Undergraduate Research in Religious Studies: A Guide for Students and Faculty 2022057588, 2022057589, 9781032004266, 9781032004259, 9781003174110

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Foreword
1 Overview
2 Religious Studies: The Intersection of Humanities and Social Sciences
3 Literature Reviews
4 Choosing Topics and Appropriate Research Questions
5 Working With Human Subjects
6 Collecting and Analyzing Data
7 Working in Archives
8 Ethnography
9 Textual Study
10 Religious Studies and the Language Hurdle
11 Material Culture
12 Citing Sources and Bibliographies
13 Online Resources
14 Dissemination of Results
Appendix 1 High Impact Research Embedded in Courses
Appendix 2 Humanities Labs
Index

Citation preview

UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES

Undergraduate Research in Religious Studies provides students and faculty with an invaluable guide to conducting research projects across all areas in the study of religion. With an emphasis on student-faculty collaboration, this concise book addresses the key areas, methods, and practical issues to inform the practice of original undergraduate research across a wide range of subdisciplines. In fourteen short chapters, the authors lay out the stages of the research process and different research methodologies; discuss approaches, examples, and ethical issues particular to religious studies; and address the unique value and challenges of collaborative research with undergraduate students, including case studies of student-faculty collaboration. Designed to be utilized by students and faculty as both a textbook and reference, this book offers an essential resource for all those engaging in or leading undergraduate research across religious studies. Chad Spigel is Professor of Religious Studies at Trinity University in San Antonio and was Director of the Mellon Initiative for Undergraduate Research in the Arts & Humanities from 2017–2020. He has been a Councilor in the Arts and Humanities division of the Council for Undergraduate Research since 2017. Rubén Dupertuis is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Trinity University in San Antonio and was Director of the Mellon Initiative for Undergraduate Research in the Arts and Humanities from 2013–2016. He was a Councilor in the Arts and Humanities division of the Council for Undergraduate Research from 2015 through 2021. Jenny Olin Shanahan is Director of Undergraduate Research at Bridgewater State University, with leadership positions in the Council for Undergraduate Research. Gregory Young is Professor of Music at Montana State University and has ongoing posts in conferences in undergraduate research in curriculum development.

Routledge Undergraduate Research Series Series Editors: Gregory Young, Montana State University, and Jenny Olin Shanahan, Bridgewater State University

Undergraduate Research in Dance A Guide for Students Lynnette Young Overby, Jenny Olin Shanahan, and Gregory Young Undergraduate Research in Film A Guide for Students Lucia Ricciardelli, Jenny Olin Shanahan, and Gregory Young Undergraduate Research in Architecture A Guide for Students D. Andrew Vernooy, Jenny Olin Shanahan, and Gregory Young Undergraduate Research in History A Guide for Students Molly Todd, Jenny Olin Shanahan, and Gregory Young Conducting Undergraduate Research in Education A Guide for Students in Teacher Education Programs Edited by Ruth J. Palmer and Deborah L. Thompson Undergraduate Research in Religious Studies A Guide for Students and Faculty Chad Spigel, Rubén Dupertuis, Jenny Olin Shanahan and Gregory Young For more information about this series please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Undergraduate-Research-Series/book-series/RURS

UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES A Guide for Students and Faculty

Chad Spigel, Rubén Dupertuis, Jenny Olin Shanahan and Gregory Young

First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Chad Spigel, Rubén Dupertuis, Jenny Olin Shanahan and Gregory Young The right of Chad Spigel, Rubén Dupertuis, Jenny Olin Shanahan and Gregory Young to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Spigel, Chad Scott, 1975- author. | Dupertuis, Rubén R., author. | Shanahan, Jenny Olin, author. | Young, Gregory Cameron David, author.  Title: Undergraduate research in religious studies : a guide for students and faculty / Chad Spigel, Rubén Dupertuis, Jenny Olin Shanahan, Gregory Young.  Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge undergraduate research series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022057588 (print) | LCCN 2022057589 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032004266 (hb) | ISBN 9781032004259 (pbk) | ISBN 9781003174110 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Religion—Study and teaching—Higher. Classification: LCC BL41 .S664 2023  (print) | LCC BL41  (ebook) | DDC 200.71—dc23/eng20230415 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022057588 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022057589 ISBN: 978-1-032-00426-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-00425-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-17411-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003174110 Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

Foreword

vii

1 Overview

1

2 Religious Studies: The Intersection of Humanities and Social Sciences

8

3 Literature Reviews

14

4 Choosing Topics and Appropriate Research Questions

25

5 Working With Human Subjects

34

6 Collecting and Analyzing Data

41

7 Working in Archives

56

8 Ethnography

72

9 Textual Study

84

10 Religious Studies and the Language Hurdle

91

11 Material Culture

99

vi

Contents

12 Citing Sources and Bibliographies

111

13 Online Resources Gloria Gatchel

116

14 Dissemination of Results

126

Appendix 1 High Impact Research Embedded in Courses Appendix 2 Humanities Labs Index

142 148 154

FOREWORD

The Routledge Undergraduate Research Series was created to guide students and faculty, particularly in the arts and humanities, working on a wide variety of research and creative projects. This volume will be the first in the humanities, joining six volumes in the arts: Music, Art, Dance, Film, Architecture, and Theater. NCUR, the National Conference on Undergraduate Research, has expanded annually since 1987 to about 4,000 participants and is now under the auspices of CUR, the Council on Undergraduate Research (www.cur.org). The British Conference on Undergraduate Research has been an annual event since 2011, and the World Congress on Undergraduate Research started in 2016, demonstrating the relevancy of this movement in our changing higher education curriculum. Conferences in Australia, India, and elsewhere are further testament to the strength of this important pedagogy. Gregory Young and Jenny Olin Shanahan Series Editors

1 OVERVIEW

Summary This chapter outlines the undergraduate research (UR) environment and discusses where religious studies fit into it, focusing on the benefits of reframing some of the excellent creative work already being done in colleges and universities. Within that context, we share ideas about the importance of UR, desired learning outcomes, how knowledge is created, the usefulness of the apprenticeship model, and how to get the most out of this book. Students will begin to understand how their learning can be linked to the discovery and creation of knowledge while they become more engaged in the process, and faculty will begin to understand why it is meaningful to fully integrate students into their research. Although terms like “research” and the “apprenticeship model” are more commonly associated with the sciences, this chapter sets the stage for illustrating how these interactive pedagogies are much more engaging and effective than traditional classroom learning in religious studies as well.

Introduction Over the last forty years in the United States, undergraduate research activity in colleges and universities has increased dramatically, led initially by science professors needing help in laboratories. Thanks to national organizations like the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) and the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR), these activities have been spreading rapidly into all disciplines. Even though CUR was started in 1978 by chemists at primarily undergraduate institutions as a way of collaborating with undergraduates in their research labs, the biggest division of CUR at the DOI: 10.4324/9781003174110-1

2

Overview

present time is Arts and Humanities. NCUR began in 1987 as a celebration of undergraduate research in all disciplines open to all colleges and universities, and currently registers about 4,000 student presenters and 500 faculty mentors annually. In 2011 the first British Conference on Undergraduate Research (BCUR) was held, and it continues annually with the recent addition of Posters in Parliament, modeled after Posters on the Hill in the United States. The first Australian Conference on Undergraduate Research (ACUR) was held in 2012, and they too have Posters in Parliament now. The first World Congress for Undergraduate Researchers (WorldCUR) was held in Qatar in November 2016. Undergraduate research/scholarship is a high-impact practice that benefits students across demographic groups and disciplines, especially underrepresented minority students. Yet most UR opportunities are highly selective and still rarely available outside of lab sciences, especially in disciplines such as religious studies, in which very few students work with one professor at a time. Participating in undergraduate research in the religious studies curriculum, however, is key to accessing its profound benefits, which include increased retention and graduation rates, cognitive and socio-emotional development, acquisition of highly valued skills, and preparation for post-baccalaureate opportunities. Undergraduates who engage in research and creative scholarship demonstrate significant gains in the very learning outcomes most highly valued not only by their professors but also by their future employers: creative and critical thinking, problem-solving and analysis, intellectual curiosity, adaptability, and oral and written communication (Lopatto 2010, 27–30). Participation in the high-impact practice of undergraduate research transforms students, both during their college careers—with deeper engagement and marked academic gains—and well into their post-baccalaureate careers.

Where Religious Studies Fits Into the Undergraduate Research Movement As learning in college becomes more active and students desire greater input into their own education, undergraduate research becomes more significant and more interesting. Since internet search engines can help students find a plethora of content, learning how to evaluate data, create knowledge, and advance the discipline of religious studies, becomes more important. There are many different terms for undergraduate research, including inquiry, scholarship, creativity, and creative scholarship. These terms are used interchangeably, although people have preferences for a variety of reasons. Many people involved in CUR, especially in its Arts and Humanities division, use URSCA (Undergraduate Research, Scholarly and Creative Activities). Whether you prefer one term over another or your university has a program that uses certain terms, it really does not matter. Furthermore, since religious

Overview

3

studies research employs various methods and theories from diverse academic disciplines, the terminology, as well as what “research” looks like, will vary considerably. What matters is that you define your process in a way that is credible, clear, authentic, and realistic. Although religious studies as an independent discipline is rather young, scholars in fields like theology, literature, history, and anthropology have been studying religion and religious communities for centuries (Capps 1995, xv). With such a long history of scholarly research, students might logically ask how they can do something original. One of the easiest ways students can do original research in religious studies is by focusing on the present and locally. A benefit of religious studies as a field for undergraduate research is that religion is a continuously shifting and evolving phenomenon entirely dependent on the people and communities who comprise and identify with particular religions and traditions. Therefore, new avenues of inquiry are constantly being created, including opportunities to explore new interpretations of old texts, local variations of old religions, and new religious communities whose particularities need to be documented, described, understood, and contextualized. In fact, for decades, many religious studies classes have included site visits to religious communities and their places of worship as assignments for students. These assignments are typically not presented as original research opportunities for students, but with minor tweaks and a reframing of the assignment, they become undergraduate research projects where the students can make original contributions to the field. Popular culture also provides a wealth of opportunities for students to do original research, especially because they often don’t require significant language skills or background knowledge. Some of these areas include religion and film, comic book scriptures, and explorations of how religions and religious texts are utilized by politicians. Several chapters in this book explore ways the “living” nature of religions opens up opportunities for students to both develop their own original research projects and contribute to faculty-driven research. Undergraduates, however, aren’t limited to research on modern aspects of religion and religious communities. In many cases, students have sufficient background to conduct undergraduate research in pre-modern religions, and there are also many areas that provide opportunities for undergraduate students to work with faculty on faculty-driven projects, being mentored as they learn how to do research in religious studies. For example, for nearly a century, students with little or no background in the field have worked on archaeological excavations conducted by faculty whose primary interests are ancient religions and ancient religious communities. This hasn’t traditionally been described as undergraduate research, but students working on excavations learn about how archaeology is done by doing real archaeological work. The evidence they help collect during the excavation process is used to create knowledge of ancient religious communities, and the results are disseminated in presentations and

4

Overview

publications. In other words, by participating in excavations they are doing undergraduate research. And, while not as common as the archaeology example, students who have backgrounds in Greek, Latin, or Hebrew have worked with religious studies faculty on projects in biblical studies and ancient Judaism and Christianity. Throughout this book, we explain how students and their faculty mentors can create meaningful undergraduate research experiences in diverse areas of religious studies, even in cases where students aren’t prepared to contribute to all aspects of a research project.

Why Undergraduate Research Is Important An undergraduate degree would not be complete without a substantial exploration into the discovery of knowledge, and in religious studies, that exploration can be focused on a variety of topics, including the definition of religion, textual study, historical study of specific communities, ethnography, material culture, and much more. Intensive research projects are often undertaken in the latter part of an undergraduate degree, but ideally, one should be exposed to the act of discovery and creation as often as possible throughout their undergraduate program. When students are asked about their vision for how they would like to learn, many say they want it to be exciting, applicable, social, and interactive. Doing group projects, working alongside professors, having input instead of passively listening, and helping to chart their own pathways, can all be components of undergraduate research in religious studies. And when employers are asked what skills they want future employees to have, many list teamwork, creativity, problem-solving, critical thinking, as well as written and oral communication. All of these can be strengthened by a real academic experience in undergraduate research.

The Apprenticeship Model: Undergraduate Research That Benefits the Student and the Professor More and more, universities are emphasizing the integration of scholarship and teaching, linking student learning with the discovery of knowledge, and making active learning a hallmark experience of an undergraduate degree. One of the best ways to accomplish all of these is through the apprenticeship model, which is when professors carve out part of their own larger research project and assign it to a student. Examples abound in chemistry, and other sciences, where researchers can be more productive in the laboratory with the help of undergraduate researchers, and students learn the complex process of original research in their field. In religious studies, however, professors often view their research as individual scholarly pursuits, and published articles and books are usually listed with only one author.

Overview

5

In this book, we show how a little creativity can result in religious studies scholars and undergraduate students effectively collaborating on professional quality academic research. Naturally, the faculty mentor will be an expert in their research field, and the undergraduate researcher will be exactly that: an undergraduate student doing research. The student should therefore not expect, nor be expected by their faculty mentor, to be an expert in the academic study of religion. The apprenticeship model is based on the idea that classroom learning is important, but that one learns to become a professional most effectively by working under the guidance of a professional in their field. This idea already exists in religious studies at the graduate level, where students work as research and teaching assistants with faculty mentors. Throughout this book, we will provide various examples of the apprenticeship model of undergraduate research in religious studies, an approach that emphasizes both collaboration and mentorship. Students who read this book will learn effective research practices that will prepare them to work collaboratively with faculty mentors who do various types of research that fall within the field of religious studies. And faculty who read this book will learn, among other things, how to be effective mentors to their undergraduate research students. In the role of mentor, faculty need to provide background information, find the right part of the project for their student, make sure their student is prepared to complete their parts of the research, make sure their students aren’t trying to tackle too much at a single time, maintain regular and effective communication, and be patient. In other words, it is the job of the faculty mentor to guide the student as they both learn and do various parts of the research process.

How to Use This Text The chapters in this book were organized to follow the general order of what is important to know as students move through the process of learning to do original research in religious studies. Proceeding to the next chapter in this book will bring you to a brief introduction to the field of religious studies, how it combines elements of other academic disciplines, and recommended readings that provide additional important background information about the field for undergraduates who want to begin the adventure of doing original research. Following that brief introduction to the field, Chapters 3– 6 provide important information about different parts of the research process that are important to become familiar with before beginning. Chapters 7–12 focus specifically on religious studies, providing information about different types of research that take place within the discipline. There are a number of ways that we could have organized these chapters. For example, we could have organized these chapters around particular religious traditions, or we could have focused on larger themes that have attracted the attention

6

Overview

of scholars in the field over the last several decades. While these organizational approaches have their merits, we decided that the most effective way to cover the breadth of research opportunities in religious studies is to focus on two things: 1) chapters that focus on different components of doing research in religious studies; and 2) chapters that focus on the broad methodological approaches utilized by scholars in the field. Within the chapters devoted to religious studies methods, we provide examples of how they can be applied to research questions that address various larger themes and consider diverse religious traditions. While this book does not cover every possible avenue for doing research in religious studies, it tries to cover the methods and approaches we believe provide the best opportunities for undergraduate researchers working either on their own individual research or collaborating with their faculty mentors. Chapters 12–14 focus on aspects that will become important for undergraduate researchers after they are familiar with how to conduct research generally and after they become familiar with their specific area within the broad field of religious studies. These chapters—focusing on analysis, citing sources, and finding online religious studies resources—are important for when the student is actually doing their research. Chapter 15 provides detailed information about what takes place after the research is complete and you are ready to present and/ or publish what you have learned. Finally, the two appendices at the end of the book provide some innovative ways for religious studies faculty to make undergraduate research in religious studies more inclusive by incorporating original research into a more traditional classroom setting. Students can benefit from the entire book, especially if they are doing their own research project from the initial brainstorming through dissemination. Other students, who might be working with a faculty mentor on a particular aspect of that faculty member’s research, also would benefit from reading the entire book but might want to focus their attention on chapters most directly related to the parts of the project to which they will be contributing. Textual analysis of a religious document, for example, will be quite a different experience and require a different approach and process than an ethnographic study of a specific religious community. Furthermore, there is no one perfect way to progress through an undergraduate research experience in religious studies. Therefore, this book does not have to be read in order from the first chapter to the last but can be used as a guide throughout the different facets of research projects in religious studies. While much of the material in the book is geared more explicitly toward students, faculty will want to read the entire book. Becoming familiar with the different chapters will prepare faculty to direct their students to the parts of the book that will be most helpful for their research. Throughout the book, faculty will also find recommendations for mentoring undergraduate researchers and suggestions for applying the apprenticeship model. Faculty can also utilize this

Overview

7

book to rethink the various components that comprise research in their field. This book clearly spells out the various components that go into a thorough professional research project in religious studies, including many steps that professional scholars sometimes skip in their own research. These steps—for example, doing a literature review, which is discussed in Chapter 3—however, can provide opportunities to apply the apprenticeship model and will hopefully lead some faculty to consider different parts of the research process where undergraduates can participate in faculty-driven research.

Bibliography Capps, W. H. 1995. Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Lopatto, D. 2010. “Undergraduate Research as High-Impact Student Experience.” Peer Review 12 (2), Spring: 27–30.

2 RELIGIOUS STUDIES The Intersection of Humanities and Social Sciences

Summary Religious studies as a stand-alone academic field is a relatively recent creation. In this chapter, we brief ly introduce religious studies, how it differs from theology, and some of the features of the field. While religious studies is an academic discipline in and of itself, its focus on people and phenomena, rather than a particular approach or method like other academic disciplines, results in a situation where various humanities and social scientific approaches and methods are utilized when doing research. The lack of specific methods and approaches makes doing research in religious studies difficult for beginners, who often have to learn new approaches and methods as their needs arise, but the breadth of the field expands the possibilities for the types of questions we can ask and answer.

Religious Studies and Theology Although religion and religious communities have been studied in universities for centuries, it was only in the 1960s and 1970s that religious studies as an academic field separate from theology became common in university settings ( Wiebe 2005, 106–107; Sharpe 2005). At different universities today, you will often find departments of either religion, religious studies, or theology. The first two are typically found in secular universities, are essentially synonymous, and ref lect internal debates within the field about the subject matter. Theology departments, on the other hand, tend to be found in colleges and seminaries with specific religious affiliations. And while scholars in departments with all of these names will study different religious communities, including their theologies, there is a fundamental difference between the fields of religious DOI: 10.4324/9781003174110-2

Religious Studies 9

studies and theology. Whereas a primary goal of scholars of religious studies is to acknowledge but do their best to avoid applying their personal beliefs to their subject matter, theologians often work from a confessional position as proponents of a particular religious tradition in order to better understand it (Wiebe 2005, 98–99). Put differently: religious studies involves instruction about religion, not instruction in religion. This distinction is not always easy to identify since many scholars in religious studies and religion departments are also religious in their personal lives, often part of the very religion they study. Of course, some are also atheists or agnostics. And some scholars in theology departments do not teach about, research, or belong to the institution’s particular religious community. The reality is that everyone—including atheists and agnostics—has biases and preconceptions, especially when it comes to the study of religion and religious communities. Despite these biases and preconceptions, most religious studies scholars today have a goal of being as objective as possible when doing their research. Debates about whether scholars are successful in this regard, however, have been part of the scholarly discourse for over a century (Wiebe 2005). For students who are new to the field, the important thing is to be aware of the debate (Herling 2007, 42–44).

Combining the Humanities and Social Sciences A few decades ago, Ninan Smart wrote that “Religious Studies is in one sense a branch of social science but has also begun to play a vital role in the humanities, both because of its cross-cultural commitments and because of its serious consideration of diversity of human world-views” (Wiebe 2005, 102; Smart 1997, 421). On the social science side of the equation, religious studies scholars apply scientific and historical-critical analyses about religion and religious communities, borrowing heavily from the fields of sociology, anthropology, and history. And on the humanities side of the equation, religious studies scholars consider questions about meaning in life, ethics, and other humanistic concerns, borrowing heavily from literature, philosophy, art history, and classics. One reason religious studies as a field combines elements of both the social sciences and the humanities is that it centers on questions about religion(s) and religious people rather than a specific methodological approach. Historians apply historical methods, literature scholars apply literary methods, philosophers apply philosophical methods, sociologists apply social scientific methods, and so on. Religious studies scholars, however, don’t have a specific set of methods and approaches that they call their own. In fact, a quick look at the history of religious studies theories and approaches reveals scholars known primarily for their affiliations with other fields, including history, psychology, anthropology, and sociology (see Pals 2015). It should, therefore, not be

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Religious Studies

surprising that even after religious studies became its own field of study, scholars within the new field continued to apply a diverse collection of methods and approaches, even combining methods and approaches as the need arose. Today you will find religious studies scholars using literary methods, historical methods, anthropology, sociology, archaeology, ethnography, economics, psychology, gender studies, post-colonialism, and basically any method or approach that can help achieve the research goal. As John Hinnels writes in the introduction to the Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, “There is no ‘right’ way to study religions.” Perhaps more importantly, he continues, “One ‘wrong way’ is dogmatism” (Hinnels 2005, 2–3). What is most important in religious studies research is answering the research question, not how one arrives at the answer. Therefore, religious studies scholars must always be prepared to alter their research plan to include whatever approach or method is necessary to answer their research question (Roof 2013, 77–78). Since it is impossible to become experts in all of the methods and approaches used in the field, religious studies scholars typically choose one or two to specialize in and utilize in their research. For example, one of the authors of this book specializes in historical and archaeological research of ancient Jewish communities, while another author specializes in the literary analysis of early Christian texts. Despite their different research methods, the two are colleagues in the same religion department at Trinity University, alongside additional faculty who specialize in other research methods. This example, which is typical at many universities, shows how undergraduate students at a single university will have opportunities to work with religious studies faculty who utilize a variety of approaches and methods.

Insider/Outsider Perspectives One thing that differentiates religious studies from other academic fields is that whereas few scholars were raised in mathematics, chemistry, or sociological homes, most scholars were raised in Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, or [insert religion here] homes. Scholars studying a religion that they are familiar with from their personal lives are said to have an insider’s perspective, while those who study a religion that they only know from their research are said to have an outsider’s perspective. Since the origins of the field, questions have been raised about which perspective yields a more accurate portrayal of the community being studied. Can an outsider truly understand the experiences of insiders? Can an insider be truly objective when researching and analyzing their own community? Is one approach better than the other? In Chapter 8, we discuss how gaining an insider’s perspective is an important part of the ethnographic method of participant observation. Here we focus on the personal identities of the religious studies scholar and how it might affect their ability to be effective scholars of different religious communities.

Religious Studies 11

Since religious studies scholars ideally acknowledge but avoid their own biases and beliefs when doing research—see the difference between religious studies and theology above—they theoretically can be members of any religious tradition or no religious tradition. For example, Christian scholars can research Jewish communities, Sikh scholars can research Buddhist communities, Muslim scholars can research Christian communities, and atheist scholars can research Hindu communities. Or, from the insider’s perspective, Jain scholars can research Jain communities, Sikh scholars can research Sikh communities, and so on. The important thing for the scholarly study of religion is not the beliefs of the scholar, but that they set aside their personal beliefs and be impartial and critical when doing their scholarly work (Knott 2005, 244–245). The reality is that approaches to religion fall somewhere along a spectrum that ranges from a complete participant who doesn’t even attempt objectivity to a complete outsider who avoids any attempt to gain an insider’s perspective, with most religious studies scholars falling more toward the middle than the ends of the spectrum (Knott 2005, 246–254). In some cases, the insider’s perspective is something the scholar has by virtue of their personal life, but in other cases, the scholar attempts to gain an insider’s perspective by becoming part of the community they are researching. The research questions one asks will naturally determine the role the scholar will play along the insider/outsider spectrum. For example, it is impossible to be a complete insider when studying historical religions, and it is impossible to be a complete outsider when studying any aspect of a religion with which you identify. Or, to effectively research a new religious community it is often necessary to become a part of the community, which is something discussed in more depth in Chapter 8 of this book. The key takeaway for students new to research in religious studies is the importance of understanding the insider/outsider dynamic and how these might affect the research they are conducting. What makes something subjective vs. objective? Can an insider be truly subjective? Is complete objectively even possible? Are insider descriptions more or less accurate—from an academic perspective—than outsider descriptions?

Difficulty for Beginners There are several challenges for beginning researchers in religious studies, not least of which is the vast array of approaches and methods and the complexities presented by the insider/outsider dynamic. To gain a better understanding of these challenges and other aspects of religious studies as an academic field, we recommend that students who are interested in doing research consult books like Making Sense: Religious Studies ( Northey et al. 2019), A Beginner’s Guide to the Study of Religion (Herling 2007), and The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion (Hinnels 2005). These books provide background information that will help students navigate a field that focuses on people, communities, and

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Religious Studies

phenomena but utilizes a variety of approaches and theories to answer research questions. Readings like these, combined with this book and guidance from faculty mentors, can help undergraduates begin the process of learning how to do original research in religious studies. For students new to research in religious studies—and even for many seasoned researchers—it is difficult to have a complete understanding of everything discussed in this chapter and even more difficult to grasp everything in the suggested readings mentioned in the previous paragraph. This means that faculty mentorship is crucial when doing undergraduate research in religious studies. Students will need guidance as they struggle with debates within the field about how to conduct religious studies research. Students will also need guidance on how to identify appropriate and effective methods and approaches to help them answer their research questions. Students should therefore be ready to ask for guidance, and faculty should be prepared to offer guidance even before their students ask. Questions for Students Am I interested in theology or religious studies? What is the best approach or method for my particular research question? What can I do to prepare myself to effectively do research in religious studies? Questions for Faculty What should your undergraduate researcher know about religious studies as a field in order to effectively do their research? What are some effective ways to help your students overcome the difficulties of doing research in religious studies?

Bibliography Herling, B. L. 2007. A Beginner’s Guide to the Study of Religion. London: Continuum. Hinnels, J. R., ed. 2005. The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion. London: Routledge. Knott, Kim. 2005. “Insider/Outsider Perspectives.” In The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, 243–58. London and New York: Routledge. Northey, Margot, Bradford A. Anderson, and Joel N. Lohr. 2019. Making Sense: A Student’s Guide to Research and Writing: Religious Studies. Ontario, Canada: Oxford University Press. Pals, Daniel L. 2015. Nine Theories of Religion. Third Edition. New York: Oxford University Press. Roof, Wade Clark. 2013. “Research Design.” In The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion, edited by Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler, 68–80. London and New York: Routledge.

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Sharpe, E. J. 2005. “The Study of Religion in Historical Perspective.” In The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, 21–45. London and New York: Routledge. Smart, Ninian. 1997. “Religious Studies in Higher Education.” In The New Penguin Dictionary of Religions, edited by John R. Hinnells, 420–21. London: Penguin. Wiebe, D. 2005. “Religious Studies.” In The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, 98–124. London and New York: Routledge.

3 LITERATURE REVIEWS

Summary A literature review is an organized, informed discussion of published works that are significant to the subject of study. It conveys the relationship between the present study and what has already been published in the field. By reviewing the literature, scholars join important conversations in the discipline with a critical understanding of what others have said, how the voices in the conversation relate to one another, and where they might add insight. Literature reviews also provide a perfect opportunity for faculty to include undergraduate students in research projects that otherwise require background or skills the student does not yet possess.

Purpose and Format of a Literature Review Conducting research on an aspect of religion and reporting on its results is a professional way of joining a vibrant, ongoing conversation about the field. Contributing to that interesting conversation entails understanding what others have said, how the voices in the conversation relate to one another, and where further insight might be added. To contribute meaningfully to the conversation, scholars need to study published material related to the topic. Much like other reviews, a literature review is an analysis of that published material. A literature review provides context for your research by explaining what is already known and what needs further exploration. In doing so, it establishes your credibility as a researcher, demonstrating that your project did not emerge from “out of the blue,” but from thoughtful consideration of what has been DOI: 10.4324/9781003174110-3

Literature Reviews

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published and how your work fits into that framework. The literature review should accomplish three main objectives: 1. 2.

3.

Brief ly summarize the salient points of the most important publications on the topic. Explain the relationships among existing works (e.g., how they changed the field, why some scholars came to different conclusions, how the introduction of something new led to surprising results). Identify gaps in the literature.

The third objective, identifying gaps in the literature, is critical to showing the need for your study. The literature review shows that you have analyzed important sources on the topic, and at least one significant question has not been addressed or has not been sufficiently answered. That is the gap your study seeks to fill.

