect policy-making with their …
Caring for the future: Climate change and intergenerational responsibility in China and the UK
Building common cause towards sustainable consumption: A cross-generational perspective
The notion of sustainable consumption has gained significant traction in recent decades, in parallel with unprecedented growth in global consumption and recognition of its catastrophic environmental impacts. In this context, there is a predominant generational narrative of frugality versus excess, with younger generations often negatively stereotyped as increasingly consumer-driven and environmentally destructive. We argue that it is important to…
Placing 'sustainability' in context: Narratives of sustainable consumption in Nanjing, China
This article examines how ordinary people practice the notion of 'sustainable consumption' in relation to their everyday lives and experiences of the wider environment and how these understandings relate to public discourses of sustainability in contemporary China. The paper is based on an empirical analysis of 129 narrative interviews with local residents in urban Nanjing, collected as part of an interdisciplinary and international comparative r…
Corporations, Consumerism and Culpability: Sustainability in the British Press
Sustainability and sustainable development are prominent themes in international policy-making, corporate PR, news-media and academic scholarship. Its definitions are contested, however sustainability is associated with a three-pillar focus on economic development, environmental conservation and social justice, most recently espoused in the adoption of the UN Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. In spite of its common usage, there is little res…
Families, Intergenerationality, and Peer Group Relations
Fixity and flux: A critique of competing approaches to researching contemporary Jewish identities
Jewish identities are becoming increasingly pluralised due to internal dynamics within Judaism and wider social processes such as secularisation, globalisation and individualisation. However, empirical research on contemporary Jewish identities often continues to adopt restrictive methodological and conceptual approaches that reify Jewish identity and portray it as a ‘product’ for educational providers and others to pass to younger generations. M…
A Chinese route to sustainability: Postsocialist transitions and the construction of ecological civilization
This article explores the concept of sustainability in a postsocialist context through an analysis of official discourses relating to sustainability in more than 700 articles published in the Chinese‐language newspaper People's Daily in 2015. The Chinese conception of sustainability, which emerges as a top‐down model built upon traditional ideologies and Chinese socialist legacies, inclusive of economic growth, environmental sustainability, socia…
Rural–urban inequality and the practice of promoting sustainability in contemporary China
Urban climate change, livelihood vulnerability and narratives of generational responsibility in Jinja, Uganda
There is an urgent need to understand lived experiences of climate change in the context of African cities, where even small climate shocks can have significant implications for the livelihoods of the urban poor. This article examines narratives of climate and livelihood changes within Jinja Municipality, Uganda, emphasizing how Jinja's residents make sense of climate change through their own narrative frames rather than through the lens of globa…
Sexual Orientation Equality and Religious Exceptionalism in the Law of the United Kingdom: The Role of the Church of England
There is a growing literature that addresses the appropriateness and merits of including exceptions in law to accommodate faith-based objections to homosexuality. However, what has rarely been considered and, as a consequence, what is generally not understood, is how such religious exceptions come to exist in law. This article provides a detailed analysis of the contribution of the Church of England to ensuring the inclusion of religious exceptio…
Sacred Spaces, Sacred Words: Religion and Same‐sex Marriage in England and Wales
This article provides an analysis of the ways in which the spatial and illocutionary requirements of English marriage law – which regulate the spaces in which marriages may be solemnized and the words the parties being married must speak – have been used to maintain distinctions between same‐sex and opposite‐sex couples. It shows how religious opponents of same‐sex partnership recognition have relied upon historically entrenched differences betwe…
Intergenerational Community-Based Research and Creative Practice: Promoting Environmental Sustainability in Jinja, Uganda
This article critically reflects on the methodological approach developed for a recent project based in Jinja, Uganda, that sought to generate new forms of environmental knowledge and action utilizing diverse forms of creative intergenerational practice embedded within a broader framework of community-based participatory research. This approach provided new opportunities for intergenerational dialogue in Jinja, generated increased civic environme…
The Promotion of British Values: Sexual Orientation Equality, Religion, and England’s Schools: Table 1
Schools in England have recently become subject to new requirements regarding the active promotion of ‘fundamental British values’. This concept has controversially been defined to encompass sexual orientation equality. In this article, we argue that the inclusion of sexual orientation equality within the scope of British values has given new impetus to debates about the appropriate balance between children’s rights, the right of parents to provi…
Intergenerational Space
Homosexuality, religion and the contested legal framework governing sex education in England
