Sharma
Biographic Data
| ID | 4872 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sharma |
| FAMILY NAME | Sharma |
| SIGNATURE | SHARMA |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6729-5363 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 68 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Reading gender through lived experiences of albinism in South Africa: A feminist analysis
Albinism caused by a deficiency of melanin in the body is a non-contagious genetic condition. Because of the paleness of the skin and eyes, persons with albinism experience sensitivity to the sun’s ultraviolet radiation and visual impairment. Recently, albinism has received more global attention by human rights advocates and researchers and nationally in South Africa by democratic inclusive policies because of the social and physical stigmatisati…
A lateral exploration of faith, intimacy and care among adult sisters
Purpose Sociologists of religion continue to prioritise parent–child socialisation in research on families and religion. In doing so, other kinds of family relationships that also influence faith practices can go unnoticed. I therefore propose a lateral reading of religion and intimate ties between siblings, specifically adult sisters. Research on this group is limited with much of sibling research focusing on younger cohorts. Explorations of fai…
Young Muslim women on Nadiya Hussain, turbanisation and the politics of respectability: Navigating public space and Islamophobia
Using the changing image of British celebrity and Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain as a catalyst for exploration, we consider young British Muslim women's attitudes and practices towards the turbanisation of the hijab and the politics of respectability. Drawing on focus group data with young Muslim women based in London, England, we examine this sartorial practice, which Nadiya Hussain represents in her celebrity career, and argue two…
Understanding midlife single women's care as radical
Single women's lives are important but marginalised. The care that they do is meaningful and can be radical. In this article, we argue that within neoliberal patriarchal capitalism, radical care work is care that emerges from the margins, is self-and-other regarding and envisions change through maintenance and small acts. This definition draws insights from an emerging body of literature that uses the term 'radical care' to explore its potential …
Social Justice in the Work of Women Healthcare Chaplains: A Feminist Analysis of Spiritual Activism
In the fraught and intimate context of healthcare, women chaplains provide spiritual care to the suffering. In addition to listening and prayer, their spiritual care is often focused on equity and inclusion such as advocacy for the vulnerable amid broader social and economic crises. This article draws on data from qualitative interviews conducted with women healthcare chaplains in London, England and Vancouver, Canada. We note that while social s…
Introduction to Special Issue on Religion and Feminism
Editorial: Introduction to Special Issue on Religion and Feminism
Racialisation, Illness and My Father: Three Vignettes
racialised people(s) continue to experience racism and inequity in and outside of healthcare settings, affecting their well-being (Hassen et al., 2021, p. 2; Gebhard, McLean and St. Denis, 2022;Geronimus, 2023).In this short piece, I present three vignettes that focus on my father and me in different spaces.In these vignettes, he is dying of cancer, and I am observing, listening to and conversing with him.My father was one of eight children who g…
Exploring racism and racialization in the work of healthcare chaplains: A case for a critical multifaith approach
The global COVID-19 pandemic has revealed healthcare settings as sites of much-needed scrutiny as to the workings of racism and racialization in shaping healthcare encounters, health outcomes, and workplace conditions. Little research has focused on how healthcare chaplains experience and respond to social processes of racism and racialization. We apply a critical race lens to understand racism and racialization in healthcare chaplaincy, and insp…
In plain view: Gender in the work of women healthcare chaplains
In sociological studies of religion and chaplaincy, there is little research on how gender plays a role in structural inequalities and experiences of women chaplains. Through research on the work of women chaplains in public healthcare in Vancouver (Canada) and London (England) this qualitative study revealed that while they have opportunities for leadership and ministry in chaplaincy, they are often on the margins of the religious institutions t…
Prayer as Transgression?: The Social Relations of Prayer in Healthcare Settings
Expressions of Prayer in Residential Care Homes
Although the value of spiritual care in the care of older adults is supported by research, few studies have focused specifically on prayer in residential care settings. This ethnographic study with fifteen chaplains and administrators in eleven residential care homes involved analyses of walking interviews and research diaries. Findings revealed the spaces in which prayer happens and the forms it takes. The identities of chaplains-their own spiri…
‘The Elephant on the Table’: Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Home Health Services
Women and Religion in the West
Religion, Equalities, and Inequalities
A Lateral Reading of Religion: Christianity in Sister Relationships
Sociologists of religion continue to give precedence to parent-child transmission in studies on religion and family. In doing so, other kinds of family relationships that also influence religious beliefs and practices remain in the background. In this article, instead of using a vertical lens, religion in the family is approached through a lateral reading of sisters' religious lives. Drawing on 13 biographical accounts, which included family diag…