Literature Review vs. Annotated Bibliography The format or structure of a literature review is different from that of an annotated bibliography, which summarizes or describes one source after another in a few sentences each. Both are useful tools in the process of doing original research, with the annotated bibliography being the first step that takes place when reviewing the relevant literature. Although annotated bibliographies usually include a brief evaluation of each source, each entry is its own individual item, listed in alphabetical order by author’s last name. The bibliography entries do not connect with each other except for the fact that they are on the same general topic and may themselves be in conversation with each other. Annotated bibliographies are great opportunities to bring undergraduate students into any research project, even those that otherwise require background or skills the student does not yet possess. Not only is it a straightforward task that the student can accomplish with minimal mentoring, but reading through the relevant literature provides the undergraduate student with important background information about the area of study that may allow them to contribute to other parts of the research. A literature review, on the other hand, is not a list. It is a narrative that could stand on its own as a coherent essay, with unified paragraphs and transitions between points. The literature review allows you to “tell the story” of what scholars already understand about the topic and how they have informed your own study. Since writing the literature review requires a firmer grasp of the material, it provides an opportunity for the student and mentor to work more collaboratively, with the student working on a series of drafts with significant input and guidance from the faculty mentor. Specific strategies for organizing literature reviews are laid out later in this chapter.

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Joining a Scholarly Conversation Almost everyone has had the irritating experience of being interrupted during what had been an interesting conversation by someone who does not know what has already been said but jumps in with opinions anyway. Sometimes the interrupter spouts unrelated ideas or rehashes a point from which the conversation has already moved. The group would probably dismiss the interrupter’s ideas, even if they are potentially good ones, because they appear to be random and uninformed. Most of us have been socialized to join an ongoing conversation in a more respectful way: only after listening for a little while and gaining familiarity with the topic. A new person joining a conversation should ask or wait to hear what the group is talking about or allow someone already involved in the conversation to offer a recap. That metaphor of joining an ongoing conversation is a useful way of thinking about a literature review. A “conversation” about the topic has been going on in the field, as represented in the published research literature. Reading the literature allows new scholars in the field to listen to what has been said and join the conversation as informed participants. Only by reading closely, or “listening” to, the previous participants’ ideas can you contribute something original and interesting to the conversation, such as a new idea that has not been completely covered already or a question about someone else’s point that adds an intriguing dimension to the topic. In other words, by conducting a review of the research literature, you avoid “interrupting” a conversation with stale opinions or irrelevant questions. Instead, you can knowledgeably participate in a discussion of an interesting topic with a group of scholars who also deeply care about it.

Finding Appropriate Sources Peer-Reviewed Sources For most scholarly projects in religious studies, the literature review is based on peer-reviewed sources. Peer review is a process of quality control to ensure that materials accepted for publication or exhibition are accurate and based on valid methods. Academic journals and book publishers typically rely on rigorous peer-review processes before publishing someone’s research. To be considered for publication, a researcher submits work to an editor, who reaches out to experts specializing in the author’s area of study to ask them to review it. Those experts are the researcher’s “peers.” Most peer reviews are double-blind, meaning that the researcher does not know who is reviewing the work, and reviewers do not know who authored it. Whether they are reviewing “blindly” or not, the reviewers are expected to evaluate the quality of the work impartially. They use their own expertise to determine

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whether the findings or conclusions are sound and to what degree the research makes an important contribution to the field of study. Peer reviewers usually can accept a work “as is” (perhaps with minor edits) or “with revisions” (requiring the author to address particular questions or problems in the next draft). If the work does not meet the standards for research in the discipline, the reviewers reject it. Due to a rigorous process of review that determines whether a work is published or not, peer-reviewed journal articles and books are considered the best quality scholarship. On the spectrum of reliable sources of information, one might think of peer-reviewed articles as the opposite of “fake news” on social media. Any information simply made up by the author would be rejected by peer reviewers, who demand evidence of careful methods and accurate reporting. The professional reputations of a journal’s or publisher’s peer reviewers are as much on the line as those of the authors being published. This book, for example, went through two peer-review processes. This book began, as most do, as a proposal submitted to a publisher. The proposal included an explanation of the need we saw for such a book, an outline of chapters with brief descriptions of what would be included in each, and two sample chapters. The publisher forwarded the proposal to three religious studies professors who mentor undergraduate research and have presented at conferences and/or published on the topic. In other words, the reviewers were our peers. The peer reviewers made comments about what we planned to include in the book, recommendations to make the book better, and recommended that we should proceed with writing the book. Once a full draft was complete, it went through a different round of peer review, through which we received additional revision suggestions that made the final product considerably stronger. If a professor or editor asks for a literature review of peer-reviewed sources, this is why: only high-quality research studies should inform the work. Researchers are unlikely to be led astray by false or unverified information when they stick to peer-reviewed journals and books. That said, it is sometimes acceptable to include non-peer-reviewed sources in a literature review, especially if the sources can be verified as reliable through other means (more about that later in this chapter) and/or if the topic of study has not received much attention from academic scholars. Consider, for example, a literature review on a contemporary religious community or a new religion. Because the peer-review process takes time, academic articles and books are published many months and sometimes years after the manuscripts are first submitted. Experts in religious studies, however, may be able to publish informative articles in a popular press in a matter of days. An article in a newspaper or magazine isn’t a peer-reviewed scholarly piece, but it can be reliable—especially when written by a reputable scholar who has a history of peer-reviewed publications—and therefore may be a valuable part of a literature review.

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Library Databases The best place to find peer-reviewed articles is in online databases to which your library subscribes. Starting with open-source repositories of scholarship such as Google Scholar is fine, but most academic journal articles are still found in subscription-only databases such as Academic Search Premier, JSTOR, EBSCOhost, and for the purposes of research in religious studies, the ATLA Religion Database, which has over 3 million articles, essays, and reviews written by religious studies scholars. More information about databases and online resources used by religious studies scholars can be found in Chapter 13 of this book. Many college and university library websites offer online tutorials for using databases. We also recommend consulting with a reference librarian to learn about the relevant online databases for your topic area and how to access them. Knowing the specific parameters for searching each database (e.g., which truncation symbols and Boolean operators it recognizes) helps make searches more efficient and effective. Truncation symbols allow you to search for multiple closely related words at the same time. Some databases use the pound sign (#) as a truncation symbol, while others use an asterisk (*). For example, you would type educ# to search for anything that begins with those four letters (e.g., educate, education, educator), or you would type wom*n to search for both woman and women. Boolean operators are conjunctions and other connecting words that are used to include or exclude certain terms from a search. For example, you could use Boolean operators to only find articles that are about Theravāda Buddhism and not other types of Buddhism: Buddhism AND Theravāda. Another option for that search in many databases would be to use quotation marks—“Theravāda Buddhism”—which limit search results to that precise phrase. A few databases use single quotation marks for that purpose (‘Theravāda Buddhism’), and still, others do not use quotation marks at all to keep terms together. Until the unlikely day when all database builders agree on a single system, consulting a reference librarian or a written guide to library databases is essential to create the appropriate search parameters for finding the correct information. When researchers have trouble locating information, the problem is often that they have not hit upon the precise search terms used in the database. To identify a comprehensive list of relevant books and articles, reference librarians recommend using a variety of search terms including alternative terms and subjects related to your topic area. Furthermore, in religious studies, it is often necessary to make sure you search using variant English spellings of nonEnglish terms. For example, research about the Jewish festival of Hanukkah will also require searches for Hannukah, Chanukkah, Chanukah, and possibly other variants. If the database allows, and you are able, it is also worthwhile searching for the term in the original language.

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Experienced scholars know that the bibliographies of sources already found are excellent resources for identifying additional sources. Bibliographies in articles and books can provide a rich trove of additional texts to read. If the same source is referenced repeatedly, that is a good indication of its importance in the field. Similarly, when scholars find a particularly useful source, they search to discover what else the author has written and whether the journal has published any similar articles.

Analyzing Existing Research in Religious Studies The articles located through database searches are often referred to as existing research to differentiate those works from the original research you are conducting in your own study. Articles and books are also called secondary sources as a way of contrasting them from the primary sources that most studies utilize, such as religious texts, religious objects, art, archaeological evidence, ethnographic data, interviews, statistical data, and surveys. Secondary sources include articles, books, and other types of media (e.g., blogs, websites) that: (a) analyze the primary sources just mentioned; (b) review, critique, or analyze articles and books that analyze primary sources; (c) describe or analyze religious objects, concepts, traditions, or communities; and (d) describe or analyze historical events and eras. To do the analysis required for a literature review, we recommend using a format that allows you to mark up your sources by underlining important passages, circling keywords, and taking notes in the margins. This can be accomplished by printing out hard copies of your sources or through the use of a tablet, stylus, and an app that allows you to markup PDFs or other digital copies of your sources. The benefit of marking up your sources digitally is that as long as you save them to the cloud you will have access through the use of a smartphone, tablet, or computer rather than having to carry around hundreds—if not thousands—of printed pages. For some sources—e.g., library books—using a research journal (hard copy or digital) can be useful to make note of important points, key terms, and questions that arise as you read. That kind of critical ref lection is the vital piece missing from inadequate literature reviews. Giving yourself time to ref lect on and position yourself in dialogue with the sources yields a much more nuanced and resonant study than the so-called “research sausage” that is created by throwing together a little from this article, a little from that book, etc., and trying to fit it all into the preformed casing of a “literature review.”

Reading Reflexively The following suggestions are a guide for ref lexive reading of articles in preparation for a literature review.

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1.

Read the abstract first, then the conclusion, before starting the body of the article. This strategy allows you to determine the relevance of the article to the study and, if it is indeed relevant, to boost your comprehension of its main ideas. After reading the abstract and conclusion, skim the section headings and subheadings, and look at any figures or graphs. Then begin reading with the end in mind. A clearer sense of the relative importance of each paragraph to the overall article becomes evident, allowing you to know which paragraphs can be skimmed and which need focused attention. The “halo effect” is a cognitive bias that, in this situation, can lead a reader to assume that because an author’s work is published in a peer-reviewed journal, the author must be “right,” even though research is rarely definitive. As careful researchers read, they keep their minds open to various perspectives on the topic by alternately accepting the author’s viewpoint and then raising questions about the research methods, limitations of the study, strength of the evidence, and the conclusions that are drawn. By following that model, raising questions, and identifying the limitations as you read, you will help yourself in two ways: 1) you will be able to draw more interesting and nuanced connections between sources in the literature review when you notice how each argument is constructed, and 2) your analysis could lead to the discovery of a “gap” in the research. Approach reading as a multiple-draft process, not unlike the writing process. Scholars reread some parts of each article, deepening their understanding each time they return to the text. Academic writing, in particular, is often densely constructed and written for experts in the field. It demands more than a single reading to grasp its meaning and implications. Anyone new to reading and analyzing research literature is likely to feel lost in the complex sentence structures and specialized terminology. A metaphor we use with our students is that of a tightly packed suitcase: as you “unpack” it, you may need to move slowly, examining one item or point at a time, noting its significance before moving to the next. Continually ask how each article or book chapter relates to the topic area being explored. Could it help contextualize the problem? Does it show that your research question remains unanswered? Does it demonstrate how other scholars have attempted to address the question differently than your study will? In this way, you can begin painless drafting of other parts of the research paper. For example, an article that corroborates the identified problem can be referenced in the introduction. Learn the context for each source. Where does it appear (if in an article)? What other kinds of articles does that journal publish? When was it written? Have there been more recent and/or more important publications on the matter? (The importance of an article can be determined in part by noting how often it is cited in other articles.) If it is an article that appears

2.

3.

4.

5.

Literature Reviews

6.

7.

8.

21

on a website or in a periodical that is not peer-reviewed, how reliable/ credible is the source? (See the “credibility check” at the end of this section.) If the source is a book, what can be determined about the publisher? A university press usually indicates a peer-reviewed, academic source. Other publishers, such as the press that produced this book (Routledge), can be looked up easily in order to discover what other kinds of texts they publish and whether they practice peer review. Throughout this process, take thorough notes. Whether you use hard copies or digital versions of articles and books, it is important to underline or highlight important passages, circle key terms, and write notes in the margins. Interacting directly with the text on the page helps with the retention of information, allows for more thoughtful use of the material, and generates more sophisticated insights. When you are unable to take your notes directly on the article or book, take notes in a journal and be sure to include the bibliographic information and the page numbers in your notes. That is helpful not only for efficiently referring back to the sources but also for keeping track of your thinking on a topic over time and how it evolves with each new piece of information. One strategy for fruitful notetaking is to write down what was most exciting, convincing, doubtful, and confusing about each article or book chapter, as well as what questions it raised. Engaging with the text and asking questions about it are essential aspects of joining the community of scholars in the field. Keep meticulous records of bibliographic information (i.e. author, article title, journal title, name of the database, date of publication, date of access, and page numbers) in the research journal. As too many of us know, unearthing that information later is frustrating work! Learn the citation style expected for the literature review and use it in all notes and drafts. Scholars in religious studies most commonly utilize the Chicago Manual of Style, but since scholars in the field utilize methodologies from various academic disciplines—e.g. sociology, archaeology, literary studies—and publish in journals and with publishers more commonly associated with other fields of study, it is important to work with your mentor to determine the appropriate citation style for your research project. Getting into the practice of citing the research sources in the correct form from the very beginning will save you time in reformatting later. (See Chapter 13 for more information about attributions and citations.)

Checking the Credibility of Sources If you find a promising source that is not in a peer-reviewed journal or book, it is important to conduct a credibility check to determine whether it contains credible information that can be utilized in your research. If your source is credible, you should be able to answer “yes” to most of the following questions:

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1.

Is the article mostly free of errors in spelling and grammar? Do the vocabulary and sentence structures seem appropriate for academic research purposes? Is the author or sponsoring organization identified? Is the author qualified? Is the author affiliated with an accredited university, a nonprofit organization, or a government agency? Is there documentation for the information provided, in citations and a bibliography? Is the information verifiable in other sources? If the article is from a website, can the purpose of the site be determined (e.g., nonprofit advocacy, business/marketing, personal soapbox)? Is that purpose seemingly objective? Does it include a publication date? Is it current? If a website, does it contain its own substantive content, as opposed to mainly providing links to other sites? Are links accurately described and still working?

2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

Organizing the Content of a Literature Review As stated at the beginning of this chapter, a literature review is an organized discussion of published works. It does not follow the order in which the researcher found or read each source, and it is rarely organized in chronological order. It only makes sense to organize a literature review chronologically when showing that the changing trends in the area of study are critical to your research. For example, a study examining the history of how the scholarly use of the term religion has shifted over the past two centuries would order the literature review chronologically from the oldest to the newest in order to make clear the development over time. Most literature reviews are organized thematically around a few main ideas with strong transitions between each main idea showing how they relate to each other. For example, you might show how new methods evolved from previous ones or how scholars in different parts of the world pursued similar questions in markedly distinct ways. The strategy for accomplishing both of these complex tasks—identifying a few main ideas and creating transitions—is to start grouping sources or even parts of sources at the time of reading. We recommend starting with big categories of the matters most often discussed in literature reviews: methods, findings, implications, and key characteristics of studies.

Organizing in a Table or Spreadsheet As experienced researchers read and take notes on the literature, they also start to organize their sources to help with subsequent tracking of patterns and

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relationships among the sources. See Table 3.1 for an example of a table you might use to jot down salient elements of a few sources. By jotting down key characteristics, methods, findings, and implications of each source, you can identify noteworthy contrasts as well as similarities. For example, the two or three sources that used mixed methods (a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, which is explained in Chapter 6), when most other published research on the topic has relied on quantitative data exclusively, could be discussed together in the literature review. Or, studies that came to vastly different conclusions could be juxtaposed for contrast.

Organizing in Narrative Form or Bullet Points Some researchers prefer writing notes about each source in narrative form or in bullet points and then coding their notes for themes, patterns, and key differences. Coding, in this instance, refers to using different color highlights and/or different symbols (e.g., double underlining, asterisks) to mark patterns in a set of notes. For example, every mention of Shi’a Islam is highlighted yellow, every mention of Sunni Islam is highlighted green, and references to Islam without any qualifier are marked with left and right brackets (). The following questions may serve as prompts for the narrative or bulleted notes for each source: • • • • • • • • •

Is the significance of the author’s work convincingly demonstrated? What are the author’s theoretical approaches and/or research methods? What are the strengths and limitations of the author’s research methods? Was the study designed well? What are the main findings and their implications? Are the author’s analysis and conclusions convincing? In what ways does the author’s work contribute to the field of study? What are the article’s or book’s overall strengths and limitations? How does the work relate to your study?

TABLE 3.1 Literature Review Table

Authors

Pub. Date

Key Characteristics of the Study

Method

Findings

Implications and my evaluation

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Moving From Notes to Draft Whether in a table, highlighted jottings, annotated bullet points, or another format, your organized notes about the research literature will help lead to the identification of patterns or other categories of information known as themes. Each of the themes that emerge can become a paragraph or series of paragraphs of the literature review. Organizing the discussion of the research literature by themes highlights connections among the works under review. Such organization also demonstrates to the audience that you have conducted ref lective and thoughtful research that has led to intriguing insights. It is your organized evaluation and analysis of the various sources’ methods, evidence, findings, limitations, etc., that will give the literature review shape as an interesting argument. You will bring the research literature to life, so to speak, by moving well beyond summarizing key studies and even beyond noting some patterns. By organizing the literature review and choosing which sources to group together, and explaining how sources evolve from and/or dispute one another, you can make a unique set of claims about the existing literature on your topic of inquiry. A well-organized analytical literature review sets the stage for what comes next: the research questions to be examined in your study. For that reason, the conclusion of the literature review is the most important part. The last paragraph establishes where the existing literature leaves off and the present research proceeds. It demonstrates the need for the present study and articulates what it will contribute to current knowledge. Questions for Students Is the literature review important for all academic projects? How do literature reviews vary by subject area? How do you know if your literature review is sufficient? Questions for Faculty How can undergraduates contribute to literature reviews in my research? Which parts of the professional literature review process are more appropriate for independent undergraduate participation and which parts require more active mentoring and collaboration?

4 CHOOSING TOPICS AND APPROPRIATE RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Summary This chapter discusses the importance of formulating research questions that are unanswered yet answerable and the processes that could be used to address them. It is essential that the development of research questions and refining of a research topic occur after, and are informed by, a thorough literature review. Many times, undergraduate students’ initial suggestions for research topics are much too broad in scope, and a literature review would quickly reveal this. Conversely, it is problematic when students’ ideas are too narrow in scope. If a research question can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” answer, it likely is inappropriate for a research study.

Brainstorming Topic Areas To generate ideas for a topic that is focused, timely, and of keen interest in your field of study, brainstorm responses to the following questions: 1.

2. 3. 4.

What are some interesting topics of conversation among you, your classmates, and your professors that relate to the particular area of religious studies that you are pursuing? What topics rarely discussed by your classmates and professors seem significant to you? Are there any trends in religious studies that you have embraced or resisted? Do you disagree with the “conventional wisdom” on a particular method, approach, or stance in religious studies?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003174110-4

26 Choosing Topics and Appropriate Research Questions

5. 6.

Have you recently come to value something in your studies that had not previously seemed important to you? Where are many people in your field of study going wrong (in your humble opinion)?

Refining the Topic Starting with a broad topic area when embarking on a scholarly project is common and perfectly acceptable. You might begin with a general interest in an area of study, such as the origins of Buddhism, the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity, or the role of ritual in religion. You might even think that if you are taking on a research project for an entire semester or more, you will need a large topic to sustain working the entire time. Ironically, the opposite is usually true. A significant, long-term research study requires a specific, focused question. Getting the scope of that question right is the most valuable task to accomplish early in the research process. The preliminary research and brainstorming you put into refining the topic is worthwhile because, as we and our colleagues have seen repeatedly with our students’ research and our own scholarly work, the scope of the question can make or break a project. Imagine trying to carry out a comprehensive study of the role of ritual in religion. Within that broad topic area, there are dozens of possible approaches, making it difficult to find a starting point. For example, would you focus on a particular religious tradition, compare different religious traditions, or attempt to draw conclusions about ritual and religion more generally? Would you focus on a particular geographical region? Would your study consider developments over time or focus on a particular period of time? Or, maybe you’d want to focus on the definition of ritual and how that affects its role or even identification in religious communities. Another possibility is to consider official vs. unofficial ritual. You probably get the point. As would be the case for the example of the role of ritual in religion, topics that are too broad can cause frustration and lead to wasted time. If it turned out you were most interested in the role of rituals in the everyday lives of Catholics in 20th-century South America, you would likely focus your attention on ethnographic studies of Catholic communities in South America rather than studies about rituals performed by the Pope in Vatican City. This doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t read sources that you would also read in the latter case—e.g., sources that discuss theories of ritual and official Catholic rituals— but since each approach to your broad topic of ritual requires significant and time-intensive research, you would direct your research to scholarship most directly related to your focus. Skipping around multiple areas of a broad topic results in shallow and/or chaotic exploration. The clearer your focus, the more efficiently you can use your time and resources to conduct an in-depth wellinformed study.

Choosing Topics and Appropriate Research Questions 27

Using the Literature Review and Plenty of Time to Focus the Question Your review of the literature, as well as conversations with your professors, peers, and perhaps external experts, will allow you to understand what others have said about the topic and, in the process, help focus and refine your area of inquiry. By posing questions, analyzing the problem, and imagining various solutions, you will come to a deeper, more thorough comprehension of the issue and how to address it most effectively. This period of refining the topic into a strong, focused research question will be most valuable and satisfying if you give yourself adequate time and reflective space, as well as permission to scrap some ideas and begin again. Very few scholars arrive at a perfectly refined research question through a singular epiphany. Most of us, most of the time, have to wallow around in halfformed ideas, mistaken directions, and—most frustratingly of all—pursuits that have to be abandoned after days or even weeks of seemingly wasted work. Rather than fearing or trying to avoid “wasted” time—and, as a result, ending up with a simplistic or otherwise ineffectual project—try to see this time as an essential and valuable part of the process of creatively and comprehensively addressing a complex issue. If you are truly confronting a focused, significant, and problematic question—one with no single, agreed-upon solution—you will need to invest in a few good stumbling-around periods. In fact, this feature of the research process is what often limits the ability of undergraduate students to participate in original research and what makes the apprenticeship model such a beneficial approach. Whereas faculty and graduate students usually have the time to go through this process as significant parts of their “day jobs,” undergraduate students who typically have several courses and responsibilities and are restricted by the limits of semesters, jobs, family responsibilities, or upcoming graduation date, often don’t have the time to effectively explore their topic in such depth on their own. By collaborating with a faculty mentor on a faculty-driven project, undergraduates can experience this part of the research process without having to worry about whether they have time to complete the entire research project on their own within a limited time frame.

Guiding Questions for Refining a Topic Taking time to focus and refine your question or goal will be time well-spent if you are engaging these critical, foundational questions: 1. 2. 3.

Why is the topic or question important? To whom is it important? Are particular groups of people affected more than others? What gives the topic tension? What would draw audiences to learn more about it? Read at least five current (i.e., published in the last five years) research articles about your topic and imagine yourself as a participant in a dialogue

28 Choosing Topics and Appropriate Research Questions

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

with the authors of the articles. What are the questions you would ask them? What seems to be missing or undervalued? What are the sources of the problem or question? Complex questions usually have complex webs of potential causes. Can you identify some of the strands of that web? Do you know professors or outside experts who can help? What is the history or broader context of the topic? To get a handle on the context of your topic area, use reliable, general resources like encyclopedias, handbooks, and dictionaries that are usually available in university libraries. Since the field of religious studies involves countless subfields, each with its own general resources, you will need to talk with your faculty mentor and librarian to determine which of these resources you should consult for your specific project. What other subject areas is your topic related to? Might these other areas provide additional perspectives and/or interdisciplinary possibilities for your research? Why do you care about the topic area? What is its connection to your personal experiences or interests? In what ways does the interest extend beyond yourself and to other scholars and professionals in the field? Who is the principal audience you want to reach with your research results? What do you want the audience to do as a result of your research? Adjust their thinking about the issue? Change some aspects of their practices/work/activities? Provide support (e.g., funding, advocacy)? Experience something new?

Freewriting Write down your responses to these questions and other ideas that come to you. Writing is the best way to reach clarity and insight about the issue you are exploring. Instead of trying to brainstorm only in your mind, we strongly recommend putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and freewriting your ideas for at least 10 minutes at a time. Do not suppress any ideas, even if they seem f lawed, and do not do any editing. The kinesthetic act of writing (moving a pen across paper or typing on a keyboard), along with the mental “unblocking” of ideas, leads to insights that simply do not arrive if you stare at a blank screen or piece of paper. Freewriting is a wonderfully simple and highly effective means of getting past “writer’s block” or just getting off the “starting block” of any writing task. Professor Peter Elbow, who has defined the drafting and revision process for college students for decades, explains the process of freewriting in his classic 1973 text, Writing Without Teachers: “The idea is simply to write for ten minutes (later on, perhaps fifteen or twenty). Don’t stop for anything. Go quickly without rushing. Never stop to look back, to cross something out . . . to wonder what word or thought to use, or to think about what you are doing. If you can’t think of a word or a spelling, just use a squiggle or else write, ‘I can’t think of it.’ Just put

Choosing Topics and Appropriate Research Questions 29

down something” (Elbow 1973, 1). Freewriting allows you to get past your own internal criticism and tap into the subconscious, creative ideas that are difficult to access any other way (Boice 1993, 31–32). Such active brainstorming will produce a lot of material—plenty to throw out eventually, but also some rich ideas that may not have been uncovered without going through the process. The added bonus is that you have notes for writing your first draft. Even decades into our academic careers, we use this freewriting strategy at the outset of new projects and when writer’s block hits. Something almost magical often occurs at about the 10-minute mark of freewriting: a breakthrough of an exciting idea, more clarity about a muddled topic, or the concept for a new and better direction.

Topic Areas in Religious Studies Research in religious studies often takes the form of one of the following broad areas. The broad and diverse nature of religious studies, however, means that these should be understood as suggestions and not as limitations. Additional topic ideas are discussed in Chapters 7–12. 1. Historical. Examples: consider a specific religious community at a particular time in history; track the development of a specific religious community over a set period of time; look into the history of a specific type of religious act within a specific religious community or across multiple religious communities. 2. Textual/Literary. Examples: provide a new interpretation of a religious text or part of a religious text; research the reception history of a particular religious text; provide a new translation of a religious text; transcribe an ancient manuscript. 3. Ethnographic. Examples: look into the beliefs and practices of a local religious community; look into local popular religious practices; research the role of gender in a local religious community; explore the foodways of a local religious community. 4. Art. Examples: do a close study of a specific piece of religious art; research attitudes towards art in a specific religious community; look into the role or history of icons, relics, or ritual objects within a specific religious community. 5. Archaeology. Examples: reinterpret a specific artifact; study the purpose of an object found at one or many archaeological sites; participate in an archaeological excavation and help write the reports; study an ancient religious community by looking at the archaeological remains of their religious architecture. 6. Religion and Film. Examples: provide a novel interpretation of a film that has previously been studied; analyze the representation of a particular religion in a single film or across multiple films; explore religious ideas and concepts in films that are not explicitly about religion. 7. Theory and Method. Examples: look into the definition of religion; provide a methodological critique of existing scholarship on a particular religious community; apply a new theoretical or methodological approach to a subject that would benefit from the new approach.

30 Choosing Topics and Appropriate Research Questions

As each of the examples indicates, undergraduate research in religious studies invites you to explore something different from what has been done in the past. It absolutely should be something uncertain, risky, or challenging—something that takes you from familiar practices and assumptions to new and surprising ones. Of course, trying something uncertain, risky, or challenging can be daunting and uncomfortable, but it is essential to an interesting and purposeful study.

Designing a Research Study or Project Goal Investing time in focusing and refining your topic undoubtedly helped you revise your research question or project goal. You are ready to develop and carry out your research plan, including creating a timeframe and figuring out logistics. Will you be working with human participants in your research? Will you be distributing a survey, conducting interviews or focus-group discussions, recruiting volunteers, or asking people to try a particular intervention? If your answer is yes to any of these questions, or if you are otherwise interacting with people online or in-person (other than your professors or librarians) for any part of your research, then you need approval or exemption from your university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB). See Chapter 5 for more information about research involving human participants. In the meantime, for the sake of planning your research, be sure to build in time to write an IRB application, have it reviewed, and make any amendments to your research that the IRB could require. Answer the following questions to help you design your plan: 1.

2. 3. 4.

If people will be involved in your research (survey-takers, interviewees, etc.), what is your goal for the “sample size” (number of people to recruit)? What are their key characteristics (e.g., college students majoring in religious studies, adults who are part of a particular religious community, leaders of a particular religious community)? How will you recruit the participants you need? How will you reduce bias in your sample? How will your study be different from what has been done by previous scholars, especially if it is similar to research in your literature review? How does your study ref lect “best practices” in the field, promote diversity and inclusion, and engage with timely and significant matters? Is your research question or goal large enough that it should be broken into two or three parts? “Unpacking” a research question or project goal into two or more stages can help organize your timeline as well as your eventual research paper. For example, assessing the effectiveness of an interfaith program could involve the following facets: a) surveys of the participants, b) interviews with the organizers, and c) focus groups with participants from the different communities involved with the program. Each could be written up separately, followed by a summation paper bringing all three together.