This article examines how religion has influenced, and continues to influence, the legal framework that regulates the circulation of knowledge about homosexuality and same-sex relationships within state-funded schools in England. This legal framework has become the subject of considerable recent public and legislative contestation. We argue that religious considerations and interests have contributed to the production and maintenance of an uneven…
Same sex marriage, civil rights rhetoric, and the ambivalent politics of Christian evangelicalism in New York City
This article extends recent discussions about the variegated character of American evangelicalism through a qualitative analysis of how issues of same-sex marriage (and gay rights more broadly) were viewed by one group of self-identified Christian evangelicals worshipping in New York City. Specifically, we draw on parish-based interviews and participant observation in one Episcopalian evangelical parish to discuss the extent to which its members …
Producing moral geographies: The Dynamics of Homophobia Within a Transnational Religious Network
The transmission and contestation of putative transcendent moral values has been relatively under-represented in geographers' thinking about globalisation and transnationalism. This paper does so through an analysis of how a new moral geography is being produced by debates over homosexuality in one transnational religious network: the Anglican Communion, a major international Christian denomination that has been significantly divided in recent ye…
Transnational religious networks: Sexuality and the changing power geometries of the Anglican Communion
This paper focuses on the response of the global Anglican Communion to the issue of homosexuality, drawing on case studies of parishes in three different national contexts (UK, USA and South Africa). It traces some of the complex connections (e.g. through flows of money, resources and discourses) between places differently located within this transnational religious network to identify a complex geometry of power. Through its attention to the dep…
Morality plays and money matters: Towards a situated understanding of the politics of homosexuality in Uganda
Since the drafting of Uganda's anti-homosexuality bill in 2009, considerable attention has been paid both in Uganda and across the African continent to the political and social significance of homosexual behaviour and identity. However, current debates have not adequately explained how and why anti-homosexual rhetoric has been able to gain such popular purchase within Uganda. In order to move beyond reductive representations of an innate African …
If a Charge was Brought Against a Saintly Religious Leader Whose Intention Was to Save Souls: An Analysis of UK Parliamentary Debates over Incitement to Hatred on the Grounds of Sexual Orientation
This article considers contemporary Parliamentary approaches to law-making in respect of homosexuality and religious belief through an analysis of debates regarding the creation of the offence of incitement to hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation (Section 74 and Schedule 16 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008). By far the most contentious issue in debates about the legislation concerned the types of speech that would be captur…
Sexuality, Activism, and Witness in the Anglican Communion: The 2008 Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops
The international Anglican Communion is a key site for struggles over the status of gays and lesbians within Christian churches. This article examines the forms that movements for gay and lesbian inclusion have taken in the Communion through an analysis of collective action at the 2008 Lambeth Conference, a central event in Anglicanism's institutional structure. The analysis builds on recent critiques of the state-centric orientation of much soci…
Intergenerational Geographies: Age Relations, Segregation and Re-engagements
Research on age in geography has become highly compartmentalized into separate literatures on younger and older generations that rarely intersect. As such, the geographies of intergenerational relationships - and particularly, extrafamilial intergenerational relationships - remain substantially under-researched. This essay reviews how geographers have approached issues of intergenerational relationships while also drawing on recent work from othe…
That's the Only Place Where You Can Hang Out: Urban Young People and the Space of the Mall
(2000). 'THAT'S THE ONLY PLACE WHERE YOU CAN HANG OUT': URBAN YOUNG PEOPLE AND THE SPACE OF THE MALL. Urban Geography: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 5-25
Anti-Nomadism, Institutions, and the Geographies of Childhood
Despite an increasing interest in the geographies of childhood, geographical research has given little attention to issues concerning young people from traditionally semi-nomadic groups, such as Gypsies and other Travellers. In this paper I explore the discursive construction of Traveller childhood within contemporary Britain, with an emphasis on the ways in which state educational discourse constructs young Travellers as needing greater involvem…
Masculinities and Fieldwork: Widening the discussion
Although recent work on masculinities has emphasised the complex ways in which masculinities are produced, performed and interpreted in different contexts, to date these insights have been given little consideration in relation to the process of ethnographic research itself. In this paper, I explore the negotiation of masculinities during fieldwork, with an emphasis on issues confronting male researchers who fail to conform to dominant expectatio…
Morality plays and money matters: Towards a situated understanding of the politics of homosexuality in Uganda