Families and Faith: How Religion is Passed down across Generations
Families and Faith: How Religion is Passed down across Generations." Journal of Contemporary Religion, 31(1), pp. 144–145
Faith as social capital: Diasporic women negotiating religion in secularized healthcare services
Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality: Ethnographic Approaches
Exploring Acts of Agency within Christian Women’s Sexuality
Conservative Protestantism’s message for sexuality is well known – sex is only for the context of heterosexual marriage. This teaching, bolstered by conservative constructions of femininity, motivates the author to explore acts of agency within Christian women’s sexuality. The author shows women between the ages of 18 and 25 negotiating competing ecclesial and secular discourses on sexuality. Drawing from 36 qualitative interviews in which 33 ide…
Challenging ‘Belief’ and the Evangelical Bias: Student Christianity in English Universities
Popular and academic accounts of university-based religion tend to privilege evangelical Christianity, presented as a morally conservative, conversionist movement at odds with university contexts, which are widely assumed to be vehicles for a progressive Western modernity. This is especially the case in the UK, given the association of higher education with secularisation, yet virtually no research has studied this interface by examining the live…
Marta Trzebiatowska and Steve Bruce, Why Are Women More Religious Than Men
Sacred spaces in public places: Religious and spiritual plurality in health care
REIMER‐KIRKHAM S, SHARMA S, PESUT B, SAWATZKY R, MEYERHOFF H and COCHRANE M. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19 : 202–212 Sacred spaces in public places: religious and spiritual plurality in health care Several intriguing developments mark the role and expression of religion and spirituality in society in recent years. In what were deemed secular societies, flows of increased sacralization (variously referred to as ‘new’, ‘alternative’, ‘emergent’ and ‘pro…
‘The Church is … My Family’: Exploring the Interrelationship between Familial and Religious Practices and Spaces
This paper considers the interrelationship between family and church, their practices and spaces. Three areas that emerged from qualitative interviews with women who were current and former churchgoers are addressed. First, women described their ‘church as family’ because of personal histories of attending with family and family-like relationships. Second, the resonance between family and church practices and spaces mapped onto other geographies …
Navigating religion between university and home: Christian students' experiences in English universities
Drawing on qualitative interview research conducted with undergraduates at English universities, this paper examines Christian students' experiences of living out their religious identities at university. Noting the transitional nature of the higher education experience, which often destabilizes existing identities, we explore how, for students self-identifying as 'Christian', the enactment of faith helps to form experiences of continuity between…
Food, Photographs, and Frames: Photo Elicitation in a Canadian Qualitative Food Study
Photo elicitation was employed in a cross-Canada study on family food habits as a means of understanding the meanings that people associate with food. From each family who took part in the study, at least one parent and one adolescent were asked to participate in a qualitative interview, to take photographs of how food fits into their everyday lives, and to participate in a second interview about their photos. In using photo elicitation, we were …
Practicing the Awareness of Embodiment in Qualitative Health Research: Methodological Reflections
Although the importance of the researcher's embodiment has been noted in health and social sciences research, in many instances, more attention has been paid to the embodiment of the researched. Thus, more in-depth analysis of the embodied researcher can illuminate qualitative inquiry. The influence of the embodied researcher became visible in a recent critical ethnographic study examining the negotiation of religious, spiritual, and cultural plu…
Navigating religion between university and home: Christian students' experiences in English universities
Drawing on qualitative interview research conducted with undergraduates at English universities, this paper examines Christian students' experiences of living out their religious identities at university. Noting the transitional nature of the higher education experience, which often destabilizes existing identities, we explore how, for students self-identifying as 'Christian', the enactment of faith helps to form experiences of continuity between…
Faith as social capital: Diasporic women negotiating religion in secularized healthcare services
Challenging ‘Belief’ and the Evangelical Bias: Student Christianity in English Universities
Popular and academic accounts of university-based religion tend to privilege evangelical Christianity, presented as a morally conservative, conversionist movement at odds with university contexts, which are widely assumed to be vehicles for a progressive Western modernity. This is especially the case in the UK, given the association of higher education with secularisation, yet virtually no research has studied this interface by examining the live…
Young Women, Sexuality and Protestant Church Community: Oppression or Empowerment
Although Christianity's clout on sexuality has generally declined in Britain due to secularization, contemporary conservative Protestantism continues to encourage a conventional construction of sexuality — sex is only for the context of heterosexual marriage. Qualitative interviews with 26 heterosexual women and two lesbian women on how their Protestant church involvement impacted their sexuality revealed the pervasive discourse of a marital-conf…