Choosing Topics and Appropriate Research Questions 31

Organizing a Timeline Brainstorming and figuring out the parts of your research design can lead to the creation of an organized timeline. Table 4.1 is set up for a two-semester project but can be adapted for shorter semester-long research papers. Or, if you are collaborating with a faculty mentor on their project, you could create a timeline for your specific contribution to a project that began before you joined and/or continues after you will move on to other projects. More specific and detailed timelines can be created with project management software like Asana. Project management software also makes it easier to work collaboratively with additional researchers and faculty mentors.

Purpose Statements In many forms of academic research, scholars state the purpose of their study or project in one or two sentences. Stating directly and succinctly the purpose of your study clarifies it for yourself at the outset, as well as for your future readers. After the purpose statement, state the research question or questions that will be guiding your study. Example 1: The purpose of this study is to . . . Guiding the design of this project are the following goals: Example 2: This research project examines . . . The following questions determined the focus of the research: Brief ly articulating your study’s purpose and identifying a manageable number of research questions can keep you on task. Write down your purpose and most critical research questions and post them in your workspace. Just about any research study can easily mushroom into an overly ambitious project, particularly if you are doing a good job of reading related literature and considering multiple perspectives. Having the parameters of your study posted right in

TABLE 4.1 Timeline Table

What do I Need to do in the Next Week?

2–3 weeks from now (Add dates here )

4–6 weeks from now (Add dates here )

2–3 months from now (Add dates here )

3–6 months from now (Add dates here )

6–8 months from now (Add dates here )

32 Choosing Topics and Appropriate Research Questions

front of you may help you resist the temptation to totalize—to take on more than you can reasonably investigate in an attempt to be comprehensive.

Using Additional Mentors There are many specialty areas and subdisciplines in religious studies in which different professors have expertise (e.g., different religious traditions, different languages, different time periods, different regions, and different methodological approaches). Therefore, students can usually find professors whose areas of research match their own interests. Even if professors with the right expertise are not your instructors, one of them might be interested enough in the topic to be an additional mentor or might have a research project already in progress that could benefit from the assistance of an undergraduate researcher. Interdisciplinary student projects particularly lend themselves to more than one faculty mentor. Interdisciplinary describes work that emerges from more than one academic discipline’s knowledge base, research methods, ways of knowing (or epistemologies), and scholarly values. As discussed in Chapter 2, religious studies, by its very nature, is interdisciplinary, and therefore most projects utilize methods and approaches that originated in other disciplines. Consider, for example, the interdisciplinary connection between the fields of religious studies and classical studies. If you are researching ancient Greek religion, you may begin your research with a theory of religion in the religious studies department but will likely want to consult archaeological and textual evidence with the help of professors in the classical studies department.

Will Success Be Measurable? The ways to measure success will vary greatly depending on the particular topic, but some components of research success include: making an original discovery of something you and your mentor did not fully expect to find, creating some new knowledge, and advancing the discipline, even in a small way. Successful dissemination of results, covered in depth in Chapter 14 of this book, is also a measure of success. Questions for Students How do I know when I have a good topic/question? When do I have to be sure of my topic/question? What should be on the checklist for choosing a topic/question?

Choosing Topics and Appropriate Research Questions 33

Questions for Faculty How can I guide students through the process of choosing an appropriate research question? How can I include students in the brainstorming stage of my research project?

Bibliography Boice, R. 1993. “Writing Blocks and Tacit Knowledge.” The Journal of Higher Education 64(1): 19–54. Elbow, P. 1973. Writing without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press.

5 WORKING WITH HUMAN SUBJECTS

Summary The focus of this chapter is human subject research. We define and discuss the role of Institutional Review Boards in reviewing, approving, and monitoring research involving human subjects in order to ensure that all research is conducted in accordance with federal, institutional, and ethical guidelines. We provide an overview of the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI training), including information for students about what to expect and a rationale for human subject training. A brief synopsis of Rebecca Skloot’s book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” will enlighten students about this. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of types of Religious Studies projects requiring IRB approval and CITI training.

Human Research Subjects Any type of research that involves people—people who take a survey, people who are interviewed, people who participate in an experiment or study, etc.—is human subjects research or human participants research. This is because, in these cases, a particular group of humans—what they think, how they change, what they do—is a subject of research. Even if a very small part of the research includes people, even if the people are minimally consulted, and even if only one or two people are affected, the rules of human subject research apply. For example, a study that surveys members of a religious community about their beliefs is human subject research. A study that involves observing what takes place at a place of worship is human subject research. And interviewing people about their perceptions of religious groups to which they do not belong is human subject research. DOI: 10.4324/9781003174110-5

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Human Subjects or Human Participants? The traditional term human subjects is still used in most training programs and U.S. federal guidelines, including those governing research conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services. Since the 1980s, though, largely because of the work of those engaged in research into the AIDS epidemic, the term human participants has often been used to refer to the people involved in a research study of any kind (Bayer 1995, 471). When AIDS was first identified, those who had contracted the disease, especially gay men and people who had used intravenous drugs, were acutely vulnerable to social stigma as well as incarceration. Homosexuality was considered a crime in more than half of the states in the U.S., was a disqualifier for teaching jobs and military service, and was often used as grounds for taking away parental rights. AIDS researchers need to take thorough care not only to protect identifying information of patients but also to ask questions with keen sensitivity and without apparent judgment regarding patients’ sexuality or drug use. As Ronald Bayer writes, “in a remarkable and quite unusual process, all the more striking since it occurred during the conservative Reagan years, representatives of gay organizations entered into a complex set of negotiations over the nature of the confidentiality protections that were to be afforded to AIDS research subjects” ( Bayer 1995, 461). Together, leaders of gay rights organizations and medical researchers established standards for informed consent that effectively changed the role of AIDS patients in the research process from subjects to participants. A participant is an active and willing member who is voluntarily contributing to the work, while the term subject implies passivity—the person on whom research is conducted. Research involving humans is vastly different from research conducted on more easily observable and controllable subjects such as plants and even mice. The main difference lies in humans’ ability and right to choose what they do and what is done to them. Humans must be fully informed about the research in which they participate, so they can either consent or not to the study.

Informed Consent Informed consent is fundamental to conducting research with humans that is legal and ethical. As bioethicist Jessica De Bord explained, informed consent traditionally refers to the process by which a competent adult agrees to or refuses a medical procedure based on a thorough understanding of the reasons it is being recommended and its potential benefits and risks. Informed consent originates in the legal and ethical rights of adults to determine what happens to their own bodies (De Bord 2014). Informed consent laws now extend far beyond medical procedures to all forms of research or intervention involving people. People can benefit from and be harmed by a much broader realm of research than that

36 Working With Human Subjects

involving medical procedures. Imagine for a moment a psychological study that could trigger Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in some subjects/ participants. Because myriad forms of research involving human beings have the potential for harm, no matter how seemingly minor, ethics and federal laws require that people participating in surveys, questionnaires, research observations, focus groups, interviews, oral histories, and any other form of research give informed consent to participate.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks The 2010 book by Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, was researched for over a decade to bring to light the far-reaching consequences and injustices of unethical research practices. It is about “a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more. Henrietta’s cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown and her family can’t afford health insurance” (Skloot 2010, back cover). Used across the United States as a first-year student convocation and summer reading book, it won many awards, including the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Wellcome Book Prize, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Award for Excellence in Science Books, the Audie Award for Best Nonfiction audiobook, and a Medical Journalists’ Association Open Book Award. As the back cover of the book highlights, “it’s a story inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we’re made of (Skloot 2010). The compelling story of Henrietta Lacks provides undergraduate researchers with an example of why human participants need to be informed, consulted with, and treated fairly, when involved in research studies. Even if your study does not involve human participants, the whole topic of ethics in research methods is something with which you, as a researcher, should be familiar. Just about every area of research holds some ethical considerations, even if not as directly as the research conducted on Henrietta Lacks. Research that appears to have absolutely no risk of harm and/or may even benefit participants is not off the hook from informed consent and ethical review. Informed consent means people are agreeing or declining to participate with full knowledge, even when there are no known risks either way. Informed consent also includes people agreeing or declining to participate in research that may benefit themselves or others. Why would anyone decide not to answer a short survey for a professor’s research if they did not have to provide their name, could take the survey during class time (so they would not have to use their free time to do so), and would receive extra credit points for turning it in?

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The answer is it doesn’t matter. Each of us has the legal right to opt-in or out of participating in research without explaining our reasons. Informed consent ensures that people are making the decision with knowledge about what they are agreeing to or declining.

IRB Approval How do researchers know that they have provided enough information to participants to meet the legal standard of informed consent? How do we guard against unintentionally harmful or ethically questionable research practices? The primary gatekeepers protecting human participants from potential harm or manipulation and preventing researchers from making ethical or legal violations (even inadvertently), are members of the Institutional Review Board (IRB). Every institution in the U.S. where research involving humans is conducted—every college and university, research hospital, school district, and any other type of research facility—has, by law, a committee typically known as the IRB. Other countries have similar ethics boards that go by different names, such as Canada’s Tri-Council (made up of representatives of three major granting agencies), the United Kingdom’s Research Ethics Committee (REC), and the European Union’s Ethics Committee. The 1964 “Declaration of Helsinki” by the World Medical Association established international ethical guidelines for research involving human subjects (World Health Organization 2010). According to U.S. federal law, an IRB is made up of at least five experts in biomedical and social-behavioral research ethics. Members of the IRB are charged with protecting the rights and welfare of human subjects/participants in research conducted by anyone affiliated with the institution, including faculty, staff, and students of a college or university. The IRB must review and approve all research involving humans before the research may commence. The chairperson of the IRB is responsible for posting readily accessible (usually online) information about ethical and legal requirements for research involving humans, training sessions for researchers, and the IRB review process. The IRB review process involves the main researcher, known as the principal investigator (PI)—the faculty member overseeing the undergraduate research in the apprenticeship model, but the undergraduate student on student-driven projects—and the co-investigator(s), who are anyone collaborating on the research, including undergraduate researchers working on faculty-driven projects, community partners, and faculty colleagues of the PI. The PI submits the IRB application and is ultimately responsible for ensuring that the research is carried out in accordance with what is described in the application after it has been approved. None of the research involving human subjects/participants can begin before IRB approval—not even the recruitment of participants. In addition to requiring a description of informed consent, IRB applications call for the following explanations:

38 Working With Human Subjects

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

How the PI and co-investigators will protect the privacy and confidentiality of all human participants. How the participants will be recruited. How the participants will be compensated, if applicable. Where the participants’ confidential and/or identifying information will be stored and who will have access to it. How the PI and co-investigators will dispose of confidential and/or identifying information after the study is complete and a certain period of time has passed. Note that IRBs often require the PI to retain records in a secure location for a set period of time, typically three years, after completing the study.

If the study includes a survey, a final copy of the survey must be attached. If the study includes interviews, oral histories, and/or focus groups, a list of questions to be asked—often known as the interview guide or protocol—must be attached. Researchers must stick to the questions in the interview guide, though related follow-up questions are permissible. The IRB may require revision of the research protocol or even reject the application if required information is missing or incomplete, or if the board determines that the risks of the research are too great. The risks of research are highest when vulnerable or protected populations are involved; vulnerable populations include children, people in prison, and people with cognitive impairments, to name a few.

Why Is Training on Human Subjects Research Necessary? Most U.S. college and university IRBs require everyone conducting research with human subjects/participants to complete human subjects research training every three years. That requirement includes undergraduate researchers. The training is provided by the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI), which offers several different online courses and modules. Everyone involved in human subjects takes the Responsible Conduct of Research CITI course and/or the Human Subjects Research CITI course, which has a SocialBehavioral Educational track. Additional modules or courses may be required depending on the nature of the research. Requiring researchers to take online CITI courses and pass the quizzes helps colleges and universities ensure that research conducted in their name and with their support is done with ethical integrity. Those who have completed CITI training are much more likely to carry out their research legally and ethically. They are informed about appropriate research protocols and the reasons for particular rules. Completing training in human subjects research confers benefits on the researchers themselves beyond the knowledge they gain about ethical research

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39

practices. Practically speaking, completing CITI training dramatically decreases the chance that a researcher will submit an IRB application that gets rejected or requires revision. Having to re-submit an IRB application requires extra time and can cause stress for researchers. It can significantly delay the start of the study, sometimes for weeks, as protocols need to be rewritten and then reviewed again by the IRB, and at large universities waiting a month or more for a decision from the IRB is not unusual. Another benefit of completing CITI training is having ethics-course certification among your experiences, which is a distinctive credential for resumes and graduate school applications. Students working within the confines of a semester have no time to waste. and securing IRB approval can sometimes be a stumbling block to completing an original research project. It can still be done, but this is one reason why we encourage utilizing the apprenticeship model of undergraduate research. Most undergraduate students cannot devote the time necessary to complete an entire original research project with human subjects from beginning to end, a process that can sometimes take several years to complete (e.g., the research for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks took more than a decade to complete!). Having undergraduate students work on specific parts of the project without having to worry about finishing the entire project provides high-impact educational and research experiences to a larger and more diverse group of students.

How Do I Get Trained? The IRB chairperson will let the PI know if CITI training is required for the planned research and, if so, which courses need to be taken. Each CITI course takes a few hours but does not need to be completed in one sitting. Most colleges and universities have a CITI subscription that covers faculty, staff, and students of the institution, and many that don’t will cover the cost if the training is required. If you need to complete CITI training, it is unlikely that you will need to pay for the courses out of your own pocket. Therefore, before creating an account on the CITI website—www.citiprogram.org—find out from the IRB chairperson which, if any, courses you need to complete and how your institution handles student registrations. If you are required to do CITI training, after each course module you will be quizzed on its content. The score considered “passing” is set by each institution’s IRB. Of course, you need a passing score to receive a certification of completion. Questions for Students What will happen if I don’t take the appropriate steps to protect the rights of participants in my study? How do I know what type of training is necessary?

40 Working With Human Subjects

Do I need to get IRB approval and CITI training if I’m working on a faculty-driven research project? Questions for Faculty How does IRB approval work within the framework of a capstone course with student research? What roles can undergraduate researchers play in my own research that requires IRB approval and/or CITI training?

Bibliography Bayer, R. 1995. “AIDS, Ethics, and Activism: Institutional Encounters in the Epidemic’s First Decade.” In Society’s Choices: Social and Ethical Decision-Making in Biomedicine, edited by R. E. Bulger, E. M. Bobby, and H. V. Fineberg, 458–76. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK231965/. De Bord, J. 2014. “Informed Consent.” In Ethics in Medicine, edited by C. H. Braddock and K. A. Edwards. Seattle, WA: University of Washington School of Medicine. depts.washington.edu/bhdept/ethics-medicine/bioethics-topics/detail/67. Skloot, R. 2010. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Broadway Books. World Health Organization. 2010. “Declaration of Helsinki.” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 79 (4): 373–74. www.who.int/bulletin/archives/79(4)373.pdf

6 COLLECTING AND ANALYZING DATA

Summary While a full exploration of data collection methods is beyond the scope of this text, the first part of this chapter introduces students to qualitative and quantitative research methods, providing overviews of each and when to use one, the other, or both. We describe major data collection strategies, including library research exploring primary sources, recording observations with research journals and field notes, survey research, and interviews. The second part of this chapter includes information about the terms and techniques involved in analyzing different types of information. It discusses the importance of triangulating results, identifying overarching themes, and aligning the discussion of research results with the research question and the review of the literature. The chapter concludes with a reminder about acknowledging any limitations of the research that significantly affect the results.

Importance of Research Methods Research is a methodological investigation or inquiry aimed at answering a specific question. The methodological approach is what gives a research study rigor and trustworthiness. After learning what is primarily known about the topic area through a review of the literature (Chapter 3), scholars develop a focused and significant question or goal (Chapter 4). As this chapter lays out, scholars then plan their own methods or processes for addressing the question or achieving the goal. They determine which sources of data or information would help answer the question or achieve the goal and how to access those sources. Purposefully planning methods of data collection and carrying out the DOI: 10.4324/9781003174110-6

42 Collecting and Analyzing Data

project according to that plan (as well as adapting the methods as needed) are at the heart of conducting scholarly research. The strength of a research study or creative project, therefore, depends most on its methods—the processes used to gather data/information to address the research question. Scholars who carefully select the methods best suited to the project set themselves up well for success. A successful study is not necessarily one in which the expected conclusion is proven or in which the goal precisely comes to fruition, but one in which something new and interesting is discovered and that new and interesting discovery is supported with evidence/data. Sound methods get to that goal. One of the common missteps we have observed in our mentoring of undergraduate research is a rush to decide on methods or processes that are obvious and readily accessible. We have had students who tried to rely entirely on secondary sources located through online research, for example, because they were most familiar with that method of information-gathering, even though additional sources of evidence would significantly strengthen their claims. And we have had to guide students away from simply conducting surveys of their peers as their primary research method. Although gathering opinions from a group of friends, acquaintances, or classmates may be handy, that narrow group of people likely will not provide enough diversity of thought or richness of information to develop a full-f ledged conclusion. This chapter is intended to guide student researchers to more thorough, well-planned methods—methods that are well-aligned with the research question or goals of the project. Sound research methods are critical to the success of your entire study because the results completely depend on the quality of the data, and the quality of the data completely depends on the ways they were collected, recorded, and analyzed. Your process of gathering and analyzing the data must be made evident before your results are presented in any dissemination of the research, such as a presentation, research paper, or publication. The audience’s trust in your findings will either be buttressed or undermined by how well you carried out the study and how well you explained carrying it out.

Establishing Credibility as a Researcher Well-selected methods—methods chosen precisely because they get at the particular research question—typically lead to trustworthy results. In addition to setting up a successful project, sound methods give credibility to you as a researcher. For at least 25 centuries of human thought, the credibility of an author has been a foundation of effective argument or rhetoric. In the 4th century BCE, the classical Greek scientist, philosopher, and teacher Aristotle explained that appealing persuasively to an audience requires logos, pathos, and ethos. Those three parts of a persuasive argument are now known as the rhetorical triangle. Logos refers literally to the logic of one’s arguments—the reasons,

Collecting and Analyzing Data 43

evidence, and explanation that convince others of one’s points. Pathos appeals to the audience by connecting with them through emotions and values. An example of pathos in a research paper about the extent of the horrors committed during the Holocaust would be to include a story about specific victims in order to help the readers connect the numbers and statistics with the human victims they represent. Of course, numbers and statistics can also be used as a form of pathos. In this example, comparing the Jewish population of Poland in 1933 (3 million) to the Jewish population of Poland in 1950 (45,000) could stir up emotions of horror and anger at the nearly complete destruction of Polish Jewry during the Holocaust. Ethos relates to the character of the writer/speaker. The importance of ethos to rhetoric/argument derives from the idea that audience members will only be persuaded by the logic of the claims (logos) and the appeals to their emotions and values (pathos) if they trust the person making the argument. That trust is established when those making claims explain with transparency how they arrived at their conclusions—in the case of research, how they gathered their data and why they went about it the way they did. If, on the other hand, the audience is not convinced of the credibility and quality of the work of the researcher, they have no reason to accept the claims.

Triangulated, Intentional, and Impartial Data Collection Triangulation of Data Establishing your credibility as a scholar and ensuring, as well as possible, the success of your study requires collecting data in triangulated, intentional, and impartial ways. Triangulated data collection refers to gathering information in a variety of ways as a system of data “checks and balances.” Data from one source can be corroborated or disputed by a different source. When multiple sources of information are brought to bear on a research question, the researcher can attain a more reliable and comprehensive understanding. Consider, for example, a study of what we can know about the historical Jesus. One would have to not only look at each of the four canonical Gospels, which tell similar but sometimes contradictory stories about the life of Jesus, but other books in the New Testament, contemporary literature about early Christianity and Jesus that did not make it into the biblical canon, other historical texts about first century Judea, and even archaeological evidence. Using just one of the Gospels to determine what we know about the historical Jesus would make the project easier and quicker, but it would be insufficient for thorough research of the available data that can be useful when trying to answer the research question. Only by culling information from numerous sources and synthesizing it into a multi-faceted study can a researcher arrive at an informed and insightful result. That work of drawing from multiple sources is triangulation.

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Although the term triangulation has led some of our students over the years to conclude that they need exactly three sources of information, the reality is more nuanced than that. The three legs of a simple camp stool give it stability; take one away, and the stool topples over. But adding a leg or two adds even more stability. We prefer to think of triangulation in terms of that metaphorical camp stool’s overall stability rather than its literal three legs. In other words, triangulated research might require only three sources of information to stand solidly on its claims, but it may need more. Would you accept an argument about the historical Jesus based on three sources alone? Furthermore, if the three sources were all from the canonical Gospels, would that be sufficient to draw historical conclusions? Wouldn’t contemporary non-Canonical and non-Christian sources from the first century that corroborate the stories in the gospels strengthen your argument? Add archaeological evidence to the mix, and you’d have a stronger and more thorough argument. Further triangulation could lead to entirely different types of research sources, such as literary parallels with stories about Jesus in Greco-Roman and Jewish literature that raise questions about the historical reliability of even multiply attested sources about certain aspects of the historical Jesus (e.g., what does it mean that Jesus birth story is very similar to the birth narrative of Moses, which itself has similarities with the birth narrative of Sargon the Great? And what about similarities with Greco-Roman miraculous birth narratives?). To plan triangulated methods, you might brainstorm about the various forms of data that could address your research questions (or parts of a single research question) or help you achieve your creative goals and then organize them into something like shown in Table 5.1.

Intentionality in Data Collection Lest it sound as if more and more sources automatically make research better, we move to the second criterion of sound research methods: intentionality. Intentional data collection refers to the careful thinking involved in determining which sources to pursue. What types of data will allow you to gain the

TABLE 6.1 Triangular Data Table

Research Questions

First Method of Data Collection

Second Method Third Method of Data of Data Collection Collection

Fourth Method of Data Collection

Part 1 of Research Question

 

 

 

 

Part 2 of Research Question

 

 

 

 

Collecting and Analyzing Data 45

information you need? By selecting sources of information intentionally and then explaining why you collected data in the ways you did, you avoid a scattershot (random and overly general) approach to research. In the study of the historical Jesus, for instance, choosing primary sources that were written during or shortly after the life of Jesus allows you to focus on contemporary reports that are more likely to have first- or second-hand knowledge about Jesus during his lifetime. Later sources aren’t necessarily less reliable but are more likely to be based on their own sources and were written or transmitted from perspectives that may not have existed during the lifetime of Jesus. And choosing to include archaeological evidence allows you to bring in sources that, on their own, do not have particular ideological biases (although you should be aware that the interpretation of the archaeological evidence often does have ideological biases). Simply compiling sources that are accepted as authoritative by the modern Catholic Church might provide a churchapproved depiction of Jesus but would not answer your research question about the historical Jesus.

Avoiding Bias and Ensuring Impartiality The third expectation of credible researchers, impartiality, requires an effort to reduce potential bias and errors. Biased or otherwise sloppy scholarship undermines the study itself as well as the credibility of the researcher. Bias in research comes in many forms, some of it unconscious on the part of the scholar. It might include a preference for or prejudice against a particular outcome that leads to overemphasis—or ignoring—of certain results. If a researcher of the historical Jesus is a member of a Christian community, they might favor evidence that confirms the historicity of the gospel stories and ignore evidence that contradicts the gospels. And an atheist researcher might discount parts of the gospel narrative even when it’s supported by other historical sources and archaeological evidence. Therefore, especially in religious studies, it is important to acknowledge your personal identity and do your best to be self-ref lexive when doing research, constantly asking yourself whether you are basing your conclusions on the evidence or whether your biases might be affecting your interpretations. When dealing with focus groups, if a researcher expects members of the focus group to be enthusiastic about a shared experience, the researcher might glom onto a few stray comments that fit that expectation. On the other hand, if members of the focus group suspect the researcher is hoping for particular responses, they might accommodate that expectation, especially if they have a relationship with the researcher that would benefit from positive reinforcement. For those very reasons, the best practices of focus-group research include having a neutral person facilitate and record the discussion without the researcher even in the room.

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Similarly, the ways survey questions are worded may reveal the biases of the researcher and skew responses. Using validated survey instruments designed by researchers with expertise in survey design mitigates those tendencies toward unconscious bias. If you need to develop your own survey, we recommend studying the elements of good design, starting with guidelines for beginning survey researchers, such as Sarah Fisher’s (2020) “How to Create an Effective Survey,” and asking for feedback on your draft questions from professors who teach research methods. Even peer-reviewed research articles are likely to ref lect the values of the journals that publish them, so over-reliance on sources from one journal should be avoided. As these examples indicate, impartial research design requires vigilance. Consistently asking yourself how sources of data could be obtained with the least possibility for bias can lead to helpful ideas for fair and even-handed methods. Explaining in your methods section the steps you took to reduce bias and the chance of errors demonstrates your impartiality and credibility as a researcher. Informed readers can and should be attentive to signs of prejudice and imprecision in reports or presentations of research. They will appreciate indications that you collected data carefully and as impartially as possible.

Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed-Methods Research How do you decide on the types of research data to triangulate, select intentionally, and collect impartially? One rough breakdown of the types of research data you might gather is quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative data is numerically measurable and reportable information. Quantitative data literally show the calculable quantity or amount of something. Examples include, the number or percentage of participants who gave a particular response to a survey question; the average increase in scores between participants’ pre- and post-tests; the amount of time needed to complete a series of tasks; and even the results of a structural analysis of a religious text. Qualitative data cannot be measured numerically; it is descriptive information about the qualities of people’s ideas or behaviors or any other subject of study that requires interpretation rather than calculation. Examples of qualitative data include transcripts of interviews; open-ended written responses on surveys; religious texts and documents; archival materials (e.g., diaries, official documents, photographs, correspondence); people’s behaviors described in field notes; official archaeological reports of completed excavations; and religious iconography. Sources of information are rarely exclusively quantitative or qualitative; many can be analyzed in different ways for quantitative or qualitative data, such as pre- and post-tests that could be evaluated in terms of how many responses were correct (quantitative measure) and/or analyzed for patterns in the openended responses (qualitative interpretation). Likewise, researchers often benefit from obtaining both quantitative and qualitative data. Using both types of

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information to get at different facets of the research question is known as mixedmethods research.

Quantitative Methods The following are the most common quantitative methods used by researchers in religious studies: 1.

2.

3.

4.

Surveys/questionnaires with multiple choice or Likert-scale responses. Surveys and questionnaires capture demographic and/or opinion data that are selfreported by individuals. A Likert scale is usually made up of five or seven choices aimed at measuring degrees of agreement, from strongly disagree to strongly agree, for example. A Likert scale provides a more nuanced set of responses than simple agree-or-disagree binary choices. Tests of content knowledge, ability, attitude, or skill. Pre- and post-test data are often used to determine whether an intervention, such as a new teaching technique or a particular experience or event, may have affected participants’ knowledge or attitudes. The pre- and post-tests ask for the same information at different points in time—days, weeks, or months apart. Pre- and post-tests may be given to one group of participants to measure change over time or distributed to two sets of participants known as the experimental group and control group, in order to make a comparison between them. The experimental group participates in the intervention being studied (“the experiment”), such as a new method of teaching. The control group continues with the status quo. Experimental and control groups usually share basic demographics in common. A study aimed at determining whether including multiple translations rather than a single translation would improve learning outcomes in a high school course about “the Bible” could utilize multiple translations with one class (the experimental group) while the other class would utilize only a single translation, which is traditionally how the course has been taught (the control group). Structural analysis of religious texts, art, and objects. A quantitative structural analysis involves some form of counting, such as quantifying the use of specific terms in a particular text or the extent of the use of specific symbols in religious art and iconography. Statistical analysis. The analysis of statistical data gathered by oneself, or previous researchers is a sophisticated quantitative research skill. Statistical data include a vast array of evidence, from individuals’ personal/demographic information to immense sets of organizational and national information. This type of analysis would be useful for a comparison of demographic data across multiple religious communities in a particular location (e.g., are there differences between the members of local Muslim, Buddhist, and Christian communities in terms of education level and family income?).

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Qualitative Methods These are the most common forms of qualitative data used by researchers in religious studies: 1.

2.

3.

4.