Since the drafting of Uganda's anti-homosexuality bill in 2009, considerable attention has been paid both in Uganda and across the African continent to the political and social significance of homosexual behaviour and identity. However, current debates have not adequately explained how and why anti-homosexual rhetoric has been able to gain such popular purchase within Uganda. In order to move beyond reductive representations of an innate African …
New York Encounters: Religion, Sexuality, and the City
This paper explores questions of sexual difference and religious belief in relation to recent debates in urban studies and geography on urban encounters. Although it has been widely suggested that increased contact between members of different groups is an important driver for tolerant and respectful intergroup relations, there is need for more careful consideration of the kinds of sites that actually facilitate 'meaningful encounters'. Specifica…
Reaching critical mass? Theory, politics, and the culture of debate in children's geographies
A small but growing number of voices have begun to raise questions about the current direction of children's geographies as a subfield and its status within the wider discipline. This article intervenes in these emerging discussions to examine the status of debate itself within children's geographies. I argue that children's geographies over the past decade has operated primarily in a consensus‐based mode, with a number of potential tensions and …
Young People's Narratives of Rural-Urban Difference
Although recent research by geographers interested in children and young people has examined young people's experiences in a range of both 'rural' and 'urban' environments, the significance of narratives of rural-urban difference for young people's identities has received comparatively little attention. This paper draws on theories of narrative identity to explore how narratives of rural-urban difference (and, in particular, the cultural hierarch…
Introduction: Geographies of exclusion, inclusion and belonging in young lives
The papers that comprise this theme issue on Exclusion, Inclusion, and Belonging emerged from a set of sessions on children's geographies conducted at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Ameri
A Chinese route to sustainability: Postsocialist transitions and the construction of ecological civilization
This article explores the concept of sustainability in a postsocialist context through an analysis of official discourses relating to sustainability in more than 700 articles published in the Chinese‐language newspaper People's Daily in 2015. The Chinese conception of sustainability, which emerges as a top‐down model built upon traditional ideologies and Chinese socialist legacies, inclusive of economic growth, environmental sustainability, socia…
Vermont and the Imaginative Geographies of American Whiteness
The U.S. state of Vermont is often portrayed as a place where “race” is of little significance, yet notions of whiteness are central to how the state has been represented and represents itself. A critical analysis of historical and contemporary economies of representation examines how Vermont has been imagined as one of the last remaining spaces of authentic Yankee whiteness while more recently becoming an imagined homeland for particular brands …
Placing 'sustainability' in context: Narratives of sustainable consumption in Nanjing, China
This article examines how ordinary people practice the notion of 'sustainable consumption' in relation to their everyday lives and experiences of the wider environment and how these understandings relate to public discourses of sustainability in contemporary China. The paper is based on an empirical analysis of 129 narrative interviews with local residents in urban Nanjing, collected as part of an interdisciplinary and international comparative r…
Producing moral geographies: The Dynamics of Homophobia Within a Transnational Religious Network
The transmission and contestation of putative transcendent moral values has been relatively under-represented in geographers' thinking about globalisation and transnationalism. This paper does so through an analysis of how a new moral geography is being produced by debates over homosexuality in one transnational religious network: the Anglican Communion, a major international Christian denomination that has been significantly divided in recent ye…
Transnational religious networks: Sexuality and the changing power geometries of the Anglican Communion
This paper focuses on the response of the global Anglican Communion to the issue of homosexuality, drawing on case studies of parishes in three different national contexts (UK, USA and South Africa). It traces some of the complex connections (e.g. through flows of money, resources and discourses) between places differently located within this transnational religious network to identify a complex geometry of power. Through its attention to the dep…
Youth, Racism, and Place in the Tony Martin Affair
This paper provides an analysis of media discourse surrounding the arrest, trial, and conviction of Norfolk farmer Tony Martin for the murder of 16‐year old Fred Barras, a Traveller from Newark, Nottinghamshire. The paper argues that discourses about Travellers (re)constructed in the media during the Martin affair showed evidence of both older, stereotypical representations of Travellers and newer ways of locating them in relation to contemporary…
Caring for the future: Climate change and intergenerational responsibility in China and the UK
Managing Politics and Consumption in Business Improvement Districts: The Geographies of Political Activism on Burlington, Vermont's Church Street Marketplace