A lateral exploration of faith, intimacy and care among adult sisters
Purpose Sociologists of religion continue to prioritise parent–child socialisation in research on families and religion. In doing so, other kinds of family relationships that also influence faith practices can go unnoticed. I therefore propose a lateral reading of religion and intimate ties between siblings, specifically adult sisters. Research on this group is limited with much of sibling research focusing on younger cohorts. Explorations of fai…
Young Muslim women on Nadiya Hussain, turbanisation and the politics of respectability: Navigating public space and Islamophobia
Using the changing image of British celebrity and Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain as a catalyst for exploration, we consider young British Muslim women's attitudes and practices towards the turbanisation of the hijab and the politics of respectability. Drawing on focus group data with young Muslim women based in London, England, we examine this sartorial practice, which Nadiya Hussain represents in her celebrity career, and argue two…
Social Justice in the Work of Women Healthcare Chaplains: A Feminist Analysis of Spiritual Activism
In the fraught and intimate context of healthcare, women chaplains provide spiritual care to the suffering. In addition to listening and prayer, their spiritual care is often focused on equity and inclusion such as advocacy for the vulnerable amid broader social and economic crises. This article draws on data from qualitative interviews conducted with women healthcare chaplains in London, England and Vancouver, Canada. We note that while social s…
Introduction to Special Issue on Religion and Feminism
Editorial: Introduction to Special Issue on Religion and Feminism
Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality: Ethnographic Approaches
Computer-tomographic (CT) studies and anthropological measurements in patients with atlanto-occipital fusion
Computer tomographic (CT) studies and anthropological measurements were performed in individuals showing complete or partial atlanto-occipital fusion. In 13 patients and 13 matched controls all measurements excepting head length and head breadth gave smaller, and in some instances significantly smaller values in the patients. The two head measurements, on the other hand, turned out to be somewhat, though not significantly larger. This suggested a…
Development and the Marginalization of Traditional Knowledge and Societies in High Hills of Central Himalaya
The traditional knowledge acquired on the medicinal herbs and other plant* of high altitude, reveal the broad exposure of natural resources and its utilization developed by the transhumant society, where resources are scarce, but this traditional specializations by the tribals known as "Bhotiyas" are breaking (town. The impact of modernization and development on the system of cure, and the institutional attitude towards this knowledge has been qu…
Chewing Pan Masala and/or Betel Quid-Fashionable Attributes and/or Cancer Menaces
Use of tobacco and tobacco-related products has unfortunately pervaded the ordinary household from being only occasional fashionable attributes to chronic potential toxicants thereby compromising immensely the health of the consumers especially more so since the synergistic action of nicotine with other drugs, drink and chemical usage has been observed. Rather than curbing their usage, the statutory warnings are ignored even among those who are s…
Nutritional Status and Mental Ability of School Girls (7-9 years) as Influenced by Nutrition Counselling
Sixty girls of 7-9 years belonging to low socio-economic group in Ludhiana city were divided equally into experimental and control group. The experimental group comprising of 30 girls and their mothers were imparted nutrition counselling twice a month for a period of four months. Dietary survey conducted before and after nutrition counselling revealed that daily intake of cereals, pulses, fruit, milk and milk products, fats and oils and sugar and…
Women and Religion in the West: Challenging Secularization
What is the relationship between women and secularization? In the West, women are abandoning traditional religion. Yet they continue to make up the majority of religious adherents. Accounting for this seeming paradox is the focus of this volume. If women undergird the foundations of religion but are leaving in large numbers, why are they leaving? Where are they going? What are they doing? And what's happening to those who remain? Women and Religi…
Young Women, Sexuality and Protestant Church Community: Oppression or Empowerment
Although Christianity's clout on sexuality has generally declined in Britain due to secularization, contemporary conservative Protestantism continues to encourage a conventional construction of sexuality — sex is only for the context of heterosexual marriage. Qualitative interviews with 26 heterosexual women and two lesbian women on how their Protestant church involvement impacted their sexuality revealed the pervasive discourse of a marital-conf…
Practicing the Awareness of Embodiment in Qualitative Health Research: Methodological Reflections
Although the importance of the researcher's embodiment has been noted in health and social sciences research, in many instances, more attention has been paid to the embodiment of the researched. Thus, more in-depth analysis of the embodied researcher can illuminate qualitative inquiry. The influence of the embodied researcher became visible in a recent critical ethnographic study examining the negotiation of religious, spiritual, and cultural plu…
Food, Photographs, and Frames: Photo Elicitation in a Canadian Qualitative Food Study
Photo elicitation was employed in a cross-Canada study on family food habits as a means of understanding the meanings that people associate with food. From each family who took part in the study, at least one parent and one adolescent were asked to participate in a qualitative interview, to take photographs of how food fits into their everyday lives, and to participate in a second interview about their photos. In using photo elicitation, we were …