Surveys/questionnaires with open-response questions. Open-response questions invite survey-takers to write out answers to questions that do not lend themselves to either-or or multiple-choice responses. They allow participants to convey a range of ideas, attitudes, and examples, often providing rich information for researchers. (Many surveys, of course, include both quantitative and qualitative questions.) Interviews. Interviews, which are typically one-on-one interactions in which the participant answers a set of questions posed by the researcher/interviewer, may be audio-recorded with the permission of the participant. Whether the interview is recorded or not, the interviewer usually takes extensive notes during and immediately following the interview. Focus Groups. Focus groups are akin to group interviews. A group of people with something in common that is of interest to the researcher (e.g., students in a summer undergraduate research program, attendees of the same worship community, survey respondents who checked the box at the end of the survey indicating their willingness to be contacted for followup research) is invited to participate in a discussion about the topic. The group should be small enough that everyone can contribute a response to some or all of the questions—usually between five and twenty participants. The facilitator poses questions to the group and may either encourage a free exchange of responses or suggest a means of equitable participation. Focus groups may be audio-recorded with the informed consent of each participant. Sometimes a notetaker accompanies the facilitator so that the facilitator can attend to the group dynamics without the additional task of writing notes. Document analysis. Some student researchers get the extraordinary opportunity to work with primary sources in an archive or online collection. Primary sources are original documents or artifacts created in the time period being studied, such as diaries/journals, manuscripts, letters and other correspondence, videos and recordings, and archaeological remains. Archives around the world preserve original documents of historical and cultural significance in secure, fireproof cabinets in temperature-controlled, lowhumidity rooms, all to ensure that they will not be lost to current and future generations. University library archives, as well as many archives associated with museums, historical societies, and other public and private libraries, offer rich troves of primary sources for researchers. You may be required to get some training from the archivist and be required to wear gloves—or you may have to view fragile, high-value pieces through plastic

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5.

6.

7.

8.

or glass—but those precautions are well worthwhile, as there is nothing quite like the thrill of working with a 1,000-year-old manuscript written by a famous religious figure. Digitized library and museum collections have made primary-source research possible from your own computer or your university’s library database. Digital photos of documents and artifacts bring the archives right to you. Anything that interprets or is otherwise at a remove from a primary text (e.g., an article that includes excerpts of letters) is a secondary source. Your notes in a journal—capturing key quotations as well as your own textual analysis and observations—are invaluable sources of qualitative data. When reading and analyzing a text (whether in the form of choreography notation, a narrative text, a data table, or a piece of artwork, to name a few), you could be jotting down ideas that strike you, direct quotations you want to use and cite, questions that pop up in your mind, connections you see to other texts, and any number of other thoughts. Those notes, especially if you color-code them according to patterns and/or markup significant details, are a form of qualitative data analysis. Case study: empirical observation and analysis of one important case (or a small number of cases) may give deep insight into a broader issue. The “case” may be a person, course, event, or other phenomena. A UR study of the response of a local religious community to climate change legislation could provide insight into the ways in which traditional religious beliefs and practices shape particular political responses. Observation (also called field observation or direct observation): conducting observations on behaviors or other phenomena in a certain setting can be a valuable qualitative research method when carried out by rigorous researchers who are doing much more than simply watching. Observation research requires detailed field notes about what is observed—a crucial aspect of its methodological rigor. Sometimes the field notes are structured to include certain behaviors or participants while purposely ignoring others in order to focus on a predetermined set of data. Other field notes are open to everything that catches the researcher’s attention, without a prediction of what to expect. If the observation is to be conducted covertly (without the knowledge and consent of those being observed), privacy must be protected, and the IRB will consider whether the research could be conducted effectively with informed participants instead. If the subjects/participants know they are being observed, the researcher must consider the Hawthorne Effect, the psychological phenomenon of people changing their behavior because they are being observed. Such decisions about covert or overt observations are usually discussed in the method section of a research paper.

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9.

Participant observation: conducting observations on the behaviors of a group of people while involved with them over a period of time offers a more intimate angle on observation research. As with other forms of observation, participant observation requires detailed field notes, though the notes may have to be written immediately after the observation time because participating and note-taking simultaneously may not be possible.

Mixed Methods Some forms of research can be quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods, depending on the types of information to be gathered. Two examples are as follows: Longitudinal study: empirical observation and analysis of something over a significant period of time Pilot study: collecting data about a new intervention or process while it is carried out for the first time and analyzing the data to determine the intervention’s longer-term efficacy. Note that IRB approval is required for all of these forms of research (quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods) except when they do not involve people in any way. IRB approval is not required for the use of archival data—information already collected by other researchers (who had IRB approval) that is now available, with no personally identifiable information, for new researchers to analyze. Other methods of gathering information and data specific to particular approaches and/or methods are addressed in subsequent chapters.

Results and Discussion The results (or findings) of your study constitute what you have learned from the research process. The results include the data along with your analysis or interpretation of the data. Merely reporting the data is not enough. The point of research is the analysis and interpretation of what the data signify. In most reports of scholarly work, the results/findings are explained right after the methods/process. In APA-style social-science papers, the results are reported separately from the discussion. The results section gives a basic explanation of the data, and the subsequent discussion section provides a more thorough interpretation of the results and explains the wider implications of what was discovered. In papers and presentations in the arts and humanities, however, the results or findings are usually interpreted while they are reported. There is no divide between the results and the discussion—or between the results and the researcher’s interpretation and statement of implications.

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Analyzing Research Data Knowing the etymology (origin) of the verb analyze can be a useful means of understanding what is really called for when you are asked to analyze information. The Latin use of analysis translates to the “resolution of anything complex into simple elements” (Analysis, 2017). In that original concept of analysis as the breaking down of complex ideas, analysis is posited as the opposite of synthesis, which refers to putting parts back into a coherent whole. That idea effectively informs the task of data analysis, which is very much about breaking apart complex information into simpler parts. The Greek etymology of analysis adds another facet to this understanding: “a breaking up, a loosening, releasing”; the verb form in Greek is “to set free; to loose a ship from its moorings” (Analysis, 2017). Imagine for a moment what that version of analysis might look like in undergraduate research. What would it mean to “loosen” or “release” research data? How does the image of a ship set free of its moorings represent something about the task of analyzing information? We consider the work of data analysis to be analogous to the Latin and Greek origins of the English word. An analysis is an act of setting free into the world the knowledge contained in quantitative and qualitative data. The analyzer’s work of breaking the data apart helps others to make sense of the information. The researcher’s analysis could even be described as loosening up the densely packed evidence, allowing others to see and understand the component parts. An analysis is what gives meaning to the quantitative and qualitative data you have collected. The data do not hold meaning in and of themselves; it is your analytical work that translates for others what the information signifies. In what remains of this chapter, we offer tools and techniques for doing that important work of making meaning from data.

Data Analysis Exercise Examine each piece of data and free-write answers to the following questions: • • • • •

What is interesting/exciting/notable about this piece of information? What is the story it can tell? Do you think this data point misrepresents what is going on? What, if anything, is disappointing about it? Is it consistent with anything you found in your review of the literature? Does it contradict anything you read in the research literature? How could it be most effectively presented? In- narrative form? In tables or graphs? Key quotations? (Quotations may come from textual analysis, from research participants, from your own research journal, etc.)

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Identifying Themes in the Data The analysis of data is about figuring out the implications (or conclusions that can be drawn) of what was discovered. To help our students start organizing their research results, we ask them to list and then free-write about the three to five themes they have learned from their research (the implications). The next step is to compose a topic sentence for each of those themes: a specific, clear, supportable claim about what the data indicate. We recommend going from there (composing topic sentences on a few clear themes) to organizing data around each of those topic sentences—perhaps by creating an outline or f low chart. Structure the outline by those topic sentences rather than by each piece of data. This is important: the data do not organize themselves. You, as the researcher, are the agent. You decide the ordering of points, and you plug in the data as evidence for those points. We have seen it go the wrong way too many times: the surveys say a, the primary sources say b and c, and many of the secondary sources seem to corroborate the survey respondents (a), but a few others say something entirely different (d and e). When research reports are organized by the data they are messy and confusing, whipping around from one piece of evidence to the next without a sense of control or clear meaning. Successful researchers analyze the data first to identify the implications/themes. The implications of the research are the most interesting points. Then researchers figure out which pieces of data support each of those implications. The difference is enormous between listing a bunch of data that needs to be made sense of and stating clear, focused claims backed up by data. The data may be represented as evidence in many different forms, including textual evidence (quotations and paraphrases); quotations from survey responses, interviews, or focus groups; and/or tables or graphs of quantitative data. However the data are represented, remember that they play a supporting role. They are the backup to the claims you make.

Analyzing Quantitative Data A full explanation of how to analyze quantitative data is beyond the scope of this book. Students who have taken a course in quantitative research methods may be able to conduct a multivariate analysis of their data, which involves the examination of multiple variables in the data in relation to one another (e.g., correlations among 300 college-student participants’ ages, genders, religious affiliation, and how often they attend formal religious services). However, that level of analysis requires statistical calculation skills that are not typically expected in most forms of religious studies. This discussion sticks to the terms and types of calculations involved in univariate (single variable) and bivariate (two variables in interaction with each other) quantitative analysis.

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If your research involves a quantitative survey, questionnaire, and/or tests, you have an array of software platforms for building the research instrument, distributing it, collecting data, and even doing preliminary analysis. Platforms such as Survey Monkey, Wufoo, and Qualtrics generate reports and allow users to download data into Excel to create customized spreadsheets and conduct analysis. While those user-friendly ways of reporting data help even those without statistical training to capture and compare data, the researcher’s own analysis is needed to explain the relationships within and the significance of the information. The following explanations are intended to guide that analysis with regard to fundamental quantitative data. The terms used here apply to most types of quantitative data, including surveys/questionnaires, pre- and post-tests, structural analysis, and statistical analysis.

Correlation Correlation is the relationship between two or more data points, such that when one piece of data changes for a certain sample of the population, the other changes too—either in the same or the opposite direction. For example, there is a statistical correlation, or relationship, between the highest level of education a group of people has completed and their income levels. There is also a correlation/relationship (though in the opposite direction) between a population’s highest level of education completed and their rates of cigarette smoking. Correlation is not the same as causation. Correlation indicates that a relationship exists but does not on its own show that one thing caused the other.

Direct Correlation/Positive Correlation/Direct Relationship These three interchangeable terms all refer to a “positive” relationship between two or more data points. A positive relationship means that when one data point increases, the other does too; when one decreases, so does the other. For example, a population’s highest level of education completed and their income levels have a positive correlation or direct relationship, according to many studies. When one is high, the other tends to be too; when one is low, the other usually is as well.

Inverse Correlation/Negative Correlation/Inverse Relationship These interchangeable terms all indicate an inverse or negative correlation between two or more data points; the data points go in opposite directions when there is a negative correlation. When one increases, the other tends to decrease, and vice versa. Using the same example set above, one would see in many studies that the highest education completed tends to have an inverse relationship with rates of cigarette smoking. In other words, the more education

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a person completes, the less likely that person is to smoke cigarettes regularly. The negative correlation occurs the opposite way too: someone who smokes cigarettes frequently is less likely to have completed college.

Frequency Distribution A frequency distribution is a display of how often (how frequently) members of a particular population sample gave particular responses (or did particular behaviors or said particular words). A frequency distribution table shows how many participants gave each response (on a survey or test question) or how many times a phenomenon occurred (in a structural analysis).

Basic Statistical Terms • • • • •

Mean: average of all the scores (using the mean has drawbacks when there are extreme or outlier scores, which skew the mean.) Median: the middle score when all responses are ranked Mode: the most frequently occurring score or phenomenon Range: the difference between the highest and lowest responses Standard deviation: how much participants’ scores differ from the mean (average) score (i.e., the deviation of each score from the mean/average)

Analyzing Qualitative Data The metaphor of unpacking luggage is an apt description of how to analyze qualitative data, including primary and secondary source texts, research-journal notes, participant responses (from open-response survey questions, interviews, and focus groups), and any other information that cannot be quantified. Imagine taking each piece of qualitative data, one by one, out of its place and holding it up for examination. What is interesting about it? How is it different from the other things (the other data points) right next to it? With what else does it logically go? Asking and answering those kinds of questions about qualitative data help bring the information to life in a way. Thinking about the interesting qualities of each piece of data helps you to put together a meaningful story from your own interpretation of the data.

Coding Coding occurs when similar data—or pieces of data that share the same idea— are coded by theme. The coding can be done by hand on hard copies using colored highlighters or annotations by pen or pencil (e.g., asterisks as one code, checkmark as another, etc.) or on a computer using the highlighter function in word-processing programs. For large data sets, coding can be done using

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analytical software (e.g., SPSS, Nvivo, Dedoose) that organizes pieces of text by code/theme.

Limitations of the Research Every research study has certain limitations. Every researcher is limited by time, resources, access to information, etc. When the limitations of the study significantly affect results, researchers need to identify the issue and explain the ramifications. What if, for example, a student studying a lesser-known but important religious leader discovered in the course of the research that primary sources and other archival materials about the person were less informative than the student first thought they would be? Not all would be lost, especially if some of the person’s writings were preserved and were available for analysis, but the inf luences from the religious leader’s personal relationship, thought to factor into her work, could not be determined from the few journal entries and letters that survive. The lack of information and its impact on the research should be noted and discussed. Questions for Students Are there standard ways to collect data? Which data collection methods are appropriate for my topic? How do I judge whether my sample size is appropriate? Questions for Faculty How do I mentor students in a way that emphasizes the importance of the types and reliability of the data they collect? Which types of data are undergraduate students equipped to help collect?

Bibliography Analysis. 2017. Online Etymology Dictionary. www.etymonline.com/word/analysis Fisher, S. 2020. “How to Create an Effective Survey.” Qualtrics. www.qualtrics.com/ blog/10-tips-for-building-effective-surveys/Library Databases

7 WORKING IN ARCHIVES

Summary Whether your research question leads you to specific archives, whether your exploration of an archive leads to a new research question, or whether your collection and analysis of data lead you to the conclusion that a new archive should be created, archival work provides various avenues of research in religious studies. In this chapter, we cover the types of religious studies research that can be done by interacting with archives. This includes visiting the archives of religious communities and state, national, and university archives that house documents related to religious communities and figures in an effort to research particular subjects. Additionally, this chapter will discuss the creation of archives as a possibility for collaborative undergraduate research projects with students.

Defining “The Archives” A s Laura Millar points out in her book about archives, there are three different ways the phrase “the archives” is used. The archives can refer to: 1. Documentary materials created, received, used and kept by a person, family, organization, government or other public or private entity in the conduct of their daily work and life and preserved because they contain enduring value as evidence of and information about activities and events. 2. The agency or institution responsible for acquiring and preserving archival materials and making those items available for use. 3. The building or other repository housing archival collections. (Millar 2017, 4) DOI: 10.4324/9781003174110-7

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For researchers in the field of religious studies, the first definition is important because it highlights that archives are primary sources that can be utilized in an effort to both develop and answer research questions. Or, as Paul Myhre puts it, “at its most rudimentary level, archival resources are historic documents that provide written and visual information about specific people, places and events” (2011, 75). Specifically, this includes but is not limited to materials like “letters, diaries, confidential memos, lecture notes, transcripts, rough drafts, unpublished manuscripts, and other personal and organizational records” (Hill 1993, 3). The second and third definitions of the phrase are important because researchers need to be familiar with both archival organizations and the repositories where the documents are stored to efficiently and effectively conduct archival research. As Millar’s definition highlights, documentary materials can take many forms, be preserved for different reasons, and appear in different types of buildings managed by different types of organizations. Scholars in the field of religious studies utilize documentary evidence collected and organized by private, public, or religious institutions in different types of physical places like museums, universities, and religious buildings. Online archives, which are becoming more common, provide opportunities for researchers to access documents without having to travel. While there are some entirely online archives, most archives have hybrid collections with some documents that only appear in physical form in the archive’s building and other documents that have been digitized and are therefore accessible virtually. It is important to keep in mind that the institutional location of the archives doesn’t necessarily determine the type of material housed in the archives. For example, university archives can house both documents related to the university as well as private collections that were donated to the university, and religious organizations can house documents unrelated to their specific religion (Millar 2017, 79). Therefore, while the Vatican Apostolic Archive is the place you want to visit if you are doing research about the papacy, their collection isn’t limited to documents directly related to the Vatican, and you might also visit this archive if you are doing research about one of several private families or individuals who donated their documents to the archive (Millar 2017, 82). It is, therefore, important for the researcher to focus on the types of materials they are seeking when looking for an archive rather than focusing primarily on the organization that manages the archive.

Finding Archives for Your Specific Research Project If you already have a research question, you will need to determine whether there is an archive that you should visit. For example, if you are researching art created in concentration camps during the Holocaust, you would probably want to visit the library and archives at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum since it has a large collection of art created during the Holocaust

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(“Plan a Visit”). Because their archives include both digital and physical collections, you could do some of your research virtually, but might also want to actually visit the archives in Bowie, Maryland to work with documents that only exist in the physical archives. Depending on the specific focus of your research, you might have to visit additional archives. For example, if your research at the archives resulted in a focus on art created at Auschwitz, you might also try and visit the archives at the Memorial and Museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau to try and learn more about both the artists and what was happening at the concentration camp when the art was created. With the Holocaust research example, the research topic made it easy to find archives since several relevant archives are well-known and easily accessible. Your topic, however, might be about something more obscure, and you may have to determine whether there are even archives available with materials that might be useful for your research. Faculty mentors are important in this regard and should direct undergraduate researchers to appropriate archives if they are familiar with the area of research (see Myhre 2011, 77). There are also free resources available that you can utilize to find archives that might contain documents related to your project. For example, the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections is a searchable database operated by the Library of Congress that includes “archival and manuscript collections held by eligible repositories located throughout the United States and its territories” (National Union). ArchiveGrid is another free website that allows you to search for archives by both topic and geographical location. This easily searchable website includes over 7 million records from 1,500 archival institutions, “bringing together information about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more” (ArchiveGrid).

Using Archives to Develop a Research Question While archives are often crucial places to visit for a specific research project, they can also be useful places to find a research topic. For example, most colleges and universities have archives, typically located in their libraries. These include everything from official documents to artifacts and objects that illustrate various aspects of the institution. In addition, the archives at many universities include collections that have been donated to the university but don’t directly relate to the university itself. One possibility is for undergraduate students at a university founded by a particular religious community to look through the documents in their university archives in an effort to better understand the role of the founding religious community at the university. The topic can start out broadly and narrow down based on what is found. For example, the student might find a significant number of documents from the 1950s that highlight the official role of religion in various aspects of the university, including hiring, specific rules for students living on campus, and

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the types of courses offered. These documents could then be utilized in a research project about the changing role of religion at the university from the 1950s to the present day. Another option would be for a student to explore a collection that has been donated to their university. For example, a student at Duke University who is interested in the early history of Buddhism in the United States might visit their university’s archives to look at the materials collected in the Cambridge Buddhist Association Recordings, 1957–1967 and undated and the D.T. Suzuki Documentary Project Collection, 2002–2005. These two collections include audiovisual material related to D.T. Suzuki, a scholar of Zen Buddhism who was instrumental in introducing Zen Buddhism to people in the United States. Listening to the materials in these two collections could be used to help the student come up with a research question that they could then pursue. For undergraduate students doing their own research projects, we recommend looking at a small collection of items in an archive. Focusing on a particular document/object or a small collection of documents/objects limits the amount of searching and lets you focus on reading and analyzing the items in the archive. In this scenario, it helps for the faculty mentor to identify the specific archives or collections within an archive to keep students focused and their projects moving forward in a timely manner. As Paul Myhre suggests, “faculty hoping to use archival collections and methodologies as a means toward introducing Undergraduate Research ought to first inventory the availability of resources that could address potential research questions” (2011, 77).

Using the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) is an online archive of data related to religion that is both created by and useful to scholars doing research in religious studies. Rather than focusing on typical archival collections, this archive provides data that is useful for a variety of research projects that are not necessarily focused on archival research as the primary source of evidence. For example, if you are doing an ethnographic study of a local religious community (see Chapter 8), you would also want to explore the ARDA since it has congregational data that will help you contextualize your local congregation. Even if archival research is your primary focus, and you are doing most of your research in the archive of a university or religious organization, the ARDA can also be useful to help provide both context and possibly fill in some of the information that is missing from your primary archive. In other words, while this archive is unlikely to be your only source of data, it should probably be considered as a possible source of data regardless of the type of religious studies research you are conducting.

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Archival Methods: Finding and Using Documents to Create Knowledge Iterative Process The purpose of working in archives is to find and use documents to create knowledge. The basic premise is straightforward: items in the archive provide the content and structure of the data, descriptions provided by archivists help provide context for the data, and with the contextually situated data, researchers are able to create knowledge (see Millar 2017, 12–13). In fact, archives exist so researchers, scholars, or really anyone can gather data and find evidence that helps them better explain their subject matter (Millar 2017, 67–68). Yet, the process is anything but straightforward. Not only must the researcher identify which items in the archive are useful for the task at hand, but after making these types of decisions, they must also interpret the documents both individually and collectively. Sometimes a document initially thought relevant becomes less important when other documents are identified; other times documents initially thought irrelevant are reconsidered and brought into the conversation. And sometimes the entire process leads to a dead end. Michael Hill’s guide for doing archival work illustrates this point: In archival work, what you find determines what you can analyze, and what you analyze structures what you look for in archival collections. This is blatantly circular—and points to the necessary provisional and iterative essence of ongoing archival work. Investigations in archives simply cannot be predicted or neatly packaged in methodological formulas that guarantee publishable results. That for me is an attraction, but to others it may seem too indeterminate, too risky. ( Hill 1993, 6) Working in archives, in other words, “is not simply a matter of sifting through documents to discover a few particularly relevant ones,” but rather, “it is a process that requires continual assessment and reassessment of documents and persistent refinement of various research methods” (Myhre 2011, 72). Therefore, as James West Davidson and Mark Lytle point out, archival work doesn’t mean finding the answer to your question just sitting there in the archive but trying to construct your answer with the various documents you find (2010, p. xii). In some cases, the entire research process can be completed in a single archive. In other cases, you will conclude that your current archive has yielded an incomplete set of data and that there are additional archives you should visit. In both cases, you need to be aware that what appears in any archive is the result of someone choosing materials that they believed to be worthy of preservation (Hill 1993, 8–9). Therefore, no matter how much data you have collected,

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there is always data that could have been useful but is either preserved in a different archive or was not preserved in any archive. And even the data you do find will rarely, if ever, be organized in a way that you would organize the data to answer your specific questions. We are pointing this out not to scare away you from doing archival research but to make sure you are aware of what you are looking at when you find documents in archives. Being aware of the nature of your data is important before you begin the process of interpretation. The f luid, nonlinear approach of archival research means that working with a faculty mentor is not only beneficial, but in many situations it is also necessary for undergraduate researchers to get the most out of their experience. In fact, because this type of research is open-ended and can take several years to complete, as an undergraduate research project it works well with the apprenticeship model where undergraduates can be given specific tasks to accomplish while working in an archive. This approach provides opportunities for undergraduate students to do research in an archive or archives over the summer or even during the academic year with their faculty mentor without having to worry about completing the entire project within a particular time frame.

Finding Material Within the Archive Once you have decided which archive you will visit, you will need to determine which items within the archive you want to request. Items in archives typically appear in boxes, binders, or under different category headings in the case of digital archives. Most archives have finding aids with descriptions of what’s included in the different collections that are available. The descriptions in finding aids should be used to determine where you want to begin your search, but at physical archives, it is also helpful to consult with the archivist, who might have insight that is not available in the finding aid. At physical archives, you will need to officially request specific materials, which are kept in a storage area and will be brought to you for your perusal. After getting the materials, you then have to go through the materials, which, depending on the archive, will be in various states of organization. This process becomes a bit of a treasure hunt as you try and find the material that will be useful for your research.

Scanning Documents One of the most important parts of visiting an archive is to prepare yourself for after you’ve left the archive. Since you cannot take the actual materials with you, it is crucial that you take good notes while you are there, and if the archive allows, it is even more important to scan or photograph material that you think might be important for your project. The ubiquity of scanning and camera capabilities on smartphones and tablets makes this much easier in today’s world

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than ever before—imagine scholars way back in the 20th century having to photocopy documents and wait for the film to be developed for 3D objects!—and you must take advantage of the ease with which you can make digital records of any and every item you think might be useful for your research. This is especially the case if you are traveling to visit the archive since it will be expensive and time-consuming to return to the archive if you need to look at items you didn’t scan. When you scan your documents, be sure to make sure you have a record of what you are scanning and where in the archive you found them so you can accurately cite your sources when you use specific documents in your scholarship (see Hill 1993, 54 and 69–73).

Interpreting Documents Interpreting the material found in an archive is a central part of the research process but is not as straightforward as it might seem. Depending on the subject matter, researchers will need various skills just to read or understand what they are looking at in the archive. For example, going through a family archive where the first language of several family members was not English will require knowledge of specific languages. Or, if the archive includes maps, it will be important for the researcher to have a good understanding of how to read maps (Myhre 2011, 76–77). Even with these skills, interpreting primary sources that have not been interpreted by others requires patience and care. The importance of one document might only be identified after looking through dozens or hundreds of additional documents, requiring the researcher to move back and forth between documents as they go through the archive. The ways in which you interpret the documents you find will necessarily depend on the specific documents and the theoretical and methodological approaches you are applying. Therefore, working with a faculty mentor to make sure you are interpreting the evidence appropriately is crucial.

Fitting Into the Bigger Picture Working in archives is typically just one part of a research project, and you will often have to combine the archival work with additional sources of data (Hill 1993, 73–75). In religious studies, you will typically conduct library research for background information and how other scholars have approached your subject (Roof 2013, 75). Depending on the project, you might need to include other methods like textual analysis, archeology, and ethnography. In fact, one of the religious studies ethnographic examples described in Chapter 11—Jamiless Lopez and Professor Angela Tarango’s research at a local church in San Antonio—began as archival research, but for Jamiless, it shifted to a focus on material culture, which involved elements of both historical research and ethnography. This cross-disciplinarity is typical

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in religious studies research, and you should make sure that you consider all methods that might help you answer your research question.

Creating New Archives While the traditional way to work with archives is to utilize the documents located in existing archives, creating new archives or organizing specific collections within an archive also provides opportunities for undergraduate research. Since most scholars in the humanities typically utilize primary sources that are already well-known and available, the importance of collecting and organizing primary source data within the research process is sometimes downplayed as preparation rather than actual research. The reality, however, is that collecting and organizing data is a very important part of the research process, and in the sciences and social sciences, it is a significant part of most research projects. The importance of creating archives for other scholars to use for research becomes very clear when we consider the case of records about the Holocaust that were kept by Pope Pius XII. For decades, scholars wanted access to these records, but it wasn’t until 2020 that they were made available to researchers, thus opening up new avenues of research access to documents that could change what we know about the actions of the Pope during the period (Millar 2017, 68–69; Povoledo 2020). Below are examples of undergraduate research opportunities related to creating physical archives, creating digital archives, and working on finding aids for archives that already exist.

New Archives: Physical Creating a new archive of documents related to the field of religious studies is an opportunity that isn’t always available, but when it is, it can provide opportunities for undergraduate research. For example, after Hurricane Harvey caused severe damage to historical documents at several synagogues in Houston in 2017, Dr. Joshua Furman at Rice University led an effort to create an archive devoted to preserving the history of local Jewish communities (Furman 2018). The initial impetus for the project was a book project that Furman was working on about the history of Meyerland, a traditionally Jewish neighborhood in Houston. Realizing that the data he needed to write his book was at risk of being lost forever because of the f lood damage, he decided to create an archive that included damaged documents that could be salvaged and documents that were unaffected by the f lood. The newly archived documents not only allowed him to continue the research he had planned on doing before the hurricane, but they also preserved important documents that future scholars could use for future research projects about Jewish communities in Houston. Creating an archive requires a lot of infrastructure and expertise, which is something that many universities are in unique situations to provide. As

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Furman put it, “It became clear to me at that point that Rice University had an opportunity to play a really important role in preserving the documentary record of Houston Jewish life. We have a special collections room, we have archivists on staff, and we have historians like myself and my colleagues who know the history of Jewish life in this city and who are in a position to be able to find these documents, acquire them, preserve them, and then make them accessible” (Furman 2018). What Furman doesn’t mention is that creating an archive also provides opportunities for undergraduate students to contribute to the various parts of the archival project. And in fact, several undergraduate students at Rice University have and continue to help with the project (see “Our Team”). While this archive has identified undergraduate students as interns, the work they are doing with their faculty mentor is the same type of work that could be identified as the apprenticeship model of undergraduate research.