Business improvement districts (BIDs), which are formed when spaces that are legally public are put under private or semi-private forms of administration, have become increasingly prominent features of many cities internationally. This paper provides an in-depth, empirically grounded analysis of the practices of political activism and issue advocacy in one widely admired BID (Church Street Marketplace, Burlington, Vermont) in light of recent theo…
Constructing the boundaries of Anglican orthodoxy: An analysis of the Global Anglican Future Conference (Gafcon)
This article examines the evolution of the transnational orthodox Anglican movement through the lens of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON)—the movement's most significant public expression to date. GAFCON represented the first large‐scale event at which a sizable number of Anglicans (ordained and lay) from both the global North and global South gathered to galvanise an ‘orthodox’ response to the current ‘crisis’ in the Anglican Commun…
Urban climate change, livelihood vulnerability and narratives of generational responsibility in Jinja, Uganda
There is an urgent need to understand lived experiences of climate change in the context of African cities, where even small climate shocks can have significant implications for the livelihoods of the urban poor. This article examines narratives of climate and livelihood changes within Jinja Municipality, Uganda, emphasizing how Jinja's residents make sense of climate change through their own narrative frames rather than through the lens of globa…
Sexuality, Activism, and Witness in the Anglican Communion: The 2008 Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops
The international Anglican Communion is a key site for struggles over the status of gays and lesbians within Christian churches. This article examines the forms that movements for gay and lesbian inclusion have taken in the Communion through an analysis of collective action at the 2008 Lambeth Conference, a central event in Anglicanism's institutional structure. The analysis builds on recent critiques of the state-centric orientation of much soci…
Inner-City Children, Country Summers: Narrating American Childhood and the Geographies of Whiteness
Although there has been rapid recent growth in the volume of research on both whiteness and childhood within geography, these literatures have only infrequently intersected explicitly. In this paper, I argue that a focus on narratives of childhood and child rearing can significantly enrich current understandings of how imaginative geographies of American (non)whiteness are sustained and reproduced. I develop this argument using a case study of re…
Intergenerational Community-Based Research and Creative Practice: Promoting Environmental Sustainability in Jinja, Uganda
This article critically reflects on the methodological approach developed for a recent project based in Jinja, Uganda, that sought to generate new forms of environmental knowledge and action utilizing diverse forms of creative intergenerational practice embedded within a broader framework of community-based participatory research. This approach provided new opportunities for intergenerational dialogue in Jinja, generated increased civic environme…
Emplacements: The Event as a Prism for Exploring Intersectionality; a Case Study of the Lambeth Conference
This article addresses the intersection of sexual orientation and religion and belief through a focus on a specific religious community — the worldwide Anglican Communion. It does so by unpacking a particular event within this Communion debate: the decennial Lambeth Conference, at Canterbury, UK. Events have received little attention within sociology, yet case studies of particular events potentially represent an effective way of empirically rese…
Girls have powers’: Using research-led arts to connect policymaking with girls’ lived experiences in Uganda
This article offers new methodological directions for generating difficult-to-capture evidence on the hidden dimensions of young people’s lives in challenging circumstances. We explore how research-led applied arts can advance participatory methodologies to bridge the gap that often exists between participatory research engaging girls meaningfully within the research process, and knowledge exchange processes that connect policy-making with their …
Building common cause towards sustainable consumption: A cross-generational perspective
The notion of sustainable consumption has gained significant traction in recent decades, in parallel with unprecedented growth in global consumption and recognition of its catastrophic environmental impacts. In this context, there is a predominant generational narrative of frugality versus excess, with younger generations often negatively stereotyped as increasingly consumer-driven and environmentally destructive. We argue that it is important to…
That's the Only Place Where You Can Hang Out: Urban Young People and the Space of the Mall
(2000). 'THAT'S THE ONLY PLACE WHERE YOU CAN HANG OUT': URBAN YOUNG PEOPLE AND THE SPACE OF THE MALL. Urban Geography: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 5-25
Young People's Narratives of Rural-Urban Difference
Although recent research by geographers interested in children and young people has examined young people's experiences in a range of both 'rural' and 'urban' environments, the significance of narratives of rural-urban difference for young people's identities has received comparatively little attention. This paper draws on theories of narrative identity to explore how narratives of rural-urban difference (and, in particular, the cultural hierarch…
Youth, Racism, and Place in the Tony Martin Affair
This paper provides an analysis of media discourse surrounding the arrest, trial, and conviction of Norfolk farmer Tony Martin for the murder of 16‐year old Fred Barras, a Traveller from Newark, Nottinghamshire. The paper argues that discourses about Travellers (re)constructed in the media during the Martin affair showed evidence of both older, stereotypical representations of Travellers and newer ways of locating them in relation to contemporary…