Sacred spaces in public places: Religious and spiritual plurality in health care
REIMER‐KIRKHAM S, SHARMA S, PESUT B, SAWATZKY R, MEYERHOFF H and COCHRANE M. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19 : 202–212 Sacred spaces in public places: religious and spiritual plurality in health care Several intriguing developments mark the role and expression of religion and spirituality in society in recent years. In what were deemed secular societies, flows of increased sacralization (variously referred to as ‘new’, ‘alternative’, ‘emergent’ and ‘pro…
‘The Church is … My Family’: Exploring the Interrelationship between Familial and Religious Practices and Spaces
This paper considers the interrelationship between family and church, their practices and spaces. Three areas that emerged from qualitative interviews with women who were current and former churchgoers are addressed. First, women described their ‘church as family’ because of personal histories of attending with family and family-like relationships. Second, the resonance between family and church practices and spaces mapped onto other geographies …
Navigating religion between university and home: Christian students' experiences in English universities
Drawing on qualitative interview research conducted with undergraduates at English universities, this paper examines Christian students' experiences of living out their religious identities at university. Noting the transitional nature of the higher education experience, which often destabilizes existing identities, we explore how, for students self-identifying as 'Christian', the enactment of faith helps to form experiences of continuity between…
Exploring Acts of Agency within Christian Women’s Sexuality
Conservative Protestantism’s message for sexuality is well known – sex is only for the context of heterosexual marriage. This teaching, bolstered by conservative constructions of femininity, motivates the author to explore acts of agency within Christian women’s sexuality. The author shows women between the ages of 18 and 25 negotiating competing ecclesial and secular discourses on sexuality. Drawing from 36 qualitative interviews in which 33 ide…
Challenging ‘Belief’ and the Evangelical Bias: Student Christianity in English Universities
Popular and academic accounts of university-based religion tend to privilege evangelical Christianity, presented as a morally conservative, conversionist movement at odds with university contexts, which are widely assumed to be vehicles for a progressive Western modernity. This is especially the case in the UK, given the association of higher education with secularisation, yet virtually no research has studied this interface by examining the live…
Marta Trzebiatowska and Steve Bruce, Why Are Women More Religious Than Men
Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality: Ethnographic Approaches
A Lateral Reading of Religion: Christianity in Sister Relationships
Sociologists of religion continue to give precedence to parent-child transmission in studies on religion and family. In doing so, other kinds of family relationships that also influence religious beliefs and practices remain in the background. In this article, instead of using a vertical lens, religion in the family is approached through a lateral reading of sisters' religious lives. Drawing on 13 biographical accounts, which included family diag…
Families and Faith: How Religion is Passed down across Generations
Families and Faith: How Religion is Passed down across Generations." Journal of Contemporary Religion, 31(1), pp. 144–145
Faith as social capital: Diasporic women negotiating religion in secularized healthcare services
Women and Religion in the West
Religion, Equalities, and Inequalities
‘The Elephant on the Table’: Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Home Health Services
Expressions of Prayer in Residential Care Homes
Although the value of spiritual care in the care of older adults is supported by research, few studies have focused specifically on prayer in residential care settings. This ethnographic study with fifteen chaplains and administrators in eleven residential care homes involved analyses of walking interviews and research diaries. Findings revealed the spaces in which prayer happens and the forms it takes. The identities of chaplains-their own spiri…
Prayer as Transgression?: The Social Relations of Prayer in Healthcare Settings
In plain view: Gender in the work of women healthcare chaplains
In sociological studies of religion and chaplaincy, there is little research on how gender plays a role in structural inequalities and experiences of women chaplains. Through research on the work of women chaplains in public healthcare in Vancouver (Canada) and London (England) this qualitative study revealed that while they have opportunities for leadership and ministry in chaplaincy, they are often on the margins of the religious institutions t…
Exploring racism and racialization in the work of healthcare chaplains: A case for a critical multifaith approach
The global COVID-19 pandemic has revealed healthcare settings as sites of much-needed scrutiny as to the workings of racism and racialization in shaping healthcare encounters, health outcomes, and workplace conditions. Little research has focused on how healthcare chaplains experience and respond to social processes of racism and racialization. We apply a critical race lens to understand racism and racialization in healthcare chaplaincy, and insp…
Sociology (25 works) · Gender Studies (19 works) · Religion, Society, and Development (17 works) · Political science (15 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology (11 works) · Religious studies (9 works) · Anthropology (8 works)