New Archives: Digital There is a wide range of opportunities for undergraduates to work with faculty to create digital archives of documents that are important to the field of religious studies. Even more than the creation of physical archives, digitizing documents in existing archives or creating new archives of entirely digitized content can make significant contributions to the field of religious studies. As Joshua Furman astutely points out, “now, more than ever, it is crucial to digitize important historical records about Texas Jewish life and to make them available to the widest possible audience. Not only do we live in a region prone to f looding, which can ruin precious documents and photographs, but now, during the pandemic, physical access to libraries and archives is limited” (Furman 2020). The Houston Jewish History Archive is just one example of an archive with a significant digital component, but it is indicative of an archive that could be created for any religious community—e.g. Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, etc.—that has documents to preserve for future generations. Finding, digitizing, and creating a digital archive of religious materials provides a number of different types of research opportunities for undergraduates. Several of these opportunities can be seen with the example of the Duke University Galilee Database (Flesher and Spigel). This digital archive is a direct follow-up to an article about the lack of access to the data and documents that were created during the excavations of several ancient synagogue buildings (Spigel 2016). The digital archive provides open access to documents that should be considered primary source data but which had previously been available to only a select few. This faculty-driven project focused on providing scholars with access to archaeological data, but it also included several aspects that are

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commonly associated with traditional research projects. For example, undergraduate researchers helped by digitizing the physical documents and entering metadata into the database. While this type of work can be tedious, the process of reading and determining what information on each document needs to be represented in the metadata required a good understanding of archaeological methodology, the sites that were excavated, and the types of research questions historians might be asking when searching for documents. Therefore, the undergraduates who worked on this project did a significant amount of library research to gain a better understanding of the specific excavations, but also archaeological methodology more generally. Undergraduate researchers also helped create the bibliography of associated publications for the database and wrote drafts for the front-end web pages that scholars will use when visiting and searching the database. While this specific project focused on material culture, similar projects can be accomplished in diverse areas of religious studies, including creating digital archives of religious documents, ethnographic field notes, or any other type of document that might be useful to other scholars but is currently unavailable.

FIGURE 7.1

Adam Toler (Trinity ’20) doing archival research at Duke University (Summer 2019).

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Examples of Individual Undergraduate Research Projects When archives get new collections, it is necessary to create order out of the chaos that often exists in boxes and envelopes containing donated or inherited documents. The process of creating a finding aid for the material is itself original research and provides opportunities for undergraduate research projects. In fact, one of my (Chad Spigel) first jobs in graduate school was to go through Duke University’s collection of haggadot—the prayer books used for the Jewish festival meal on Passover—that spanned the globe and nearly 1,000 years, and create a finding aid that future scholars and patrons could use to better understand and search the library’s collection. The research included looking through each haggadah (singular of haggadot) to create a taxonomy of types, finding interesting or unusual features of several items in the collection, doing library research to find information about the different haggadot, and then writing descriptions for the finding aid. Although I was a graduate student at the time, with the guidance of a faculty mentor, the type of work I did can be done by an undergraduate student with basic knowledge of Jewish history and some knowledge of Hebrew. Not only is this real research that undergraduates can accomplish, but it also provides opportunities for students to have their work published. The finding aid I created is still available on the Duke University Library website more than 18 years after I completed the project (Spigel 2004). A second example of an individual undergraduate research project comes from an abstract from the National Conference on Undergraduate Research: Mormon Women and Equal Rights Politics at Utah’s IWY Conference, June 24–25, 1977 by Ruby Lee Johnson (Faculty Mentor: Heikki Lempa; Moravian College) The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon Church) was founded in 1830 in upstate New York. In search of religious freedom, members of the church travelled across the United States and arrived in the Utah territory in July of 1847. Mormon women enjoyed relatively high levels of autonomy in the 19th century, were involved in political activism, and were the first women in the nation granted the right to vote. Their political involvement waned significantly after universal women’s suffrage was achieved in the United States in 1920. After half a century of near apolitical existence, 1977 brought these women back to the forefront of the political arena. This time, however, they were fighting against a piece of legislation meant to guarantee equal rights to women. This paper focuses on Mormon women’s involvement in equal rights politics at Utah’s International Women’s Year (IWY) Conference. Prior to the church announcing its official stance on the Equal Rights Amendment

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(ERA), a majority of residents of the state and legislators were in favor of the proposed amendment, but were persuaded to oppose it once the church announced their objections to the ERA. In 1977, each state in the U.S. held an IWY conference culminating in a national conference in Houston in November. One of the major issues on IWY agendas was the ERA. In response, the church sent out letters encouraging at least 10 women from each ward to go to Utah’s conference which was initially set to host 2,000 women. Over 14,000 women showed up. While the church was largely represented by anti-ERA Mormon women, there were Mormon dissenters there representing a pro-ERA stance. Scholarship of the ERA has largely neglected Mormon involvement. Historians have been divided by whether Mormon women fought against ERA because the church told them to (Bradley) or because they had personal reasons to do so (Young). Analysis of the archival records found in the Utah State and University of Utah Special Collections archives suggests that in the Mormon Church’s battle against the Equal Rights Amendment, Mormon women did not respond as a singular voice, but in multiple antifeminist and feminist movements. Utah’s IWY conference, however, illustrates the power and inf luence the church hierarchy possessed over many members. With this specific project, the student utilized documentary evidence found in archives to do research about the role of women within the Church of LatterDay Saints in the 1970s. Similar collections of archival data can be used by undergraduates to ask a variety of research questions about different religious communities across North America and beyond.

Examples of Archival Research Using the Apprenticeship Model As discussed above, archival research in religious studies is rarely a linear process and takes a significant amount of time to complete. The apprenticeship model, therefore, is useful because it lets students contribute to archival research projects even when they do not have the background or time to complete an entire project. This ability to contribute to a specific part of a long-term project is precisely what took place in the summer of 2013 when Isaiah Ellis, an undergraduate student at Trinity University, worked with Professor Tarango to research religious diversity in 20th-century Navajo communities. The initial goal of this faculty-driven project was to research the life of Jacob Morgan— the Navajo Tribal Chairman and Native sovereignty activist from 1938–1942— and ultimately write a book about “Navajo religious diversity, the history of the Native American Church, or if resources permit, a biographical work about

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Morgan” (“2013 Mellon SURF Projects”). Isaiah’s role was to work with Professor Tarango to find and begin analyzing archival material. Together, the two researchers traveled to the archives at the Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico, where for a week they collected over one thousand documents about Jacob Morgan and then began the long process of interpreting the documents. While an undergraduate student could not have completed this type of project on their own within the typical undergraduate time constraints, working full time during the summer with his faculty mentor gave Isaiah the opportunity to learn how professional archival research in religious studies is done by actually doing archival research. And the experience was beneficial for both the undergraduate student and the faculty mentor. Ref lecting on the experience, Isaiah wrote that he had “never before handled actual documents that existed 80–90 years ago” and that it was something he wanted to do again (Pope-Levison 2013). And Professor Tarango commented that “with just me, it would have taken two weeks, but Isaiah was a fast worker and prepared ahead of time, so I could trust him to do it and do it right” ( Pope-Levison 2013). The Sacred Centers of India project is another example of the apprenticeship model focused on archival research in religious studies, in this case, the creation of a digital archive. This faculty-driven project utilizes an “interdisciplinary approach to organize and digitally curate a collected dataset” of religious material culture from the Hindu city of Gaya, including “a Virtual Reality component, a 3-D model of the Vishnupad temple, a digital database, and GIS information of twenty shrines and temples” (Amar 2021, 200). This complex project, which developed out of Professor Amar’s doctoral research in 2005 and 2006, is a long-term project whose first phase took place from 2013–2018 and is described in detail in “Sacred Centers in India: Archiving Temples and Images of a Hindu City” (Amar 2021). During the first phase of the project, undergraduate students contributed by creating a standardized form and format for listing data, creating metadata, setting up the internal server and archive, creating a VR model of the Vishnupada temple, and promoting the project (Amar 2021, 205–211). The work the undergraduates did was complex, which meant that it required both training by and collaboration with Professor Amar and the Digital Humanities Initiative Development team at Hamilton College (2021, 205). But hard work is something that should be expected for a project that “has been helpful in protecting, preserving, and researching heritage” and providing a VR model and data that can be used within the religious studies classroom (Amar 2021, 213). This is a great example of a project that would be impossible for undergraduates to complete on their own, but as a facultydriven project it provides numerous opportunities for undergraduates to make important contributions. A final example of the apprenticeship model is a project titled “Mapping Islamophobia.” This project, which is described in detail in “Mapping Anti-Muslim

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Hostility and its Effects” (Elfenbein et al. 2021), was similar to the previous one in that it was a faculty-driven public-facing digital humanities project where undergraduate students truly collaborated with their faculty mentor to create an online database. In this case, Professor Caleb Elfenbein’s goal was to collect data on anti-Muslim hostility from media sources, categorize the data, and geographically locate each incident on a map (Elfenbein et al. 2021, 251–252). Students were involved from the beginning of the project, working on collecting the data from media sources, entering the data into the database, and even helping develop a second phase for the project (Elfenbein et al. 2021, 253). The results of the project are publicly available at https://www.grinnell.edu/user/elfenbei. There are a number of elements that make this type of project especially effective for undergraduate research. First, as Professor Elfenbein points out, it involved “a pretty straightforward though time consuming process” that “required many people working on the project at once” to complete in a reasonable amount of time (Elfenbein et al. 2021, 252). And while it might be tempting to say that the collection of data on a website doesn’t count as scholarly research, Julia Schafer and Farah Omer, two undergraduate researchers who worked on the project, clearly and carefully explain how the very process of collecting and choosing data for the website is a form of scholarly analysis that both shapes and limits the analysis and conclusions of students and scholars who use their database (Elfenbein et al. 2021, 255–264). Second, the project focused on a contemporary issue that students thought was both interesting, important, and could really have an impact on others. As Farah Omer, one of the undergraduate researchers, explains, “by drawing attention to the relationship between anti-Muslim activity and Muslim public outreach and engagement, we attempt to bridge the divide between scholarship and activism, creating space for the two to inform and enrich each other” (Elfenbein et al. 2021, 262). Third, the project provided opportunities for students to learn various aspects of doing research, from the rote work of collecting and categorizing data to more complex roles like struggling with methodological questions about what counts as reliable data and taking primary responsibility for a particular part of the project. The latter role provided the faculty mentor with the time to “take a broader view of the project and to develop related scholarly work” (Elfenbein et al. 2021, 254). In other words, students benefited from having the opportunity to be a part of high-level decision-omaking during the research process—in this case, deciding which data to include and exclude from the website (Elfenbein et al. 2021, 256–258)—and the faculty mentor benefited from having true research partners making important contributions to the project. As two of the undergraduate researchers and their faculty mentor explained in an article they co-authored about the project, each brought “different skills, experience, and sensibilities to this project” and their collaboration “made this project much richer than it would be otherwise” (Elfenbein et al. 2021, 265).

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Questions for Students How are archives used by scholars in religious studies? How do archival documents become religious studies data? What types of archives can be created to assist in religious studies research? Questions for Faculty Are there local archival collections that might provide opportunities for undergraduate research projects? Are there components of my archival research that could be worked on by an undergraduate? Is there an opportunity to create an archive that would both benefit my research and provide opportunities for undergraduate students?

Bibliography “2013 Mellon SURF Projects.” Mellon Initiative at Trinity University. Accessed on April 4, 2022. www.trinity.edu/sites/mellon-initiative/surf-program/surf-projects/ 2013-mellon-surf-projects Amar, Abhishek. 2021. “Sacred Centers in India: Archiving Temples and Images of a Hindu City.” In Digital Humanities and Research Methods in Religious Studies an Introduction, edited by Christopher D. Cantwell and Kristian Petersen, 199–213. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH. ArchiveGrid. Accessed on January 29, 2022. https://researchworks.oclc.org/archivegrid/ “Archives.” Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. Accessed on March 4, 2022. www.auschwitz.org/en/museum/archives/ Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). www.thearda.com/ Cambridge Buddhist Association Recordings, 1957–1967 and Undated. Duke University Libraries. https://archives.lib.duke.edu/catalog/cambridgebuddhistassociationrecordings Davidson, James West, and Mark H. Lytle. 2010. After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. D.T. Suzuki Documentary Project Collection, 2002–2005. Duke University Libraries. https://archives.lib.duke.edu/catalog/suzukidt Elfenbein, Caleb, Bakaari, Farah, and Schafer, Julia. 2021. “Mapping Anti-Muslim Hostility and Its Effects.” In Digital Humanities and Research Methods in Religious Studies an Introduction, edited by Christopher D. Cantwell and Kristian Petersen, 249–70. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH. Flesher, Paul V. M., and Chad Spigel. “DUG: Duke University Galilee Database.” Accessed on August 27, 2022. www-lib.uwyo.edu/digital/DUG/index.php/CMainPages/index/ Furman, Joshua. 2018. “Houston Jewish History Archive with Joshua Furman.” Interview with Jason Lustig. Jewish History Matters, Podcast transcript, February 11, 2018. Accessed on February 16, 2022. www.jewishhistory.fm/houston-jewish-history-ar chive-with-joshua-furman/ Furman, Joshua. 2020. “30 Years of Beth Yeshurun History, Digitized, and at Your Fingertips.” Jewish Herald-Voice, October 22, 2020. https://jhvonline.com/years-ofbeth-yeshurun-history-digitized-and-at-your-fingertips-p28258-313.htm

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Hill, Michael R. 1993. Archival Strategies and Techniques. Newbury Park: Sage Publications. Millar, Laura A. 2017. Archives: Principles and Practices. London: Facet Publishing. Myhre, Paul O. 2011. “Exploring Archival Material.” In Teaching Undergraduate Research in Religious Studies, edited by Bernadette McNary-Zak and Rebecca Todd Peters, 69–81. Oxford: Oxford University Press. National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections. Accessed on January 29, 2022. www.loc. gov/coll/nucmc/about.html Our Team. Houston Jewish History Archive. https://jewishstudies.rice.edu/hjha-team “Plan a Visit.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Accessed on March 4, 2022. www.ushmm.org/collections/plan-a-research-visit/visit-the-library-and-archives Pope-Levison, Chloe. 2013. “Researching Former Navajo Tribal Chairman J.C. Morgan.” Trinitonian, September 6, 2013. https://trinitonian.com/2013/09/06/researchingformer-navajo-tribal-chairman-j-c-morgan/ Povoledo, Elisabetta. 2020. “Unsealed Archives Give Fresh Clues to Pope Pius XII’s Response to the Holocaust.” New York Times, August 28, 2020. www.nytimes. com/2020/08/28/world/europe/pope-pius-xii-jews-vatican-archives.html Roof, Wade Clark. 2013. “Research Design.” In The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion, edited by Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler, 68–80. London and New York: Routledge. Spigel, Chad, processor. 2004. Duke University Libraries Collection of Haggadot, 1200– 2003 (bulk 1900–2003). Accessed on August 21, 2022. https://archives.lib.duke. edu/catalog/haggadot Spigel, Chad. 2016. “Debating Ancient Synagogue Dating: The Implications of Deteriorating Data.” BASOR 376: 83–100.

8 ETHNOGRAPHY

Summary This chapter introduces ethnography as an approach to studying religion and religious communities. We begin by describing ethnography in some detail to provide students with an understanding of the process and the issues associated with this particular academic approach within the field of religious studies. Focusing on the types of questions that can be answered using these methods and the benefits and limits of doing fieldwork, students will learn how various ethnographic methods can be used to gain comprehensive understanding of religious people and their communities. The chapter ends with examples of several different types of ethnographic research in religious studies to provide ideas to both faculty and students.

Ethnography in Religious Studies In religious studies, ethnography is an approach in which the researcher does fieldwork to gain a comprehensive understanding of living religious groups or communities. Doing ethnographic fieldwork includes utilizing surveys, interviews, statistics, tests, and other methods to gather data about the group, but to truly understand a particular community, an ethnographer also “eats with the group, works with them, relaxes with them, and hopefully comes to understand them” (Agar 1980, 6). Because this type of research is necessarily f luid and f lexible (O’Reilly 2005, 27), it can be extremely time-consuming and can take several years and even decades to complete. Doing ethnographic research as part of an undergraduate research project in religious studies, however, does not have to be all-or-nothing. In fact, when broken down into the various DOI: 10.4324/9781003174110-8

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types of ethnographic methods, it is possible for undergraduate students to both conduct ethnographic research and make original contributions to the field. Ethnographic research is an ideal approach for doing undergraduate research in religious studies because religious communities exist in nearly every location where universities are found. Even some of the smallest college towns offer opportunities for getting into the field and doing ethnographic research. As Jeffrey Brackett points out, “I assumed that students would have a great difficulty locating religiously diverse groups in and around Muncie, Indiana. I was wrong” (Brackett 2011, 97). Brackett goes on to identify the diverse local religious communities where his students have conducted fieldwork, including but not limited to several different Christian denominations, an Islamic center, various Buddhist communities, and a Baha’i community (Brackett 2011, 97–98). While ethnographic research has likely been conducted in similar communities in other locations, little, if anything, has been published about most local religious communities, making them potential opportunities for original research. While religious studies faculty regularly utilize ethnography in their research, the types of ethnographic research undergraduate students can conduct will be limited by the natural f low of student life. Addressing a specific question about a community and utilizing a single ethnographic method might be feasible for an undergraduate research project done by the student alone, but it is unrealistic to expect a student to do a comprehensive ethnography of any religious community, no matter how small. This is what makes ethnographic research particularly conducive to the apprenticeship model.

Preparing to Do Ethnographic Research Before stepping into the field to conduct your research, it is important to prepare yourself by learning about the various methods utilized by ethnographers. Some of this preparation can be accomplished in a classroom setting. Although some courses in religious studies departments will provide introductions to these methods, students can learn these methods and are more likely to find entire courses dedicated to them in the sociology and anthropology departments. If you have not yet taken a course that teaches ethnographic methods, we recommend that you consult the following books, which do a particularly good job of introducing the method. Religion: The Social Context by Meredith McGuire (2008) provides a great introduction to how the ethnographic approach can be used to learn about religious communities as well as a useful appendix written for undergraduate students interested in conducting field research. Ethnographic Methods by Karen O’Reilly (2005) provides a history of the field and introduces the reader to the nuts and bolts of the ethnographic methods discussed below. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes by Emerson et al. (2011) goes even further and

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provides practical advice for recording and analyzing what you observe in the field. Finally, we recommend reading the introduction to Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn by Karen McCarthy Brown (1991). The introduction to this ethnography does a wonderful job of discussing the difficulties and complexities of doing ethnographic research in general and in religious studies specifically. Faculty mentors should also play a role in directing students to books and articles that will provide information about the specific methods that will be utilized for their specific research project. Another way we recommend learning ethnographic methods is by applying them in the field. This is because unlike some of the other research methods we discuss—e.g., analyzing texts or even interpreting archaeological evidence—it is difficult to simulate the act of doing ethnography in the classroom or by reading books. To really understand doing original research in this manner, it is important to actually do ethnography. While this experience can be gained through individual research projects like the religious studies site-visit projects discussed in Chapter 1, the apprenticeship model provides an opportunity for undergraduate students to have their faculty mentor guide them through the experience.

Participant Observer The primary method utilized in ethnographic research is participant observation, which involves learning about people by “observing them, participating in their lives, and asking questions that relate to the daily life experience as we have seen and experienced it” (O’Reilly 2005, 85). While ethnography includes gathering data in other ways (e.g., interviews and surveys), which will be discussed below, the act of participant observation is a powerful approach that is central to studying living religious communities. For religious studies, participant observation is a way for researchers to learn about what really happens in a religious community as opposed to how members of that community might describe themselves in interviews or published documents. Of course, before beginning the process of doing participant observation, it is important to do background research to learn more generally about the religious community you are studying. For example, if you are going to be a participant-observer at a local Sikh Gurdwara in order to learn more about gender roles, you will want to read scholarly literature about Sikhism, Gurdwaras, and gender roles within Sikh communities. This background research provides a starting point for your research, but the role of the participant-observer is to pay attention to what actually takes place, which might not conform to what you expect to take place based on what you have read. In the Sikh Gurdwara example, you might have read about typical gender roles in Sikh Gurdwaras, and in an interview, a member of the local Sikh community might have actually told you that what you read is followed locally, but as a participant observer

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you might observe things that don’t align with the “official” descriptions or the adherent’s self-perception. Participant observation includes two parts: participating and observing. The former is the more difficult part for you as an outsider since, in the beginning, you are not really part of the community you are studying. Yet, it is a crucial component if you want to truly become part of the group, so you stop being a novelty to the community, and they start acting as if you were not there observing them. There is an uneasy tension inherent in being both a participant and an observer, and as a scholar, your role as an observer is more important than your role as a participant. You must participate to some degree—it is important to work towards the goal of making community members comfortable enough with your presence that they stop acting in certain ways for your benefit—but too much participation risks both losing one’s objectivity and failing to make meaningful academic observations (O’Reilly 2005, 101–109). Therefore, it is necessary to keep your research goals in mind even while you become more comfortable with your community and they become more comfortable with you. The observation part of the method is where you collect your data and is, therefore, the most important part of being a participant-observer. There are a number of steps you will need to take to effectively observe your community in a way that allows you to gather the type of data that will help you answer your research question. First, you will need to gain access to observe your community. The means of gaining access will depend on your specific project and the community that you are observing and is something that should be determined in conversation with your faculty mentor. Regardless of the details of your project, if you are using the participant-observer method, you will need to do so in an ethical way. This includes applying for IRB approval and following all IRB guidelines, which includes asking the community for access, telling the community what you are researching, and making sure that you are not collecting and disseminating information that might cause harm to the community you are observing. Even if you get IRB approval there are some communities that will not grant access. For these situations, you will have to explore other methods to help you answer your research questions. For communities to which you have been given access, you will need to prepare to effectively observe. This includes determining when, where, and how many times you will observe the community. You should plan on visiting and observing your community several times if your goal is to do a thorough job. The first few visits will probably be spent learning about the community and what you need to focus on, so it is important that you don’t try and rush the process. You will also need to create a plan for taking notes, which is not as easy as it might seem. In most cases, you won’t be able to take your notes as you make the observations but will have to wait until the end of your visit to write down everything you observed. Of course, you won’t be able to remember

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everything, so you will need to make many decisions about what should be noted and what might not be relevant. This process is iterative, and what you deem unimportant one day will turn out to be important in subsequent visits. Furthermore, you will make mistakes and forget to write things down or remember things incorrectly and thereby take notes that don’t ref lect what you actually observed. Being aware of what you are certain of and less certain of— and taking note of this—is a crucial part of the process. As Karen O’Reilly bluntly points out, “participation-observation takes time” (2005, 92). Not only does it take time to gain access to your community, but it takes time to become part of the community once you have access, and then it takes time to observe all of the details and nuances that only become clear once you feel comfortable with the community and the community becomes comfortable with you. Time also allows you to notice the ebb and f low of community life, which cannot be gained if you only visited the community once or twice (O’Reilly 2005, 92–95). Although time is a necessary component for this type of research, and it sometimes takes years to complete the process, depending on the scope of your research topic, it might be possible to complete an ethnographic project in a few months (O’Reilly 2005, 94). Undergraduate students wanting to apply this method for their own original research projects, therefore, need to work with their faculty mentors to make sure the scope of their project fits within the time constraints of undergraduate life. Faculty-driven ethnographic projects, on the other hand, can usually be structured to provide opportunities for undergraduates to contribute to parts of the project that fit within their time constraints.

Interviews and Surveys Included in the participant-observer method but also utilized as stand-alone ways to gather data are interviews and surveys. As an ethnographer, you might do several informal interviews as part of your research—for example, talking to various people during your time as a participant-observer—but our focus in this section is on an approach where you create a set of questions that will hopefully yield answers that will help you answer your research question. Whereas participant observation allows you as a researcher to observe what actually takes place in the community you are researching, interviews and surveys allow you to dig deeper into the beliefs, ideas, and self-perceptions of either specific individuals or larger groups of people within the community. While both of these methods are essentially ways to gather information directly from individuals, and you may, in fact, start with essentially the same list of questions, the method you choose will depend on whether you are doing qualitative or quantitative research. Interviews of individuals, for example, allow you to create a rapport with your interviewee and ask follow-up questions based on their initial responses.

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Interviews take a lot of time, and as an undergraduate researcher, you will probably not have enough time to conduct enough individual interviews to turn the qualitative data into data that is quantifiable. Therefore, interviews are a great option for research questions that focus on small case studies. If your goal is to make generalizations about a particular subject within a single community or across several communities, then you need to gather similar data from a large number of people, which can be done with surveys. Surveys allow you to ask the same set of questions to large numbers of people in a relatively short period of time, which creates a standardized set of data allowing you to quantify the data and make generalizations. Of course, both methods can be utilized in the same project, so it is important to think about what your goals are before beginning and utilizing the method or methods that will most effectively accomplish your goals. Within the field of religious studies, interviews and surveys provide opportunities to learn about the nuances of specific religious communities in ways that might differentiate this particular group from other groups that identify as part of the same religious community. For example, you could interview several members of a local Hindu temple in an effort to understand how their beliefs and practices compare with what has been published about Hindu beliefs and practices in the United States more generally. You will want to write your questions in a way that will get your interviewees to provide data that will help you answer your research question but also allows them to expand in ways that you might not expect. A semi-structured interview that begins with a list of specific questions, which allows you to make comparisons between several interviews but allows you to ask follow-up questions based on what has already been said, is an effective way to discover information that you may not have even considered prior to the interview (O’Reilly 2005, 116–119). Although interviews are a great way to gather information about your research question, you should be aware that interviews don’t always yield honest or accurate information. Ethnographers must always remember that some interviewees will answer questions in ways they think they should rather than with answers that actually ref lect their beliefs and actions (O’Reilly 2005, 127). If you suspect that your interviews result in data that fits too much with the “party line,” you might have to compare the results of multiple interviews and/ or combine your interviews with participant observation to effectively interpret your results (O’Reilly 2005, 154–155).

Examples of Ethnographic Research Projects Focusing on Local Communities Although ethnographic research in religious studies can be conducted anywhere in the world, local communities provide countless opportunities for original research. This is especially true for undergraduate research projects,

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where the researchers are often limited in terms of funding, travel, and the time they will be able to commit to the research project. This section, therefore, focuses on examples of ethnographic research conducted by undergraduate researchers—both individually and collaboratively with faculty mentors—in the communities surrounding their universities. One of the longest-running examples of ethnographic research in religious studies conducted by undergraduates is the Community Religions Project at the University of Leeds, which began in 1976 and continues to this day. The project provides opportunities for students to conduct research on religion and religions in the area surrounding the university and has resulted in a website that archives the results of over forty years of research into the religious landscape of West Yorkshire. The research projects archived on the website show how undergraduates within the context of a university course are able to conduct original research through fieldwork by focusing on local communities and their unique attributes. As Ujjwala Harshavardhan’s comment about her fieldwork at a local Sikh Gurdwara illustrates, “this fieldwork project also allowed me to see how a diaspora community integrates with and adds to British society. Actually going to visit meant that I had a much clearer understanding than from books alone” (Places of Worship in Leeds). Furthermore, as a collection of case studies about different religious communities and places, the project as a whole showcases the unique diversity of the religious landscape surrounding the University of Leeds. There are several examples of undergraduate research projects that utilized interviews to gather data in Colby University’s Maine Jewish History project, a long-term project that includes research done by both faculty and undergraduate students beginning in 2010. One especially good example is an article titled “Food and Jewish Identity in Waterville” by Madeline Kurtz (Colby ’14). In 2011, Madeline conducted her own interviews with Jewish residents of Waterville and utilized interviews that had been conducted by other students and faculty to do original research about the unique role of lobster as “Jewish” food in Maine. While the interviews revealed that Jews in Maine approached the Jewish concept of unkosher food like pork in ways that mirrored Jews throughout the United States, it also revealed that Maine’s Jews were unique in their treatment of lobster despite the fact that both foods are prohibited by the Torah. According to Kurtz, “since pork is not a part of Maine culture, some Jews choose to follow kashrut and not eat it. However, since lobster is such an important aspect of life in Maine, they eat it” (2011). Kurtz could have determined that many of Maine’s Jews eat lobster through participant observation, but it is only through the use of interviews that she was able to gather personal stories and histories that allowed her to offer an explanation for why this is the case. Another example involves a collaboration between Professor Simran Singh and Benjamin Collinger (Trinity ’19) at Trinity University in San Antonio,

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was titled “Developing a Religious Diversity Profile of San Antonio” (2017). This was a summer research project that applied the apprenticeship model and utilized both interviews and surveys to gain a better understanding of the array of faith-based communities in San Antonio, how they interacted with each other, and how they interacted with the city government. During the summer of 2016, and under the mentorship of Professor Singh, Benjamin Collinger conducted 30 in-person interviews and received surveys from 102 respondents from various backgrounds, faith communities, and non-profit organizations, with a focus on people from underrepresented religious communities, including Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs. The data they gathered in the interviews and surveys were then used by the research team to co-author a white paper that assessed inclusion in San Antonio and made recommendations that the city government could use to uphold its non-discrimination ordinance and inform its efforts to proactively end institutional discrimination within government and around the city.