Introduction: Geographies of exclusion, inclusion and belonging in young lives
The papers that comprise this theme issue on Exclusion, Inclusion, and Belonging emerged from a set of sessions on children's geographies conducted at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Ameri
Ecological Identity Work in Higher Education: Theoretical Perspectives and a Case Study
This paper develops and extends the concept of ecological identity work through an investigation of issues of identity among students studying the environment at one US university. We conceptualize identity work as both an individual and group process through which students locate themselves in relation to particular, relatively preformed ecological identities, while also attempting to redefine the boundaries of ecological identity itself. Using …
Masculinities and Fieldwork: Widening the discussion
Although recent work on masculinities has emphasised the complex ways in which masculinities are produced, performed and interpreted in different contexts, to date these insights have been given little consideration in relation to the process of ethnographic research itself. In this paper, I explore the negotiation of masculinities during fieldwork, with an emphasis on issues confronting male researchers who fail to conform to dominant expectatio…
Anti-Nomadism, Institutions, and the Geographies of Childhood
Despite an increasing interest in the geographies of childhood, geographical research has given little attention to issues concerning young people from traditionally semi-nomadic groups, such as Gypsies and other Travellers. In this paper I explore the discursive construction of Traveller childhood within contemporary Britain, with an emphasis on the ways in which state educational discourse constructs young Travellers as needing greater involvem…
Managing Politics and Consumption in Business Improvement Districts: The Geographies of Political Activism on Burlington, Vermont's Church Street Marketplace
Business improvement districts (BIDs), which are formed when spaces that are legally public are put under private or semi-private forms of administration, have become increasingly prominent features of many cities internationally. This paper provides an in-depth, empirically grounded analysis of the practices of political activism and issue advocacy in one widely admired BID (Church Street Marketplace, Burlington, Vermont) in light of recent theo…
Vermont and the Imaginative Geographies of American Whiteness
The U.S. state of Vermont is often portrayed as a place where “race” is of little significance, yet notions of whiteness are central to how the state has been represented and represents itself. A critical analysis of historical and contemporary economies of representation examines how Vermont has been imagined as one of the last remaining spaces of authentic Yankee whiteness while more recently becoming an imagined homeland for particular brands …
Intergenerational Geographies: Age Relations, Segregation and Re-engagements
Research on age in geography has become highly compartmentalized into separate literatures on younger and older generations that rarely intersect. As such, the geographies of intergenerational relationships - and particularly, extrafamilial intergenerational relationships - remain substantially under-researched. This essay reviews how geographers have approached issues of intergenerational relationships while also drawing on recent work from othe…
Reaching critical mass? Theory, politics, and the culture of debate in children's geographies
A small but growing number of voices have begun to raise questions about the current direction of children's geographies as a subfield and its status within the wider discipline. This article intervenes in these emerging discussions to examine the status of debate itself within children's geographies. I argue that children's geographies over the past decade has operated primarily in a consensus‐based mode, with a number of potential tensions and …
Inner-City Children, Country Summers: Narrating American Childhood and the Geographies of Whiteness
Although there has been rapid recent growth in the volume of research on both whiteness and childhood within geography, these literatures have only infrequently intersected explicitly. In this paper, I argue that a focus on narratives of childhood and child rearing can significantly enrich current understandings of how imaginative geographies of American (non)whiteness are sustained and reproduced. I develop this argument using a case study of re…
Constructing the boundaries of Anglican orthodoxy: An analysis of the Global Anglican Future Conference (Gafcon)
This article examines the evolution of the transnational orthodox Anglican movement through the lens of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON)—the movement's most significant public expression to date. GAFCON represented the first large‐scale event at which a sizable number of Anglicans (ordained and lay) from both the global North and global South gathered to galvanise an ‘orthodox’ response to the current ‘crisis’ in the Anglican Commun…
Emplacements: The Event as a Prism for Exploring Intersectionality; a Case Study of the Lambeth Conference
This article addresses the intersection of sexual orientation and religion and belief through a focus on a specific religious community — the worldwide Anglican Communion. It does so by unpacking a particular event within this Communion debate: the decennial Lambeth Conference, at Canterbury, UK. Events have received little attention within sociology, yet case studies of particular events potentially represent an effective way of empirically rese…