Sample Abstracts From National Council for Undergraduate Research In this section, we provide a few sample abstracts from student presentations at different NCUR conferences. In each case, the student applied ethnographic

FIGURE 8.1

Benjamin Collinger (Trinity ’19) works with Professor Simran Singh on the Religious Diversity Profile of San Antonio.

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methods to better understand something about religion or religions in their local communities. When combined with the examples provided above, these abstracts show how ethnographic methods provide opportunities for students to explore a variety of research questions about diverse communities without having to travel very far. Two Buddhisms: Analyzing Convert Communities in Historical and Contemporary Contexts by Mariya A. Khan and Emily C. Hall (Faculty Mentor: Dr. Mark Berkson; Hamline University) As religions spread around the globe, they alter and adapt to fit new cultures. Buddhism, upon reaching the United States, has experienced numerous changes as its various traditions necessarily adapt. This process plays out in distinct American Buddhist groups, namely “immigrant” and “convert” Buddhists. “Immigrant” Buddhists, composed of Asian immigrants and refugees and their descendants, face the challenges of preserving their culture, while young “convert” communities, composed almost entirely of middle class, white Americans seek to transform themselves and the traditions they identify with. These “convert” communities are the focus of our research. Still a relatively new phenomenon, scholarly work remains to be done in terms of understanding their Buddhist identity and community. Through first person interviewing and consultation of scholarly, academic accounts, we have compiled the history of convert Buddhism in the Twin Cities area. This includes biographical information on founding figures and established institutions and their offshoots, which we have placed in context of the wider American convert communities. No outstanding scholarship on Buddhism in the Midwest region exists in the historical narrative thus far, with the majority of attention given to communities on the East and West coasts, California and New York in particular. We find that the Twin Cities convert communities are interconnected cross-regionally with many other communities, sharing leadership and lineage, while possessing much of their own local character. Through surveys we have characterized the individuals and communities that comprise this subgroup among American Buddhism as a whole. Our survey features seven categories: demographic information, relationship with Buddhism, knowledge of Buddhism, Buddhist practice and activities, teachers and instruction, beliefs concerning Buddhism, levels of diversity at the institution, diversity needs at institution, and levels of inclusion at institution. We address diversity in race, gender, age, and socioeconomic status. Through our data we establish common trends in beliefs and practice of convert communities, such as focus on meditation and personal transformation and skepticism towards rebirth, and

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address the challenges to the future of convert Buddhist communities, such as the low racial diversity and a strong need for increased racial diversity identified by respondents. Altogether, our research adds a necessary piece to the narrative surrounding Buddhism in the United States with the addition of a new regional focus, and lays the groundwork for essential directions in future research that must address the challenges facing convert communities as they establish and begin a second generation. The History of the Clear Lake Islamic Center by Ameera Mustafa (Faculty Mentor: Eddie Weller; San Jacinto College) While religious institutions are focal points around which communities grow, in some cases the community also affects and even changes the institution. Such is the case of the Clear Lake Islamic Center located near the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The mosque is located in the most culturally diverse city in the nation and in an area of high education levels near NASA; many of the members are either engineers or physicians. This mosque has developed a unique approach, such as having openings between the male and female prayer areas, working with a local Christian church in sharing property and increasing local interfaith knowledge, unifying people of diverse ethnic and national backgrounds, and hosting local political candidates to share their views. This paper explains the transition of the Nasa Musallah into the current, unique mosque. It highlights the values and visions of the founders to build a community based on religious knowledge free of any bias towards a particular culture. This paper is based on primary sources, including interviews with many people involved in the founding of the mosque as well as records from the mosque and newspapers. No one has ever written or published on this subject before, so it is all new research. Migration and Identity: Gender Dynamics and Religious Participation Among Sikh Women in North Carolina by Melina Oliverio (Faculty Mentor: Dr. Amy Allocco; Elon University) This paper relies on extended ethnographic research at The Sikh Gurdwara of North Carolina in Durham, North Carolina, where I have been engaging in participant observation and conducting semi-structured interviews for the past year. Within my broader project examining how transnational Sikhs construct and negotiate their religious identities, gender roles and issues related to women’s religious participation and ritual leadership have emerged as significant among both first- and

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second-generation members of this community. Both men and women describe how gender expectations may diverge in practice from Sikh ideals associated with gender equality. A number of my informants emphasize that although gender roles within the Sikh community in North Carolina are inf luenced by living in the United States, they are still shaped by these individuals’ South Asian cultural heritage and its traditionally patriarchal norms. Drawing on my observations, as well as individual narratives and interview texts, my paper offers insights into how Sikh Americans are negotiating multiple identities in their transnational contexts and argues that the complex opinions over gender equality in Sikhism can be indexed to the different stages of translating religious identity. In this paper I also devote attention to the impact of age on perceptions about gender and religion, as younger Sikhs typically express the belief that equality should not only be a reality, but is also likely to be achieved, while older Sikhs often observe that gender equality is the goal, but are less optimistic that significant changes in gender dynamics will occur in their lifetimes because most people are too firmly entrenched in the patriarchal culture of their homeland.

Suggested Research Topics for Individual Student Research • • • • • •

Participant-Observer exploration of unique local worship practices of a specific local religious community. Participant-Observer exploration of gender roles within a specific local religious community. Interviewing local religious leaders about interfaith efforts. Interviewing members of a local religious community to learn about a particular aspect of their religious identity. Surveying members of a single local religious community to determine similarities and differences in views on various subjects. Surveying members of multiple local religious communities to determine similarities and differences in views on various subjects. Questions for Students Is it possible to complete the ethnographic study I’m considering within my time constraints? Which ethnographic method will help me gather the type of data I need to answer my research question? Questions for Faculty Which local religious communities might provide opportunities for student-led undergraduate research projects?

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Are there faculty-driven research projects in the department with elements for undergraduate researchers to contribute?

Bibliography Agar, Michael. 1980. The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction to Ethnography. Studies in Anthropology. New York: Academic Press. Brackett, Jeffrey M. 2011. “Sending Students into the Field.” In Teaching Undergraduate Research in Religious Studies, edited by Bernadette McNary-Zak and Rebecca Todd Peters, 95–105. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Karen McCarthy. 1991. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press. Collinger, Benjamin, and Simran Jeet Singh. 2017. “Developing a Religious Diversity Profile of San Antonio.” http://sacompassion.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ developing-religious-diversity-profile-san-antonio-trinity-university.pdf Community Religions Project. University of Leeds. Accessed on January 18, 2022. https://crp.leeds.ac.uk/ Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw. 2011. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Kurtz, Madeline. 2011. “Food and Identity in Waterville.” Colby’s Maine’s Jewish History Project. https://web.colby.edu/jewsinmaine/kennebec/food/ McGuire, Meredith B. 2008. Religion: The Social Context. Fifth Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Thomson Learning. O’Reilly, Karen. 2005. Ethnographic Methods. London and New York: Routledge. Places of Worship in Leeds. Accessed on January 18, 2022. https://crp.leeds.ac.uk/ religion-in-leeds/places-of-worship/

9 TEXTUAL STUDY

Summary Studying foundational texts of religious traditions has been around for a long time—it is one of the oldest forms of the study of religion and predates modern religious studies by hundreds of years. In a number of religious traditions that developed scriptures or sacred texts, the study of the texts was typically practiced by insiders with the goal of understanding the nature of the deity and how to live in relation to that deity. This way of reading texts is, in a sense, part of the field of theology. The study of religious texts—whether foundational texts or not—is no longer the domain of insiders or the province of theology. In the field of religious studies, the ways in which texts can be studied and explored defy simple classification. It includes historical contextualization, questions regarding historical sources, and a broad range of literary approaches, some of which are discussed in this chapter.

Sacred Texts Sacred or foundational texts exist in a number of different religious traditions, but we will use the study of the Bible as a way to chart how the study of religious texts has changed over time. For much of the last two millennia, the study of biblical texts—that is, the foundational texts that make up the Tanakh for Judaism and the Old and New Testaments for Christianity—has taken place in the context of believing communities. And the purpose of interpretation was to understand what the deity wanted to communicate to believers through the medium of sacred scriptures. Through the middle ages, reading strategies centered on literal, moral, allegorical, and analogical modes of reading the biblical DOI: 10.4324/9781003174110-9

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texts, but always from an insider’s perspective. The intellectual and scientific revolutions of the 18th century—referred to typically as the “Enlightenment”— led to the emergence of critical tools and an interest in reason and rationality that effectively created the beginnings of the modern academic disciplines that we now find in any college and university. An interest in the classical world and its languages and the development of the modern tools of history allowed for the study of biblical texts as products of history. With that came a comparison to other contemporary cultures and their literature and an interest in contextualizing biblical texts. Even if biblical studies still took place primarily in theology departments and seminaries, the goal of biblical studies from this point forward was an ideally objective understanding that distinguished the approach of biblical studies from the study of scripture (Davies 2014, 40–42). That trajectory has continued, and, in the last fifty years, accelerated as the number of approaches, theories, and methods that have proven useful to understanding the biblical and related texts have grown exponentially. The particulars of how the study of texts, including foundational texts or scriptures, has changed over time will vary depending on the particular religious tradition, but in the context of religious studies, all texts are now explored with a broad range of historical and literary tools and approaches.

Working With Textual Evidence Before looking at the range of methods and approaches used to study texts in the field of religious studies, it is worth addressing what it means to use and rely on texts and literary material in our research. Religious texts, and especially foundational texts, are often used to introduce students to particular religious traditions. As a result, learning to do research on and ask questions about texts is often one of the first steps students in religious studies take, whether at the undergraduate or graduate level. But it’s not necessarily an intuitive step, so it’s worth addressing brief ly since analyzing texts and using evidence from texts is one of the basic steps in any kind of textual or literary research project. In one way or another, research projects that involve texts, whether they are narratives, letters, or sermons, require supporting analytical claims by pointing to or appealing to the texts being studied. Whether researching a particular section of a text, the themes that appear in a narrative, or particular keywords, at some point the researcher needs to refer to the text under analysis. That’s when words become data that are both the subject of the research and the evidence used to support the analysis and argument. But it’s important to remember that any text to which a researcher appeals needs to be reinterpreted. To do that, as the authors of the Harvard Divinity School “Guide to Writing in Religious Studies” point out, you first need to summarize or restate in your own words what you think the text can mean. Then, more importantly, you need to analyze the quoted text or passage, which you do “by noting

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something in it that is not on the surface: most dramatically, a contradiction in it or a subtext that the author did not intend or less dramatically (but more commonly), an interesting ramification it suggests or an implicit connection you see it has to other points” (Halperin et al. 2007, 19). Of course, the analysis will depend on the particular research question or methodological approach (which we discuss below). But it is important to remember that quotations are not self-explanatory. The final step is connecting the interpretation of a passage to the argument. Beyond the basics of how to handle textual evidence, what research projects focusing on texts can look like will be determined by the particular text that is the focus of the research project and what one considers a text, and the particular approach one chooses.

What Is a Text? How we define texts relevant in the study of religion is broad, not limited to texts considered scripture within particular traditions, and extends to texts that interact with earlier religious texts or texts that document a particular moment in the history of a community or particular religious tradition. For example, texts that are the subject of religious studies research can include texts produced in the first few centuries of the development of Christianity, including the Gospel of Thomas and the writings of Augustine; medieval Muslim philosophers and poets like Rumi; Jewish mystic writings like the Bahir and Zohar; Buddhist Tantric texts like the Hevajra Tantra; Hindu epics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana; the sermons of Jonathan Edwards; 18th century British pamphlets and gospel tracts; novels engaging foundational texts; the list could go on and on. The reality is that in the context of religious studies, just about anything that has words that can be used to gain insight into a particular religious individual or community counts as a text.

Methods and Approaches The academic study of religious texts, including foundational texts or scripture, is today not that different from the academic study of literature of any type. Scholars apply the available range of theoretical approaches and theories to religious texts. The range of approaches can include, but is not limited to, historical contextualization, literary analysis, rhetorical analysis, applying narrative theory, cultural studies approaches, feminist readings, colonial and post-colonial readings, and ecocriticism (Tyson 2006; Parker 2011). In a recent survey and analysis of the field of biblical studies itself, Phillip R. Davies notes the importance of recognizing “that biblical studies is a branch of the human sciences” (Davies 2014, 35). A quick look at any recent program of an American Academy of Religion or Society of Biblical Literature conference confirms Davies’ point

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and illustrates the broad range of approaches applied to texts from a variety of religious traditions. This same range of approaches can be seen in the projects of undergraduate researchers that will serve as examples of the kinds of textual research that can be done. For example, at the 2015 NCUR meeting Kyle Dipre presented on his research analyzing the rhetorical strategies in Rev. Anna Howard Shaw’s suffrage speeches, in 2013 Tiara Haffenbredl applied an ecocritical approach to a comparative study of how the concept of “wilderness” is used in the biblical book of Job and essays by John Muir and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and in 2015 Erin Palmer carried out a literary and rhetorical analysis of the function of imagined sacred space in biblical books of Ezekiel and Revelation. Palmer’s research was subsequently published (Palmer 2015). Another example of literary analysis can be seen in the research of Dana Hatab, who worked on a project designed by her mentor, Dr. Gregory Clines: Hero Among Heroes: The Story of Rāma in Hemacandra’s Triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣacarita by Dana Hatab (Faculty Mentor: Gregory Clines, Trinity University) Vālmīki’s Rāmāyana is a Hindu epic narrating the tales of prince Rāmā, an avatar of the God Vishnu, as he defeats a demon threatening worldly order. Jain authors have rewritten the Rāmāyana story numerous times, and one version, found in Hemacandra’s Triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣacarita (‘The Lives of the ̣ Sixty-Three Illustrious Men’), lists Rāmā as a profound figure in Jain universal history. While Hemacandra is recognized as a significant contributor to Jain literature and philosophy, little work has been done specifically on the Triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣacarita. Thus, our research will primarily serve to analyze ̣ the narrative of Rāmā from the Triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣacarita with an emphasis on how the story defines morality and is used as a means of developing virtuous ̣ Jain persons. In seeking to understand the widely inf luential nature of the Rāmāyana, particularly in how it has manifested in Jain literature in regards to differing perceptions of morality, our research will culminate in a bibliography on Hemacandra, a bibliography on the genre, as well as an academic article. The last two examples involved research on texts written originally in Hebrew, Greek, and Sanskrit. And while the students did not have advanced knowledge of those languages, they were able to productively carry out their analyses using high-quality translations and original language aids such as lexica and commentaries. We’ll have more to say on the so-called language hurdle for undergraduate research in the next chapter.

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Another research possibility is studying the reception of earlier texts by later texts. Two examples illustrate very different ways in which this can be approached. Erin Conley’s 2009 study of the Gospel of Mary, a text discovered in 1896, focused not on the text itself but on the history of scholarship to examine how and to what end the text has been used by scholars. Gender in the History of Scholarship of the Gospel of Mary, by Erin Conley (Faculty Mentor Kristi Upson-Saia, Occidental College) Though canonical literature often relegates Mary to a position of secondary theological importance, the Gospel of Mary paints the protagonist Mary Magdalene as a disciple of Jesus, a woman with apostolic authority. With texts such as the Gospel of Mary, scholars have begun to question Mary’s role in the history of the Jesus movement, as well as the possibility for other female disciples and leaders. Since its discovery in 1896, the Gospel of Mary has intrigued scholars of early Christianity. Much of the research on this text focuses on issues of gender, though not all scholars approach and analyze gender the same way. This paper proposes to examine the history of scholarship on this text to discern how Gospel of Mary has been used to reconstruct the history of early Christianity and discern “real” issues of gender therein, dissect gendered rhetoric and ideological representations present in the literary text, and comment on scholars’ contemporary socio-political concerns. Most scholars combine these approaches in complex and nuanced ways that most productively suit their individual agendas as historians, literary critics, and/or Feminists. This paper attempts to untangle the interconnected interpretations and uses of this text as a reflection, purveyor, and/or instrument of gender ideology. As scholars analyzed the historical significance of the Gospel of Mary, the issue of female ordination was coming to the fore in American Protestantism. In light of the American Feminist movement, pro-ordination factions sought historical precedence, and thus justification, for female leadership in the Christian church. The analysis and interpretations of the Gospel of Mary, as well as the significance it was accorded, were necessarily influenced by the contemporary historical conditions. A very different approach was used by Mariah Wahl in her study of two of the later novels written by science fiction author Philip K. Dick. Her research question focused on the ways in which Dick’s novels engage ancient texts, which he often cites, and the rather fluid way in which he uses the concept of scripture. The Bible in the Fiction of Philip K. Dick by Mariah Wahl (Faculty Mentor: Rubén Dupertuis, Trinity University) The work of the American science fiction author Philip K. Dick (1928– 1982) has had an enormous inf luence beyond SF circles thanks, in part,

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to the adaptation of many of his short stories and novels into films (nine and counting, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, and The Adjustment Bureau). Dick’s fiction often addresses the constructed nature of reality, paranoia, powerlessness, and revelation. Religion and religious themes are central in Dick’s fiction. This is especially the case in works written after 1974, when Dick believed he received a vision from God. While religious themes in Dick’s fiction have been studied at some length, especially Dick’s use Gnostic Christian ideas, very little attention has been given to the prominent role of the Bible in his work, where it features as artifact, as source of information, as a subject of study, and as a model for Dick’s own “inspired” writings. In this study we investigate the role and function of the Bible in Dick’s work, focusing on his later novels VALIS and The Divine Invasion.

Research Using Original Languages Some knowledge of the original languages in which texts were written opens up a number of possibilities for research. It naturally allows students to work with critical editions of texts and apply their analyses to original language texts. It also allows students to engage in the work of translation. As we note in the next chapter, one of the authors of this book (Rubén Dupertuis) worked with Kathleen Arbogast and Victoria Ydens, both students with several years of Greek, on English translations of The Preaching of Peter and The Gospel of Peter, two second-century early Christian texts. Their work extended beyond translating the texts from the source language into the target language—they studied the history of the period and related second-century literature in order to understand the larger context that shaped the texts. They also engaged with and made decisions about which theories of translation would guide their work. The translations are already available publicly as open-access resources and will be published in an upcoming book devoted to these two texts. In addition, the work of translation required research on the historical and literary contexts of the texts. That, in turn, led to the opportunity to write brief introductory articles on both texts that are now published in BibleOdyssey.org, the Society of Biblical Literature’s publication designed to make biblical and related scholarship available to non-scholars (Grout et al. 2022; Arbogast et al. 2022).

Conclusion There are many opportunities for undergraduates to do original research on religious texts. Whether the research takes the form of a new interpretation of an old text by applying a new theoretical model or approach, creating new translations, or examining the ways in which more recent literature engages

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foundational texts, texts continue to provide many opportunities for both individual student research projects and for faculty to include undergraduates in their research using the apprenticeship model.

Bibliography Arbogast, Kathleen, Zoe Grout, and Rubén R. Dupertuis. 2022. “Preaching of Peter.” Accessed on September 8, 2022. www.bibleodyssey.org:443/passages/main-articles/ preaching-of-peter Davies, Phillip R. 2014. “Biblical Studies: Fifty Years of Multi-Discipline.” Currents in Biblical Research, 13 (1): 34–66. Grout, Zoe, Kathleen Arbogast, and Rubén R. Dupertuis. 2022. “Gospel of Peter.” Accessed on September 8, 2022. www.bibleodyssey.org:443/passages/main-articles/ gospel-of-peter Halperin, Faye, Thomas A. Lewis, Anne Monius, Robert Orsi, and Christopher White. 2007. “A Guide to Writing in Religious Studies.” The President and Fellow of Harvard College. Accessed on August 15, 2022. https://library.hds.harvard.edu/files/ hds_library/files/religious_studies.pdf Palmer, Erin. 2015. “Imagining Space in Revelation: The Heavenly Throne Room and New Jerusalem.” Journal of Theta Alpha Kappa 39 (1): 35–47. Parker, Robert Dale. 2011. How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tyson, Louis. 2006. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. Second Edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

10 RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND THE LANGUAGE HURDLE

Summary This chapter discusses something that is, at the same time, one of the most common requirements for religious studies research and one of the primary barriers to undergraduate research in religious studies: original languages. While it is true that years of language study are often required for specific research projects, this chapter discusses how this is a hurdle, not a barrier and explains how faculty mentors can jump or go around this hurdle and find ways to do research with their undergraduate students. In some cases, undergraduate students are actually prepared to contribute to original language research. In other cases, there are components of research projects where undergraduate students can contribute even if they don’t have the required language skills.

The Hurdle of Original Languages The two primary professional associations in the field of religious studies in the United States are the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). According to a 2019 member data report, SBL had 8,324 active members, and according to the AAR’s website that organization had over 8,000 members around the world (“2019 SBL Membership Data”; “About AAR”). While some members of SBL have research agendas focused on archaeology, theory, history, and other areas, as the name of the organization implies, the overwhelming majority of the members of SBL devote much of their research to the analysis of biblical and other texts that were written in ancient languages (e.g., Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin). And while the AAR is more diverse in terms of the approaches their members use DOI: 10.4324/9781003174110-10

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to study religions and religious communities, since members study religious communities from around the world—including Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, Chinese Religions, Jainism, Korean religions, Japanese religions, Hinduism, African religions, and Middle Eastern Christianity (“Program Units”)—it is abundantly clear that knowledge of languages is important if one wants to do research in religious studies. In fact, knowledge of languages is required for most religious studies research about religious communities not located in English-speaking countries. And sometimes, languages are required even for religious communities in English-speaking countries. For example, Yiddish would be important when studying Hasidic Jewish communities in New York. It should, therefore, not be a surprise that one of the biggest hurdles religious studies scholars face when trying to do research with undergraduates is that their students are not proficient in the language of their research. In the classroom, it is often sufficient to study religious texts in translation or learn about religious communities through secondary texts written in English, but when it comes to doing academic research about religious texts or religious communities, knowledge of languages is crucial and often perceived as a barrier for undergraduates who want to do original research. As Nadia Luhutsky mentioned when discussing mentoring senior thesis projects, deficiencies in languages are “an obvious hindrance” to doing original research in religious studies, to the point that she can’t “recall in twenty years any honors thesis being done in biblical studies” (2011, 26). Of course, this is also an issue in several other fields, including classical studies, history, modern languages, and philosophy. When we started the Mellon Initiative for Undergraduate Research in the Arts and Humanities at Trinity University in 2013, the fact that students didn’t have the necessary language skills was a common explanation we heard when we asked faculty why they were not interested in having undergraduates help them with their research. And when we sent a survey about doing research with undergraduates in the summer of 2020 to religious studies scholars across the United States, many responded that the lack of languages prevented them from truly collaborating on their research with undergraduates. It should be pointed out that the survey was not sent arbitrarily. It was sent to scholars whose online presence indicated that they had some experience with undergraduate research. Our goal is not to downplay the importance of languages in religious studies. Languages are a fundamental part of the field, and many research projects will entail studying religious texts in their original language or requiring knowledge of specific languages to do ethnography or to do research in non-English speaking communities or countries. This reality, however, does not have to be a barrier to working with undergraduate students on original research.

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Some Undergraduate Students Do Have Languages Although this will not be the case for every language and will not always be an option with your specific students, there are often undergraduates who do have enough language skills to work with faculty on their research, and in some cases, a student can bring additional language skills to a project that would otherwise be missing something. For example, most universities offer both Ancient Greek and Latin as languages, which are important for the study of ancient Judaism and Christianity and their ancient texts, as well as other religions and cults in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Other languages for pre-modern religious communities—e.g., Biblical Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit—are offered to varying degrees, as is the spectrum of modern languages that are crucial for studying modern religious communities. Other students arrive at college with language skills, either because they have learned them at school, they are international students, or they grew up in families where a language other than English was spoken at home. Not every student will be fluent in their languages, but many will have enough competency to contribute in some manner. In some cases, undergraduate students will know the primary language of the research project. While most will unlikely bring the same level of expertise in the language as their faculty mentor, they can make contributions, and because they bring fresh eyes to the project, they can sometimes notice things that their faculty mentor doesn’t and thereby make original contributions to the research. For example, in the summer of 2020, one of the authors of this book (Rubén Dupertuis) worked with Kathleen Arbogast (Trinity ’21), an undergraduate student with several years of Classical Greek, on a translation and interpretation of The Kerygma Petri (or “Preaching of Peter”), a Christian text from the early second century with no recently published English translation. The undergraduate student, in this case, was able to read the text in the original language, discuss and analyze critical Hellenistic terms with her faculty mentor, and contribute to an open-access online translation of the text. While it is unlikely that the student alone would have been able to produce professional quality scholarly work in this case, with the guidance of a faculty mentor Kathleen was able to participate in a high-impact research experience, learn how professional research is conducted under the guidance of a mentor, and make significant contributions to the project. Another way students can contribute to religious studies research is by bringing new languages to the project. Typically, when your research would benefit from a particular language that you do not know, you are either required to consult a colleague who knows the language or adapt the project so the unknown language becomes unnecessary. In some of these cases, undergraduate students can be great research partners. For example, in 2013, Professor C. Mackenzie Brown, a scholar of Hinduism, wanted to investigate contemporary

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Indian views on rape and women’s equality in light of a tragic rape and murder that had taken place in India. While Professor Brown could cover the analysis of primary religious, folk, and legal texts and could interview and survey Indians in the United States, he did not have the modern Indian language skills to conduct ethnography and thus learn about modern views on the subject. This is where Nupur Agrawal (Trinity ’14), a Religion and Psychology major, was able to make significant contributions to the project. Nupur, a native of India and f luent in several North Indian languages, was able to go to India over the summer and conduct interviews and surveys of college-age Indians, thus providing a significant contribution to the project. Not only did this project utilize Professor Brown’s academic expertise and Nupur’s language skills, but it resulted in several impressive academic products. Professor Brown and Nuper co-presented the results of their research at the national AAR conference—it is rare for undergraduates to present at this conference—and that presentation

FIGURE 10.1

Poster Presentation by Kathleen Arbogast, an undergraduate student at Trinity University who worked with her faculty mentor on the translation of an early Christian text that was written in Greek. Image courtesy of Kathleen Arbogast (Summer 2020).

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led to an invitation to co-author an article in the Journal of Religion and Violence ( Brown and Agrawal 2014). It is true that languages can be a hurdle to participation in many faculty research projects, but these examples show that there are some students who do have the necessary skills to contribute in meaningful ways to faculty projects where knowledge of languages is required. To be clear, we are not claiming that undergraduate students will be at the same level in terms of language proficiency as their faculty mentors. This would be an unfair expectation for graduate students, let alone undergraduates. But just as graduate students who are still developing their language skills are able to be research assistants to their faculty mentors, so are undergraduate students, even if they require a bit more mentorship.

Parts of Projects That Don’t Require Languages When considering working with undergraduates, scholars often fixate on the focal points of their research project—e.g., the text they are analyzing or the people they are interviewing—and forget that there are many aspects of the research process that precede, follow, and support the main component of research. These aspects of a research project are just as important to the success of the project and provide opportunities for meaningful undergraduate research experiences for students who are not equipped with the necessary language skills. For example, a scholar analyzing the book of Acts in the New Testament will necessarily need to read that book and other contemporary literature in the original Greek. If a student doesn’t know ancient Greek, they will not be able to successfully participate in the reading and analysis of the text in the original language. They can, however, read secondary literature in English that has been written about the Greek text, create annotated bibliographies, and discuss the state of the research with their mentor and how this might affect their analysis of the text they are researching. This is not an insignificant part of a research project and benefits both the faculty member and the undergraduate student. This type of research can lead to the undergraduate student writing a literature review, something that appears in most Ph.D. dissertations and teaches undergraduates the importance of researching and learning about what has already been written about a subject before it is possible to add something new to the scholarly conversation. And the faculty mentor is able to focus on other aspects of the project while their mentee collects and analyzes bibliographic information, some of which will be known to the mentor, but some of which will be new and contribute to the research. This is precisely what happened when an undergraduate student was helping me (Chad Spigel) work on research about the ancient synagogue in Dura Europos. I had thought that I had read all of the relevant articles, but as my student was doing background research, she uncovered an article I had missed that ended up significantly contributing to some of the conclusions I eventually made in the article.

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Research in Translation Although professional-level research will always involve the study of texts in their original languages, this does not preclude the utility and even necessity of researching how the original language has been translated by other scholars. While in some cases, specific texts will not yet be translated into English, in many cases, scholars research texts that already have one or more English translations. This is true in the case of biblical texts where there are hundreds of English translations of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, but it is also true for the Qur’an and other texts that are revered by various religious communities. Professional analyses of translations that attempt to assess the validity of specific translation choices—e.g., does this English word accurately ref lect a possible meaning of the original word within the context of the passage?—will require knowledge of the original language. Nonetheless, there are research projects that can look into the reasons why a particular translation was chosen, even without knowing the original language. In these cases, it is possible to explore the secondary scholarly literature on the passage to determine possible translations of the original language and compare the scholarly analyses with the translation that is under review. Undergraduates can explore whether a particular translation utilizes English words and phrases that are discussed as options in the scholarly literature or whether it introduces a new English translation and, if so, why. Perhaps research into the religious ideologies held by the community for which the translation was written might help the undergraduate researcher determine why. Undergraduate students lacking original language skills might not be able to offer their own translations, but they can do research into translations and provide meaningful analyses about why specific translational choices were made.

Reception History Another area where undergraduate students can contribute to research without a strong foundation in languages is in the area of reception history. In many cases, reception history will require the knowledge of original languages. For example, to study the early reception history of the Hebrew Bible in ancient and medieval Jewish communities, one would need to consider texts in many languages, including Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and Arabic. Of course, most religious studies scholars themselves are not proficient in all of those languages, and that is the point. Undergraduate students can look into the reception history of particular religious texts in a number of ways that don’t require f luency in the original languages. For example, undergraduates are entirely capable of researching what has already been written about reception history. As mentioned above, determining the state of the field is a crucial component

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of any academic research project and should not be treated as unimportant. After doing the background research, undergraduates can focus their research on the reception of the text in communities where English is the primary language. For example, students might explore how English-speaking Buddhist communities received and interpreted the Pāli Canon and how their interpretations differ from scholarly descriptions of earlier interpretations of the text in the original language of Pāli. They might also explore the interpretive similarities and differences amongst various English-speaking communities. These areas of research can be explored by undergraduate students through library research or even ethnographic research.

Conclusion One of the biggest hurdles to doing original research with undergraduate students in religious studies is that students often don’t have the language skills that are thought to be required for the project. This chapter, however, has shown that there are often ways to jump or even bypass this hurdle. Whether it’s finding the student who has enough knowledge of the language to contribute in small but meaningful ways, having students contribute to the parts of the project that don’t require knowing the language, utilizing students with complementary language skills that add something new to the project or creating a new project that builds upon the main area of research but doesn’t require languages, there are myriad ways for faculty and students to collaborate on faculty-driven research even on the most language-dependent projects. Questions for Students Do I need specific languages to answer my research question? Which research components of an original language project don’t require knowledge of the original language? What types of research projects don’t require original languages? Questions for Faculty Are there parts of my research where students can contribute even if they don’t have a background in the original language? How do I help students find ideas for original research projects if they don’t have the necessary background in a particular language?

Bibliography “2019 SBL Membership Data.” Accessed on January 11, 2022. www.sbl-site.org/assets/ pdfs/sblMemberProfile2019.pdf

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“About AAR.” American Academy of Religion Website. Accessed on January 11, 2022. www.aarweb.org/AARMBR/About-AAR/AARMBR/About-AAR.aspx Brown, C. Mackenzie and Nupur Agrawal. 2014. “The Rape that Woke Up India: Hindu Imagination and the Rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey.” Journal of Religion and Violence 2: 234–80. Luhutsky, Nadia M. 2011. “Training the Undergraduate Scholar.” In Teaching Undergraduate Research in Religious Studies, edited by Bernadette McNary-Zak and Rebecca Todd Peters, 131–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press. “Program Units.” American Academy of Religion Website. Accessed on June 18, 2021. https://papers.aarweb.org/program-units

11 MATERIAL CULTURE

Summary This chapter covers various ways religious studies scholars do research on the material ‘things’ associated with and utilized by religions and religious people and communities. In addition to defining material culture, this chapter identifies areas where undergraduate students can enter into the scholarly conversation in meaningful ways. These include the study of pre-modern religious communities through archaeological excavations and of the art, architecture, ritual objects, and other artifacts they have left behind; the study of living religious communities and how they create and use similar types of material objects; and the study of material objects that aren’t associated with official religious communities. Specific examples for both individual undergraduate projects and faculty-driven projects are provided throughout the chapter.

Defining Material Culture Within Religious Studies According to Richard Carp: Material religion is everything perceptible that is part of a religious tradition. This extends to ritual objects, images, architecture and music, but also food (and diet), scents (e.g. incense), prescribed uses of the body (kneeling for prayer, postures of exaltation), proscribed uses of the body (women hiding their hair except to their husbands, forbidden sexual practices, fasting, prohibitions on tattooing), and so forth. In every case, these must be taken to include the processes and personnel by which they

DOI: 10.4324/9781003174110-11

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are made, used, enforced and so on. Material religion extends beyond explicitly religious contexts. (Carp 2013, 476) In religious studies, material culture is studied as it applies to “official” religions— e.g. communal architecture, ritual objects, and icons—but also grassroots and unofficial expressions of religion like spontaneous shrines that memorialize tragic deaths, religious knick-knacks sold to pilgrims, and even religiously decorated taxis in New York City (Keenan and Arweck 2006, 13–16). As Jules David Prown puts it, studying material culture allows us “to understand culture, to discover the beliefs—the values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions—of a particular community or society at a given time” (Prown 1993, 1). Religious studies scholars who focus on material culture research different religions and employ a variety of approaches and methods spanning various academic disciplines, including history, art, art history, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, architecture, etc. (Lubar and Kingery 1993, viii–x). What makes the study of material culture an especially good fit for undergraduate students is that original research can often be conducted without languages that are required for other types of research in religious studies. And even in cases where knowledge of languages is necessary, undergraduates can contribute to significant parts of the project when working with a faculty mentor who knows the required languages. The ubiquity and constant creation of material culture by human beings and the continuous uncovering of new archaeological evidence of significance to our understanding of the histories of religious communities make this an area with countless opportunities for original research that can be done by undergraduate students on their own, but also provides unique opportunities for faculty-student collaborations using the apprenticeship model. Even if undergraduate students aren’t prepared to complete an entire original research project, since the study of material culture is often a component of larger research projects in the field, this area provides opportunities to include undergraduates in various aspects of larger projects.

A Word on Religious Texts Religious texts can both be an object of material culture and tools used to help interpret material culture. In the former scenario, one might research the history of texts in their material form (e.g., as scrolls, books, or illuminated manuscripts) or the materials used to make religious texts (e.g., parchment and inks). In these cases, the research focus is the object itself. Undergraduates can both work with faculty on their research projects that focus on the materiality of particular religious texts, but in some cases, undergraduates could even embark on the research of a particular material object. For solo projects, we

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recommend narrowing the focus to a single object or a small collection of similar objects. For example, researching the history of an important manuscript that is owned by a local religious institution, but does not appear in the scholarly literature, provides an opportunity for an undergraduate student to conduct a thorough research project that explores not only the history of the object itself but also the history of how the members of the community relate and interact with the object, thus providing opportunities to apply historical, textual and ethnographic methods of analysis. In the latter scenario mentioned above, texts are used to help interpret a specific material object. For example, the New Testament and other Christian texts can be used to interpret the images in a piece of art that hangs in a cathedral, or the Qur’an and Hadith can be used to interpret ritual objects that are found in mosques. In these cases, it is important to keep in mind that “scholars should be careful not to give texts undue priority in interpretation; texts may misinterpret material culture, intentionally or not” (Carp 2013, 482). This, in fact, is one of the most important contributions of the field of religious studies: official religious documents don’t always align with real-world examples of religious communities and people and, therefore, it is important for scholars to observe religious things without relying exclusively on the written record (Orsi 2004, 142, 167).

Archaeology: Researching Ancient Material Culture At its most basic level, archaeology is “the study of artifacts in relation to past human behavior” (Lubar and Kingery 1993, ix). And as the field of religious studies has come to focus more on practices and everyday religion rather than the “official” beliefs and tenets that are found in authoritative texts, the importance of archaeological data has become central to scholarly reconstructions of the history of specific religious communities (Rüpke 2013, 294). Scholars of ancient Judaism and Christianity have long utilized archaeology in their research, but as the table of contents in The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion shows, archaeological methods have been applied to nearly every historical religion, including prehistoric religions, religions and cults in the ancient world, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, indigenous religions, and even new religions (Insoll 2011, v–x). It is important to state upfront that undergraduate students cannot conduct original archaeological research on their own. The process of identifying sites to excavate, getting the proper permissions from the governing authorities, creating an excavation plan, putting together a team, and getting the tools to conduct the excavation can take several years, significant funding, and the proper connections. This type of work is, therefore, typically organized and directed by professional archaeologists. However, as discussed in Chapter 1, undergraduate students have participated in archaeological excavations since

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the middle of the 20th century, even if their participation as volunteers or as part of field schools has not been framed as undergraduate research. In religious studies, these experiences have primarily been part of excavations that take place in sites associated with the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, but in the last few decades, religious studies students have also participated in excavations whose research questions focus on the history of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and so on. Working on excavations, undergraduate students get to participate in various aspects of the research project, including, but not limited to setting up the excavation area, physically excavating, recording data, cleaning and labeling artifacts, cataloging artifacts, and listening/participating in discussions about interpreting what has been excavated. While these parts of the excavation do not include the final interpretations and publications of the evidence, they should not be dismissed as unimportant. Without contributions made by undergraduate excavators, there would be nothing to interpret and publish. Therefore, faculty mentors should work to effectively frame this type of work as undergraduate research and mentor their students in ways that help them see how their work—the excavating and recording of data—contributes to the larger project. In the case of the student who is working on an excavation for the first time, the mentoring component is especially crucial to ensure that students understand that they are doing research and are not simply manual laborers who do the actual digging while the faculty researchers do the “important” work. Undergraduate students who are participating in their second or third seasons of a particular excavation—a situation that is not uncommon—often have opportunities for additional types of collaboration with their faculty mentors. These students already have experience with the basics of archaeological methods and techniques, and with a little planning on the part of the faculty mentor, it is possible to take the collaborative research experience to the next level. For example, one of the authors of this book (Chad Spigel) was an area supervisor on the excavation of the ancient village of Huqoq (modern-day Israel) and experienced undergraduate students regularly helped him with several aspects of the research project, including supervising newer undergraduate students on the excavation with some of the more technical aspects of collecting and recording the data; writing end-of-the-season reports; and even co-presenting the results of the excavation at professional archaeological conferences. These research and dissemination activities are typically done by graduate students or professional archaeologists, but they are perfect opportunities for collaborative research with undergraduate students. Archaeological excavations take years, if not decades, to complete, so no undergraduate will be able to work on a complete project. However, the fact that archaeology includes detailed record-keeping on a daily basis, as well as yearly reports, provides one of the

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Joshua Pedrick (Trinity ’13) records data during the excavation of the ancient village of Huqoq. This was Joshua’s third summer working at the excavation and he was given the responsibility of supervising one square within the ancient village.

best opportunities to include and mentor undergraduates in important parts of the research process. In addition to archaeological fieldwork, the results of previous archaeological excavations can provide opportunities for undergraduate research. For example, undergraduates can focus on the analysis of a particular type of artifact that has been excavated extensively but is not completely understood. Specific artifacts (e.g., altars and incense shovels found in domestic contexts) or visual depictions uncovered in excavations (e.g., mosaic f loors and wall frescoes in religious communal buildings) are not only common but their meanings and uses within ancient religious communities are often debated in the scholarly research, thus leaving open avenues for new research. This type of research could take several forms, but on the most basic level, undergraduate students can conduct the research utilizing resources found in libraries, including excavation reports, secondary sources that deal with the subject matter, and online databases. Since this type of research doesn’t require fieldwork, it is often possible for undergraduates to do this type of original research on their own.

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Local Places of Worship Most religious communities have communal spaces where worship and other types of social activities take place. These include, but are not limited to, churches, synagogues, mosques, gurdwaras, temples, meditation centers, and shrines. While undergraduate students in religious studies have been doing original research about these places for decades, the framing of the research is typically as a “site visit” and usually results in a typical undergraduate essay or paper that focuses on descriptions and only scratches the surface of what undergraduates can actually accomplish. In Chapter 8, we discussed how using ethnographic methods to do research about local places of worship can lead to original undergraduate research. Another way to do original research on the local level is to focus on a particular aspect of the physical objects in these spaces. This can be the building itself—that is, the interior layout and furnishings—or other objects that appear in the building, including art, books, scrolls, and ritual objects. While these types of material objects have long been studied by religious studies scholars, local religious communities do not always conform to similar religious communities in other parts of the country, the world, or even the same city. In other words, while there are indeed similarities between religious communities of the same denomination of a particular religion, religious studies scholarship has shown that local nuances and idiosyncrasies are the norm rather than the exception. By visiting, observing, recording, and analyzing the material objects that appear in contemporary places of worship and then comparing and contrasting what they observe with what already appears in the scholarly literature, undergraduates can contribute to the scholarly conversation. Several examples of this type of undergraduate research can be found in the Community Religions Project at the University of Leeds, which is discussed in more detail in Chapter 8.

Religious Objects Another area that provides opportunities for undergraduate research is the study of art, relics, and any other object that was created or used for religious purposes. While “religious” objects are often part of larger research projects, the identification, analysis, and interpretation of objects can also stand on their own, illuminating specific aspects of the religious landscape by focusing on how they functioned when used by people. As the authors of the book Tangible Things argue, “any tangible thing can be pressed into service as primary historical evidence” (Ulrich et al. 2015, 2). And what makes this type of study extremely appropriate for undergraduate research is that religious objects are ubiquitous, providing new avenues of research locally available to students. Whether it’s an object in a local museum, a cluster of roadside shrines to car accident victims, unique art or icons at local places of worship, statues of the

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ten commandments at state capitals and courthouses, tourist ‘shrines’ like the Alamo in San Antonio or the memorial at Ground Zero in New York City, there are plenty of opportunities for original research. These types of studies will typically include aspects of historical research (what is the history of this type of object?), contextual analysis (is this part of an official religious community, an ad-hoc expression, grassroots religion, or something entirely different?), ethnography (how do people interact with the object?), and theoretical analysis (how does this fit into what we know about religious communities and expressions more generally?). Figuring out the appropriate questions to ask and approaches to take with the project is where the mentoring relationship really comes into play for undergraduates working on their own project and where students working with faculty under the apprenticeship model can learn about the f luid nature of research in religious studies as they go through the journey of figuring out how to approach the research along with their faculty mentor.

Examples of Individual Undergraduate Research on Material Culture This section includes examples of projects where individual undergraduate researchers have either made individual contributions to larger projects or have completed entire original research projects on their own under the guidance of a faculty mentor. The first example is actually a collection of several individual undergraduate research projects that collectively comprise a larger original research project organized and directed by faculty. ReligYinz: Mapping Religious Pittsburgh is a digital humanities project developed by professors in the department of religious studies at the University of Pittsburgh that incorporates the results of dozens of undergraduate research projects about local religious architecture, businesses, rituals, and individual religious communities. The individual case studies are part of an ongoing project that students complete in different courses, where they research, photograph, and write about lived religion in Pittsburgh in all of its diversity (ReligYinz). As part of this project, several students wrote short articles about responses to the tragic shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, including an article about the appearance of knitted Jewish stars on trees in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood and an art exhibit of drawings by students that appears outside of the synagogue building where the tragedy took place. Other case studies document everything from a shrine displayed in a mattress store to a church that was converted into a brewery. Each individual case study makes a small original contribution, and collectively they create something that wouldn’t have existed without the contributions of undergraduate researchers: a map that illustrates the diversity of religion

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in Pittsburgh. This type of project requires faculty mentors to create the framework, include it in their courses, and manage the website, but each case study can be completed individually by undergraduate students. Furthermore, by focusing on small case studies, this is a good example of how students can complete original research within the context of a semesterlong course. This next example comes in the form of an abstract from a presentation at the National Council for Undergraduate Research. In this project, the undergraduate student focused on the architecture and internal layout of a local synagogue building in an effort to better understand the worldview of the community that constructed the building. This example also shows how research in religious studies—even at the undergraduate level—is truly crossdisciplinary, commonly utilizing diverse methods and approaches to answer research questions. If Walls Could Speak: A Material Culture Study of Temple Beth HaTephila, Asheville, North Carolina by Rachel Ellen Grossman (Faculty Mentor: Rodger Payne; The University of North Carolina at Asheville) In 1949 a new Jewish Temple was dedicated in Asheville, North Carolina. The city’s Reform congregation had spent fourteen years fundraising, designing, and executing the structure—a large International Modern style building in a residential neighborhood just north of downtown they christened Temple Beth Ha-Tephila (House of Prayer). Using the synagogue as a case study, my project looks at the architectural style of the building, the layout of the interior, the building’s décor and stylistic concerns, and even its groundwork to understand the worldview of Congregation Beth Ha-Tephila in the years surrounding the erection of their new Temple. The unique situation of American Jews following the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II had a deep and resounding effect on the building of the synagogue, expressing itself in non-traditional architectural styles and modern works of art. At the same time, Temple Beth Ha-Tephila retained a very conventional Reform Jewish layout and decorative details, suggesting that the congregation was conservative in understanding their identity as traditional American Reform Jews. The mixture of these two themes creates a complex and nuanced expression of Congregation Beth Ha-Tephila’s self-identity. Utilizing archival materials from the University of North Carolina at Asheville D.H. Ramsey Library Special Collections and supported by photographic examples of Temple Beth Ha-Tephila’s exterior design, interior arrangement, and decorative elements, my project brings together components and methodologies that cross traditional academic disciplines such as Religious

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Studies, History, and Material Culture Studies to create an engaging and interesting look at American Jewish life in Asheville, North Carolina’s postwar years.

Examples of Research on Material Culture Using the Apprenticeship Model The following are a few examples that illustrate diverse ways faculty and undergraduate students have collaborated on religious studies research that focuses on material culture. For an example of archaeological research, we highlight a project where an undergraduate student worked with one of the authors of this book (Chad Spigel) to do research on archaeological remains of a 3rd-century synagogue building in Dura-Europos (modern-day Syria), which was excavated in the early 20th century. The research project utilized previously published archaeological data as well as unpublished archival data to try to answer unanswered questions about the Jewish community that utilized the building before it was intentionally buried over 1,700 years ago. The undergraduate student, Savannah Wagner (Trinity ’17), worked on two very important parts of the project. First, Savannah did library research about the city of Dura-Europos, finding dozens of books and articles about both the ancient city and the synagogue building, creating an annotated bibliography, and helping her mentor determine which sources might be useful for the project. While the faculty mentor was already familiar with most of the sources Savannah found, what made the collaborative work so rewarding is that Savannah found several articles her mentor had not yet consulted, including an article (Weisman 2012) that ended up being a very important part of the research, and for good measure was authored by an undergraduate student! The second thing Savannah helped with was applying a method that her mentor had created for determining the seating capacities of ancient synagogue buildings. Applying the seating capacity method to the Dura-Europos building not only provided Savannah with the opportunity to do original research by creating new data about the synagogue—i.e., its seating capacities—it also gave her mentor the opportunity to determine if the method could be applied effectively by other scholars. Savannah worked with her mentor on this project for just one summer, but in this short time, she contributed to two very important parts of the research process: library research and applying a specific methodological approach to create new data. Although Savannah wasn’t able to work on the project from beginning to end—the project took several years to complete—her participation significantly contributed to the article that was completed a few years later (Spigel 2019). The next example is a project that had Professor Angela Tarango working with Jamiless Lopez (Trinity ’20) on an ethnographic study of La Trinidad

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United Methodist Church. The research started out focusing on religiously motivated political engagement of the community, but after coming across fascinating and unexpected material culture in the church’s archive, objects that are typically overlooked in religious histories, their research ended up focusing on how Tejano Methodists have both created and preserved material culture in order to document and celebrate their particular history. Jamiless focused on material objects that women made for the church, including handmade quilts, liturgical banners, and miniature quilts donated for premature babies. The research involved archival work at the church, interviews with women in the banner-making groups, interviews with women in charge of maintaining the church’s history room, and photographically documenting the material objects. Jamiless presented the results of the research at an undergraduate conference and at the time this book was written, Professor Tarango was using the research to write a book based on the research. This example shows how material culture can provide fruitful avenues for research that illuminates often overlooked aspects of local religious communities. It also shows how faculty and undergraduates can collaborate in ways that benefit both the student and the faculty; in this case, the faculty member will publish a book and the student learned how to do professional academic research, which played an important role in her acceptance to a Ph.D. program in history. Another collaborative project had Professor Angela Tarango working with Isaiah Ellis (Trinity ’15; Ph.D. in religious studies from UNC ’22) on a “multiplelocale visual ethnography.” More specifically, they traveled to Oklahoma to explore how and why the different native tribes represented their cultures and religions through various objects in their casinos. For various reasons the research team could not conduct interviews, so the study focused entirely on their own observations of the material culture found in and around the casinos they visited (Tarango 2017, 178). By studying this material culture, the research team was able to arrive at several conclusions about how different tribes refer to the sacred in different ways through the materials that appear in their casinos: “the Choctaw with the white buffalo, the Cherokee with the tree of life, and the Quapaw with the display of religious artifacts (pipes, sacred fans) and a mural that invokes their cosmology,” but also how none of the tribes actually explained these objects to visitors who were not members of the tribe, thus shielding “their sacred symbols and artifacts” (Tarango 2017, 196). Isaiah was able to turn this research into a presentation titled “Native American Casinos and the Question of Indigeneity” at the 2015 NCUR conference, and Professor Tarango used the data they collected to publish an article titled “Hunting Buffalo in Oklahoma: Native American Casinos, Constructed Identities, and Portrayals of Native Culture and Religion” (Tarango 2017). A final example is a collaboration between a faculty member who serves as the director of the project and undergraduate students working as research assistants. Materializing the Bible is a digital scholarship project that began in

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2015 with the goal of “understanding how Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and Jews create places themed by biblical narratives” (Bielo and Vaughn 2021, 119). James Bielo, the faculty mentor, developed the project with the goal of identifying and describing all sites around the world that “materialize” the Bible” but also providing more in-depth analyses of specific places ( Bielo and Vaughn 2021, 121–122). Over the years, at least five undergraduate students have worked with Professor Bielo to do research and create the entries, but one undergraduate student, Claire Vaughn, stands out for not only working on the project already in her first semester in college but also continuing to work on it for her entire undergraduate career. During this time, she contributed to the research project in a number of ways, including arranging archival, textual, and fieldwork materials for the website; doing ethnographic fieldwork at the Garden of Hope; creating a 3D model for the Garden of Hope virtual tour; doing independent research in various archives; and ultimately co-authoring an article about the project with her faculty mentor (Bielo and Vaughn 2021, 139). This project shows how faculty and undergraduates can work together to document religion in its material forms and also how both student and mentor can benefit from doing research collaboratively.

Conclusion Material culture provides countless opportunities for undergraduates to do original research in religious studies. Whether the research takes the form of library research about an ancient artifact, ethnographic research focusing on furnishings in a local place of worship, or doing research about specific religious objects or places, material culture can provide a variety of opportunities for both individual student research projects and for faculty to include undergraduates in their research using the apprenticeship model. Questions for Discussion What types of research questions do religious studies scholars ask that require researching material culture? How do scholars and practitioners differ in their approaches to interpreting archaeological remains and religious objects? What other approaches can be utilized when researching material culture?

Bibliography Bielo, James S., and Claire Vaughn. 2021. “Materializing the Bible: A Digital Scholarship Project from the Anthropology of Religion.” In Digital Humanities and Research Methods in Religious Studies, edited by Christopher D. Cantwell and Kristian Petersen, 119–41. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH.

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Carp, Richard M. 2013. “Material Culture.” In The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion, edited by Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler, 474–90. London and New York: Routledge. Insoll, Timothy, ed. 2011. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keenan, William. J. F., and Elisabeth Arweck. 2006. “Introduction: Material Varieties of Religious Expression.” In Materializing Religion: Expression, Performance and Ritual, edited by William J. F. Keenan and Elisabeth Arweck, 1–20. Aldershot, England: Ashgate. Lubar, Steven, and W. David Kingery. 1993. “Introduction.” In History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, edited by Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery, vii–xvii. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Materializing the Bible. Accessed on January 25, 2022. www.materializingthebible.com/ undergraduate-research-assistants.html Orsi, Robert. 2004. Between Heaven and Earth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Prown, Jules D. 1993. “The Truth of Material Culture: History or Fiction?” In History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, edited by Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery, 1–19. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. ReligYinz: Mapping Religious Pittsburgh. 2021. University of Pittsburgh. https://religyinz. pitt.edu/ Rüpke, Jörg. 2013. “History.” In The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion, edited by Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler, 283–309. London and New York: Routledge. Spigel, Chad. 2019. “The Jewish Minority of Dura-Europos.” Journal of Ancient Judaism 10 (2): 211–55. Tarango, Angela. 2017. “Hunting Buffalo in Oklahoma: Native American Casinos, Constructed Identities, and Portrayals of Native Culture and Religion.” In The Business Turn in American Religious History, edited by M. Porterfield, D. E. Grem, and J. Corrigan, 176–98. New York: Oxford University Press. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, Ivan Gaskell, Sara Schechner, Sarah Anne Carter, and Samantha S. B. van Gerbig. 2015. Tangible Things: Making History through Objects. New York: Oxford University Press. Weisman, Stefanie. 2012. “Militarism in the Wall Paintings of the Dura-Europos Synagogue: A New Perspective on Jewish Life on the Roman Frontier.” Shofar (3): 1–34.

12 CITING SOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Summary Responsible scholars give credit to other researchers and authors by acknowledging ideas that are not their own. This is done through the use of parenthetical citations or footnotes along with a bibliography or reference list. This chapter discusses the Chicago Manual of Style and other guidelines utilized by religious studies scholars and the reasons for the different styles when citing sources and organizing research findings. Plagiarism encompasses a wide spectrum of behaviors, from outright word-for-word copying of another’s work without giving credit to an artful paraphrase that re-states another author’s idea without acknowledging their work. We provide guidelines and resources to help students navigate the challenge of properly citing others’ ideas, words, and images and avoiding unethical uses of information.

Rationale Scholarly inquiry is the pursuit of knowledge and truth, so conducting research and creative scholarship honestly is fundamental to the task. Every scholar has the responsibility to demonstrate absolute integrity in the reporting of data, acknowledging the sources of ideas and information, sharing images and recordings only with permission, and providing thorough and correct documentation of those sources. This is important when students are working on their own projects but becomes even more critical when students are working with faculty mentors on research that will eventually be published in a peerreviewed journal or book.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003174110-12

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In this chapter, we seek to shift some common perspectives on research integrity and the citation and documentation of sources. Many of our students have expressed a sense of fear or frustration about the topics of citations and bibliographies. They have too often been made to feel as if they could fail an assignment because of plagiarism for making an honest and fairly minor mistake in a citation. On the other end of the spectrum, we have had many students who assume that in a world of easy access to free information, images, music, and videos, there is no big deal in sharing and appropriating someone else’s work. Both attitudes are missing the mark and creating unnecessary problems for students, especially those involved in undergraduate research. This chapter redefines the mark by clarifying a reasonable goal of honesty and integrity in scholarly work.

Plagiarism and How to Avoid Plagiarism The definition of plagiarism is taking someone else’s ideas or intellectual property and representing them, in whole, or in part, as your own. Plagiarism is a form of theft, as the ideas and words of one person are taken without their consent by someone else who hopes to benefit from them. The United States and many other countries share a legal standard and cultural understanding that each person’s ideas and creative works—usually represented in the products of the ideas, such as books, articles, art, photographs, and recordings—are uniquely their own. When the creator/writer shares these ideas publicly, in whatever form, they enter into an implicit trust with those who encounter it. They trust that shared values and legal standards will keep their own name and rights attached to them and that anyone who shares or builds upon their work will give them the credit that is due, and in some cases (e.g., creative works like photographs) will share it only with permission. Students and other scholars who incorporate others’ ideas, words, images, and recordings into their own—in other words, everyone doing research in religious studies—are required to clearly identify the original sources, no matter how easily accessible the information might be. Work found on online platforms such as Creative Commons that allow creators to share licensed and copyrighted works for others to use legally needs to be cited as well. The Creative Commons website has clear examples of how to attribute and cite different kinds of media, depending on the terms of use. The guidance Creative Commons provides is to use the acronym TASL to remember to attribute and cite the Title, Author, Source, and License, as they offer six types of licenses that determine how material can be used and shared, and each work on the platform includes information about its particular license (Creative Commons 2021). Even those not intending to steal or cause harm may be committing ethics violations that have consequences, so it is incumbent on researchers to document all sources of information. When the intention is to give credit, but an

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omission or other mistake is made, the result is sloppy scholarship more than outright plagiarism. While it may not be an illegal offense, sloppy scholarship should be guarded against by double-checking that all sources of information are correctly credited. The intentional appropriation of others’ ideas without giving credit is much more serious. University policies and academic publishers dictate serious consequences for those who are caught plagiarizing or committing other violations of research ethics. Strict policies and severe consequences are intended to discourage such violations, for if plagiarism occurs without significant repercussions, everyone’s work is diminished. For that reason, plagiarism can ruin a scholar’s career. Other ethical and legal violations include fabricating or falsifying data and improperly treating human subjects/participants (including any violation of IRB guidelines).