The Meanings of Communion: Anglican Identities, the Sexuality Debates, and Christian Relationality
Recent discussions of the international Anglican Communion have been dominated by notions of a 'crisis' and 'schism' resulting from conflicts over issues of homosexuality. Existing accounts of the Communion have often tended to emphasise the perspectives of those most vocal in the debates (particularly bishops, senior clergy, and pressure groups) or to engage in primarily theological analysis. This article examines the nature of the purported 'cr…
If a Charge was Brought Against a Saintly Religious Leader Whose Intention Was to Save Souls: An Analysis of UK Parliamentary Debates over Incitement to Hatred on the Grounds of Sexual Orientation
This article considers contemporary Parliamentary approaches to law-making in respect of homosexuality and religious belief through an analysis of debates regarding the creation of the offence of incitement to hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation (Section 74 and Schedule 16 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008). By far the most contentious issue in debates about the legislation concerned the types of speech that would be captur…
Sexuality, Activism, and Witness in the Anglican Communion: The 2008 Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops
The international Anglican Communion is a key site for struggles over the status of gays and lesbians within Christian churches. This article examines the forms that movements for gay and lesbian inclusion have taken in the Communion through an analysis of collective action at the 2008 Lambeth Conference, a central event in Anglicanism's institutional structure. The analysis builds on recent critiques of the state-centric orientation of much soci…
New York Encounters: Religion, Sexuality, and the City
This paper explores questions of sexual difference and religious belief in relation to recent debates in urban studies and geography on urban encounters. Although it has been widely suggested that increased contact between members of different groups is an important driver for tolerant and respectful intergroup relations, there is need for more careful consideration of the kinds of sites that actually facilitate 'meaningful encounters'. Specifica…
Transnational religious networks: Sexuality and the changing power geometries of the Anglican Communion
This paper focuses on the response of the global Anglican Communion to the issue of homosexuality, drawing on case studies of parishes in three different national contexts (UK, USA and South Africa). It traces some of the complex connections (e.g. through flows of money, resources and discourses) between places differently located within this transnational religious network to identify a complex geometry of power. Through its attention to the dep…
Morality plays and money matters: Towards a situated understanding of the politics of homosexuality in Uganda
Since the drafting of Uganda's anti-homosexuality bill in 2009, considerable attention has been paid both in Uganda and across the African continent to the political and social significance of homosexual behaviour and identity. However, current debates have not adequately explained how and why anti-homosexual rhetoric has been able to gain such popular purchase within Uganda. In order to move beyond reductive representations of an innate African …
Same sex marriage, civil rights rhetoric, and the ambivalent politics of Christian evangelicalism in New York City
This article extends recent discussions about the variegated character of American evangelicalism through a qualitative analysis of how issues of same-sex marriage (and gay rights more broadly) were viewed by one group of self-identified Christian evangelicals worshipping in New York City. Specifically, we draw on parish-based interviews and participant observation in one Episcopalian evangelical parish to discuss the extent to which its members …
Producing moral geographies: The Dynamics of Homophobia Within a Transnational Religious Network
The transmission and contestation of putative transcendent moral values has been relatively under-represented in geographers' thinking about globalisation and transnationalism. This paper does so through an analysis of how a new moral geography is being produced by debates over homosexuality in one transnational religious network: the Anglican Communion, a major international Christian denomination that has been significantly divided in recent ye…
Intergenerational Space
Homosexuality, religion and the contested legal framework governing sex education in England
This article examines how religion has influenced, and continues to influence, the legal framework that regulates the circulation of knowledge about homosexuality and same-sex relationships within state-funded schools in England. This legal framework has become the subject of considerable recent public and legislative contestation. We argue that religious considerations and interests have contributed to the production and maintenance of an uneven…
The Promotion of British Values: Sexual Orientation Equality, Religion, and England’s Schools: Table 1
Schools in England have recently become subject to new requirements regarding the active promotion of ‘fundamental British values’. This concept has controversially been defined to encompass sexual orientation equality. In this article, we argue that the inclusion of sexual orientation equality within the scope of British values has given new impetus to debates about the appropriate balance between children’s rights, the right of parents to provi…
Sociology (37 works) · Political science (31 works) · Law (27 works) · Gender Studies (24 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (18 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Geography (14 works) · Social science (12 works) · Epistemology (8 works)