Why There Are Different Citation and Documentation Styles In our various academic disciplines, we are all in agreement about the utmost importance of academic integrity and the lawful and ethical crediting of the sources of ideas. We have different guidelines, though, for exactly how we credit our sources in our different disciplinary epistemologies or theories and ways of knowing. Students often get frustrated when they are required to use Modern Language Association (MLA) format in their first-year writing courses, and just when they have that down are expected to switch to the American Psychological Association (APA) style in their education or other social science classes, and then Chicago Manual of Style for their religious studies courses. We have heard more than once of students—and faculty having to use different styles for different journals—bemoaning different citation styles as a conspiracy to drive them mad. Believe it or not, however, there are some sound reasons for the different expectations. We have found that understanding the epistemologies and underlying reasons for different citation and bibliographic styles helps ease the frustration. Graff and Birkenstein’s (2014) “They Say, I Say”: the Moves that Matter in Academic Writing helpfully addresses the concept of templates in academic writing. They point out that many of our disciplinary conventions follow certain patterns or templates, and that by learning some of the main ones, we can master aspects of academic writing with more alacrity. Herb Childress (2017) applies the idea of templates to understanding different citation systems and the disciplinary values they represent. Dr. Childress uses examples of MLA and APA parenthetical citations and bibliographic entries to make the point. MLA parenthetical citations require the author’s last name and the page number on which the idea is stated. In APA format, the parenthetical citation includes the author’s last name and year of publication. The only time the page number is provided is when the text is quoted directly, which is rare in APA papers. Why the differences? MLA is the format used in

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the humanities and disciplines in which elegant writing and textual analysis are highly valued. Humanities scholars need the page number or URL in the parenthetical citation because reading the actual words of the text is usually important to them. APA, however, is used most often in social sciences, where different primary values are in play: timeliness—hence the use of the year of publication in the parenthetical citation—and the empirical/experimental findings themselves, as opposed to the prose in which they were reported. That is why APA papers include few, if any, direct quotations: the findings are what matter, not the way in which the researchers expressed them, so paraphrases do not lose the essence of the ideas. The bibliography entries of each style likewise ref lect disciplinary priorities. On an MLA Works Cited page, authors’ first and last names are listed, whereas APA uses the last name only and initials. Why? The fullness of the human person is not only a subject of study but a deeply held value in the humanities. A scholar’s full name conveys more about that person than his or her initials, including, in many cases, their gender identity. The scientific approach favored in disciplines that use APA style has a preference for more neutrality. There is no way to know the gender identity of a scholar from first and middle initials alone, and that is considered a good thing in objective research. Another notable difference between the two bibliographic styles is the placement of the year of publication: near the end of the entry in MLA Works Cited, but right after the authors’ names—second thing in the entry—in APA References. The prioritizing of timely research is again the reason for the early placement of the date in APA References entries. In the humanities, however, timeliness may not matter as much. While recent scholarship must be part of the conversation, scholarship that is decades or even more than a century old can be just as important and relevant, and therefore the publication year isn’t given a preferred position in the citation. In religious studies, most scholars use The Chicago Manual of Style (2017), which offers two basic systems that have similarities with the MLA and APA styles, but with their own nuances. The first system utilizes footnotes or endnotes and bibliographies and is commonly utilized by scholars in the arts and humanities. The second system is an author-date system that includes the author’s name, publication year, and page numbers and is commonly utilized by scholars in the natural and social sciences. Given the multidisciplinary nature of the field, which incorporates elements of both the humanities and social sciences, it is probably unsurprising that scholars in religious studies use both systems depending on the preferences of the journals and publishers with whom they are publishing. While the Chicago Manual of Style is commonly used by scholars in the field of religious studies, in some corners of the field, supplementary style guides are often necessary to account for the use of ancient texts and languages. For example, in the field of biblical studies and related fields, scholars use the

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Society of Biblical Literature’s SBL Handbook of Style, which provides instructions for both style and citation issues unique in biblical studies and related fields. We are unaware of similar style guides used by scholars in other corners of the religious studies world, but it is a good idea to check with your faculty mentor to make sure that this is the case.

The OWL at Purdue Even though we can understand some of the reasons for different citation and bibliographic styles, it is difficult to master and remember them. And even when we master one or two styles with which we work most regularly, a new edition of the style book is published, and we have some new details to try to keep in mind. Fortunately, holding all of that in one’s own mind is not necessary beyond the basics, and keeping up with the changes can be fairly automatic. Thanks to the Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University, examples of citations and bibliographic entries for a wide variety of sources in several styles are readily available, including the Chicago Manual of Style. We recommend bookmarking the website (https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/) and keeping it open while writing. Through a quick search and a look at some examples, anyone can be sure of correct, up-to-date citing and referencing. Questions for Students What “counts” as plagiarism? What if you didn’t mean to plagiarize? Why is it important to identify the correct citation style? How can I avoid common mistakes in citing sources?

Bibliography The Chicago Manual of Style. 2017. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Childress, H. 2017. “Templates: XS/S/M/L.” Workshop Presented at the Council on Undergraduate Research Institute: Undergraduate Research and Creative Inquiry in the Arts and Humanities, Lincoln University, PA. Creative Commons. 2021. Attributing Sources. https://creativecommons.org/use-remix/ attribution. Graff, G., and Birkenstein, C. 2014. ‘They Say, I Say’: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. New York: N. W. Norton.

13 ONLINE RESOURCES Gloria Gatchel

Summary This chapter begins with an introduction to why online resources are important, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Following the introduction is an annotated list of online resources that are organized into several categories. Gloria Gatchel (Trinity ’21) wrote this chapter, which included finding and annotating the online resources and writing the introductory paragraphs, as part of an undergraduate research fellowship in the summer of 2020.

The Importance of Online Resources The growth of the internet is constantly making access to online materials easier. From databases to archives to writing guides, information that is often available only online has become increasingly essential for a successful research project. The first draft of this chapter was written during the initial months of the COVID-19 outbreak, a time when we significantly limited physical contact with others to minimize the spread of the virus. With our increasing dependence on virtual ways of connecting, the importance of online resources had never been clearer. Many collections of academic materials were already being digitized before the pandemic, and now, even as travel restrictions have loosened, there is just as much demand for online accessibility as there was in the summer of 2020, and every indication is that the amount of information available online will continue to increase. Therefore, the online resources listed in this chapter should not be considered a comprehensive list but rather a starting point where you can gather ideas about what types of information are available to begin your own search for resources that are relevant to your project. DOI: 10.4324/9781003174110-13

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Most of these websites approach their content from an informational standpoint. That is, they focus more on relaying information about the data of a particular religious tradition than engaging with the experiential dimension of the religion. These more data-driven websites tend to provide information on multiple points of view about a religious tradition. While there are many devotional websites online, they tend to be dedicated to one specific view of a religious tradition. These devotional websites can offer important information if a researcher is studying a specific community, but the amount of diversity across religious communities means there is not enough room in this chapter to offer a comprehensive list of these websites. The resources in this chapter are categorized according to the type of information they provide. Resources on How to do Research contains websites that will help the research process in general, while Resources for Writing and Citing Sources deal specifically with aspects of writing up the results of your research. The remaining sections—Libraries and Bibliographies; Manuscripts, Texts, and Art; and Databases and Archives—include resources related to various topics in the field of religious studies and from diverse traditions and include online access to materials that can be useful for conducting religious studies research projects. Of course, online resources come with their own unique challenges. Many websites have been neglected, so they are now either hard to navigate because their formats have not been updated or are simply “dead links” that are no longer accessible. All of the URLs listed in this chapter are websites that were navigable and accessible as of August 2022. This list also only includes sites that are updated frequently, to minimize the risk of the websites being abandoned in the near future.

Resources on How to Do Research AAR Guides for Evaluating a Religious Studies Digital Project While this web page seems to still be a work in progress, it is structured to explain what makes a successful digital project in the context of religious studies. Most of the focus of this website is evaluating the result of the research, so it is lacking information on the research process. https://rsn. aarweb.org/articles/draft-aar-guidelines-evaluating-digital-scholarship Columbia University: Tips for Doing Archival Research Abroad A guide designed to let you know what to expect when doing research in archives outside of the United States. http://guides.library.columbia. edu/c.php?g=642405&p=4500178 Digital Projects 101: A Resource Guide The Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois developed a guide on how to navigate digital collections of information. They

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give specific resources about how digital projects are created, which provides insight into how these collections are formatted. www.carli.illinois. edu/products-services/contentdm/digital_projects_101 National Council of Research Methods Resources Page The United Kingdom’s National Council of Research Methods includes news and resources about how to conduct research in a variety of areas. www.ncrm.ac.uk/resources/ Research Methods for the Study of Religion: An Online Training Resource This website, created by the University of Kent and funded by the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, provides resources that support methodological training for a variety of approaches to the field of religious studies. www.kent.ac.uk/religionmethods/about-the-project.html Religious Studies Project This website, supported by an international collection of religious studies organizations, includes weekly podcasts and written response essays that feature scholars sharing their research and expertise on cutting-edge theoretical, methodological, and empirical issues in religious studies. www. religiousstudiesproject.com/ Tools for Digital Research in Humanities Kennesaw State University collected software that could help facilitate digital research. There are a variety of programs designed to facilitate many different tasks a digital humanities project may need. https://libguides.kennesaw.edu/Research_Tools/home

Resources for Writing and Citing Sources Citation in Turabian/Chicago/SBL Style Pitts theological library published this PDF that provides a good overview of how the Society of Biblical Literature uses citations, which is a branch of the Chicago/Turabian citation style. http://pitts.emory.edu/files/ww/ Citation+Handout.pdf SMU Citation Page Southern Methodist University’s online library has a very clear and accessible citation guide. It is one of many you can find online, but the

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organization of this website makes it easy to navigate. https://guides.smu. edu/citations/overview Writing Commons This website offers a comprehensive overview of how to optimize writing. With the amount of information it has on professional writing, it is too useful not to include. https://writingcommons.org/ Zotero Zotero is downloadable computer software that is extremely useful for collecting and citing sources in research. It is free with an account and provides a browser extension, so when you find an article or webpage useful to your project, it can immediately be added to your Zotero library. Once in Zotero, you can organize your files and generate citations with the click of a button. Zotero also allows for collaborating on bibliographies, so it is especially useful for research within the apprenticeship model. www.zotero.org/

Libraries and Bibliographies American Theological Library Association: Guides to Websites on Religion This website contains resources on a wide variety of religious traditions. Not all of these links are active, but the number of websites collected makes it a valuable resource. https://atla.libguides.com/wor Bibliography on Islam in Contemporary Sub Saharan Africa A very extensive pdf with sources through 2006. https://hdl.handle. net/1887/12922 Buddhist Studies Virtual Library While a little hard to navigate, this website is useful because it divides resources on Buddhism into different traditions. www.ciolek.com/ WWWVL-Buddhism.html Center for Research Libraries: Religion and Philosophy Collection The collections in this library are centered around branches of Protestant Christianity. www.crl.edu/collections/topics/religion-andphilosophy

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Christian Classics Ethereal Library This website includes a collection of classical texts from the Christian tradition as well as some modern texts focused on devotional experience. www.ccel.org/ Digital South Asian Library The University of Chicago and the Center for Research Libraries created this database with an overview of resources about South Asian culture. Part of this website includes information on religious traditions in South Asia. https://dsal.uchicago.edu/ Islam in South Asia: Some Useful Study Materials Columbia University’s collection of resources related to Islam in South Asia. www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/index.html Islamic History Sourcebook A collection of texts on Islamic history. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/ islam/islamsbook.asp Jain eLibrary A collection of texts about Jainism and manuscripts. https://jainelibrary.org/ Open Access Digital Theological Library A comprehensive overview of online and open access resources in religious studies. This collection is notable simply because of its size. https://oadtl.org/ Princeton Theological Seminary: The Theological Commons This website contains resources related to the past 200 years of Christian traditions, with a few references to other religious traditions. https:// commons.ptsem.edu/ Sam Houston State University Library This site includes primary sources related to religious development in the United States. https://shsulibraryguides.org/c.php?g=86715&p=558421 The Tibetan and Himalayan Library The most useful part of this site is probably the Literature collection, which contains many sources on Tibetan Buddhism. www.thlib.org/

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Manuscripts, Texts, and Art Alphabetical List of Open Access Historical Newspapers and Other Periodicals in Middle East and Islamic Studies This blogspot link provides a very comprehensive list of historical newspapers for Islamic studies. http://amirmideast.blogspot.com/2013/10/ alphabetical-list-of-open-access.html Art History Resources This website is a clearinghouse of art history resources from around the world, many of which are relevant for research in religious studies. http:// arthistoryresources.net/ARTHLinks.html Asian Classics Input Project A searchable digital database that provides access to a virtual library of sacred and classical Asian texts. https://asianclassics.org/ Chinese Text Project A collection of early Chinese texts that are digitized, searchable, and translatable. https://ctext.org/ Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints History Catalog A searchable collection of documents written by or about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members. https://catalog. churchofjesuschrist.org/?lang=eng Collection of Sunnah and Hadith This collection is from the Center of Islamic and Jewish Engagement. The webpage also has the Qur’an and the Tanakh, all in searchable PDF format. https://web.archive.org/web/20110822165911/http://www.usc.edu/ schools/college/crcc/engagement/resources/texts/muslim/hadith Cooperative Digital Resources Initiative The American Theological Library Association’s collection of art and manuscripts from the Christian tradition. https://dl.atla.com/collections/44558j212 Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum A digital collection of texts in Latin. Spans many traditions and a large amount of time. www.forumromanum.org/literature/index.html

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Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Libraries Digitized manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls. www.deadseascrolls.org.il/ Early Christian Writings A collection of Christian texts, including translations and commentaries, from the 1st—3rd centuries CE. www.earlychristianwritings.com/ Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center The Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center is dedicated to archiving Pentecostal history. This website contains a large number of artifacts, documents, and memorabilia stored online. https://ifphc.org/ Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society Free registration will provide you with access to digitized manuscripts about the Jewish tradition. https://fjms.genizah.org/?eraseCache=true? Gottingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages A searchable collection of standardized machine-readable texts in several Indian languages. http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil.html Internet Sacred Texts Archive This website is dedicated to being the largest online archive of sacred texts from as many religious traditions as possible. www.sacred-texts. com/index.htm Islamic Heritage Projects Harvard’s collection of Islamic art, manuscripts, etc. https://library.harvard. edu/collections/islamic-heritage-project Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the National Library of Medicine Contains resources of the Islamic tradition from the Middle Ages. www. nlm.nih.gov/hmd/arabic/arabichome.html JDC (The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) Archives An extensive digital archive of photographs and documents related to Jewish history from 1914 onwards. https://archives.jdc.org/

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National Library of Israel Has a digital library that includes extensive digital resources about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. https://web.nli.org.il/sites/nli/english/Pages/ default.aspx New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room An online collection of Greek New Testament manuscripts hosted by the Institute for New Testament Textual Research. https://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/ Perseus Digital Library An extensive and ever-growing collection of Greco-Roman texts, including important ancient Jewish and Christian texts. www.perseus.tufts.edu Princeton Digital Library of Islamic Manuscripts Thousands of scanned manuscripts from Princeton’s collections on Islamic history. https://dpul.princeton.edu/islamicmss Syriac Reference Project This website is dedicated to materials in Syriac, which include a large amount of early Christian writings. https://syriaca.org/index.html The Golden Elixir This website has a collection of Taoist texts translated into English. www. goldenelixir.com/taoism_texts.html The Labyrinth: Medieval Theology Resources Sponsored by Georgetown University, this blog provides access to many medieval manuscripts. https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/ categories/theology/ The International Dunhuang Project Collections of manuscripts, paintings, textiles, and artifacts from multiple archaeology sites of the Eastern Silk Road. http://idp.bl.uk/ Thesaurus Literaturae Buddhicae Created at the University of Oslo, this is a collection of Buddhist literature, translated into multiple languages. www2.hf.uio.no/polyglotta/ index.php?page=library&bid=2

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Databases and Archives ArchiveGrid This easily searchable website includes over 7 million records from 1,500 archival institutions, “bringing together information about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more” (ArchiveGrid). In addition to finding physical archives that you might want to visit for your research project, many of the results will also include digital documents that you can access without leaving your desk. https://researchworks.oclc. org/archivegrid/ Association of Religion Data Archive Searchable collection of data about religion submitted by scholars and research centers from around the world. www.thearda.com/index.asp Berman Jewish Databank Quantitative data on Jewish communities, with a concentration on communities in North America. www.jewishdatabank.org/databank Database of Religious History A searchable quantitative encyclopedia of religious history that includes both data and qualitative analyses of the data. https://religiondatabase. org/landing/ International Religious Freedom Reports A collection of the annual report to the United States Congress about religious freedom across the globe. www.state.gov/international-religiousfreedom-reports/ Mavcor Material Objects Archive This archive is part of the Yale University’s Center for the Study of Material & Visual Cultures of Religions and includes “an ever-expanding online gallery” of “material objects, especially as they are activated in religious practices of some sort.” https://mavcor.yale.edu/material-objects Nation Master Statistics in Religion Nation Master contains data by country for as many countries as possible. They have a subsection of data on religion in specific countries. www. nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Religion

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Pew Research Center Religious Data Data on religion that Pew has gathered. www.pewforum.org/data/ Statistics About Islam in Europe by Country Demographics about the prevalence and experiences of Islamic communities in Europe, the United States and Canada. www.euro-islam.info/ country-profiles/

14 DISSEMINATION OF RESULTS

Summary Included in the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) definition of undergraduate research is the phrase “contribution to the discipline.” Like faculty scholarship, undergraduate research contributes to the discipline through the dissemination of the work to other scholars in the form of conference presentations, publications, performances, and exhibits. There are a growing number of opportunities for students to present, publish, or show their work, and this chapter provides a guide to the various venues, conferences, symposia, and journals available to students.

Why Share Your Work? The key attribute that transforms ordinary students doing research assignments into scholars i s the dissemination of their results. Scholars are part of a scholarly community t hat learns from each other and advances the field of study. That learning from each other can only occur, of course, when scholars share what they learn, discover, or create. One purpose of conducting research is to inform one’s own thinking. But the more important reason is to contribute to the discovery and creation of new knowledge. In sharing new knowledge, researchers further not only their own but also many others’ understandings about the topic of study and contribute to the progression of the field.

Dissemination as a Defining Feature of Undergraduate Research The definition of undergraduate research according to the national organization CUR is “an inquiry or investigation conducted by an undergraduate student DOI: 10.4324/9781003174110-14

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that makes an original intellectual or creative contribution to the discipline” (Council on Undergraduate Research 2020, emphasis added). The mentored inquiry or investigation would be incomplete without the contribution to the discipline or to another community, as appropriate. That “original . . . contribution to the discipline” is a very high standard any scholar’s work could shoot for that goal and not get there for a number of reasons. It could turn out that another scholar made the discovery first. Sometimes limitations of studies (see Chapter 6) are more significant than initially realized and then undermine the results. Or, even after a thoughtfully chosen design, a study may not go as planned, and the data could be inconclusive. Achieving publishable results that make a notable disciplinary contribution is not the only standard for successful undergraduate research, nor is it the only reason to disseminate findings. We usually talk with our students in terms of a lightly edited version of the CUR definition of undergraduate research: a faculty-mentored investigation that seeks to make an original intellectual or creative contribution. Seeking to make a contribution puts the focus on the process and purpose of conducting scholarly work rather than the outcome of that work. Having an orientation for your research efforts towards a community of disciplinary experts and peers makes your work more meaningful and scholarly than if you were gathering information solely for your own knowledge base. We have found it even more useful to identify what makes undergraduate research a high-impact practice—the characteristics or criteria of impactful scholarly experiences rather than a one-size-fits-all definition. Osborn and Karukstis (2009) laid out four criteria for high-quality undergraduate research: mentorship by faculty, original work, acceptability in the discipline, and dissemination. In this chapter, we are most interested in that last criterion. Dissemination is considered a defining characteristic of undergraduate research because sharing a work in progress or the results of scholarly work with an audience of academics, peers, experts in the field, a community of practice (a group of people who share a common interest and wish to learn from one another about it), and/or the general public, contributes to—and sometimes completes—the inquiry process and is a powerful learning experience in its own right.

Engaging With an Authentic Audience Have you ever wondered about the point of writing a research paper that only your instructor would ever read? We remember feeling let down at times during our student years after investing late-night hours and some pretty good ideas in writing an essay, only to send it into the apparent void of a professor’s paper pile. Our best professors wrote thoughtful responses to each student’s work, and a couple of them even talked with us about it, but those were few and far between.

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On the other hand, when students have the chance to engage with an authentic audience for their work beyond a single instructor, they say they devote more time and effort to it. As university faculty, we have witnessed the difference in the quality of student work when it will be disseminated in some way. The research and writing simply matter more when other people will see the results of the work and respond to it. As social creatures, perhaps all of us are hardwired to want to connect with others through our ideas and efforts. When others find our work thought-provoking, when they ask questions about it, and/or when they offer productive feedback, we tend to want to meet their expectations for good-quality work. For all of these reasons—the contributions that can be made to a scholarly community and field of study, the logical completion of the research process, and the higher level of effort and engagement inspired by addressing an audience—sharing the work is an essential aspect of undergraduate research.

What You Will Gain From Presenting and Publishing Your Scholarly Work Students who develop particularly valued skills are likely to stand out in a very tough employment environment. Nearly all business and nonprofit leaders surveyed said that oral communication, written communication, and critical thinking and analysis are three of the top six skills that are more important than a job candidate’s major or the university that they attended (Hart Research Associates 2015). In other words, students should be focused more on oral and written communication and critical, real-world problem-solving skills than worrying about the most marketable majors or the prominence of their university. The research you will conduct with your faculty mentor will sharpen your critical thinking and analysis skills, and when you focus on the dissemination of your research you will sharpen your written and oral communication skills. Speaking articulately and confidently and engaging interpersonally with a diversity of people are skills that need extensive practice to develop. Therefore, it would not be surprising if you were reluctant (or even deathly afraid) of developing your oral communication skills by presenting your research in front of a live audience. Just about everyone experiences nervousness about public speaking, and for many, the very idea brings on acute anxiety. According to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears (2019), public speaking is one of the most common forms of personal anxiety. Fortunately, there is a plethora of online and print resources to help manage anxiety about public speaking. More severe phobias can be eased through therapy, relaxation techniques, or hypnosis. The best strategy for overcoming a fear of presenting is to practice over and over again, preferably in low-stakes settings. Take opportunities to present in less

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stressful situations, such as in a class with people you know and can trust to be on your side or in a student research symposium on your campus where dozens or even hundreds of your peers are going through the same experience. Public speaking is truly something that gets easier by doing it. We recommend starting out with poster presentations, if feasible. These types of presentations are much less nerveracking since they entail speaking for just a few minutes to one or two audience members at a time rather than giving a more formal talk. After even one poster presentation, you will likely gain confidence in your ability to present your work and may feel more ready to try an oral presentation in a friendly environment. The other critical career skill that is enhanced by sharing your research is written communication. Writing the content of an oral or poster presentation is an excellent means of developing drafting and revision skills. Writing about the results of research is especially suited to common workplace writing situations, such as reports and presentation materials. Showing a willingness to revise written work has been cited by employers as a rare and valuable trait. Your work to revise presentations—especially in consolidating a large amount of information into a succinct and effective poster or talk—can be noted in cover letters and interviews to your benefit. Publishing your research will take that distinction in written communication skills to a whole new level. Composing a substantial paper that will be carefully read by an audience—as opposed to the quick grasp they would get from presentation slides or a poster—requires writing acumen and a longer process of drafting and revision. The work likely will pay off exceedingly well, though. For example, student papers published in Bridgewater State University’s journal of undergraduate research, The Undergraduate Review, have been downloaded more than two million times. Students whose work appears in the journal, which is published in print as well as electronic form, report being asked about their articles during interviews for internships, jobs, and graduate and professional school. They can include a link to their published paper in electronic applications, offering an at-the-ready writing sample that is not only well-written but also copyedited and nicely laid out by the journal editors. Since published papers also show up in online searches, the students have discovered that when their names are Googled by potential employers or graduate admissions officers that their published research shows up at or near the top of the results. The benefits of that exposure to the student’s best work are incalculable.

Where Can You Share Your Work? The Rhetorical Situation As you may have learned in an English Composition course, the audience, context, and purpose of a piece of writing constitute its rhetorical situation or the circumstances in which an argument is made. Like the concept of the rhetorical

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triangle explained in Chapter 6, the theory of the rhetorical situation derives from Aristotle’s Rhetoric (2018), an ancient Greek philosophical text about the art of effective speaking and writing. Bitzer (1968) adapted the concept for modern presenters and writers to explain how their claims are shaped by the intended audience (including readers), the context (or setting or framework in which the presenter/writer is working), and its purpose. The following examples of each aspect of the rhetorical situation—audience, context, and purpose—are intended to help illustrate its function. Imagine sharing your research in a venue mainly attended by your college or university’s religious studies professors. As experts in the field of study, the audience of religious studies professors would expect high-level scholarly work. You might, for example, decide to include theoretical ideas that are familiar only to those who study religion. Alternatively, if you were to present that same work in a talk at a multidisciplinary undergraduate conference attended by hundreds of college students majoring in a broad range of fields, many of whom have never taken a religious studies course, you would either omit some of the theory or include only a few key points with clear explanations. The audience, in other words, plays a significant role in determining the content you share and how you present it. The context (circumstance, setting, or framework) is the second determining factor. The presentation to the religious studies faculty could occur in a departmental thesis defense, where you are expected to give a formal talk followed by challenging questions from the faculty. Your skill in answering the questions, as well as your ability to present your most important results succinctly and clearly are being evaluated for a grade and may even determine whether you graduate with honors. That high-stakes context would undoubtedly inf luence your selection of information and how you prepare for the questions. If, however, instead of justifying your work at a thesis defense, you were presenting in a less intense situation, both the substance and style of your presentation would be different. Consider, for example, presenting a poster at your university’s annual undergraduate research symposium that is held on campus. Members of the same religious studies faculty might stop by your poster. Yet, you would interact with them less formally, one or two at a time, rather than addressing the entire department at once. What you say to them would probably vary based on how well you know each professor, their area of expertise, and how acquainted each is with your work. The context shapes the content, format, and design of the presentation. The purpose of sharing the work also affects its substance and form. If you received an undergraduate research grant to support your work, you would likely need to report to faculty on the selection committee about what you accomplished at the end of the grant period. Such a report could include any major findings, challenges you encountered and how you addressed them, and a statement of gratitude for the opportunities afforded by the funding. But what

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if the grant were renewable, and you wanted to request additional funds? You would still show what you accomplished with the first grant, but you would need to add a convincing explanation of how much further you would like to take the project and how a second round of funding would make that possible. In that grant-renewal request, you would have a distinctly different purpose (asking for more money) and, therefore, would need to alter your report to achieve the hoped-for outcome. Each purpose has its own demands, and meeting those particular demands is essential to success. There are two main options for where you can share your work: publish your research in an academic journal and present your research at a conference. And since there are various types of academic journals and conferences where you share your work will require you to consider the rhetorical situation, that is the network of audience, context, and purpose. The possibilities for the dissemination of undergraduate research in religious studies begin with the most accessible opportunities and move to more selective options that include collaborating with your faculty mentor on presentations at professional conferences and articles in peer-reviewed professional journals.

Campus Symposium of Undergraduate Research As the benefits of undergraduate research as a high-impact practice become ever more recognized, most four-year colleges and universities in the U.S. now offer opportunities for students to share their scholarly work in a campus symposium or showcase of undergraduate work. Some of these events feature poster presentations exclusively, while others include a mix of poster and oral presentations. The size and atmosphere of campus symposia vary a great deal too. On some campuses, student presenters are selected through a review process, whereas at other institutions, everyone who wants to present is welcome, and many faculty members even make a symposium presentation a course requirement, especially for capstone and other research-intensive courses. Awards for the highest-quality projects are given at many campus symposia. Presenting in a campus symposium or showcase is an outstanding opportunity for several reasons. The symposium audience—other students, faculty and administrators, and some presenters’ family members—offers a valuable and gratifying experience in addressing a real-world audience. Over the years, we have each witnessed hundreds of students heading to their campus-symposium presentations with apprehension or dread, only to hear them say immediately afterward that it was not nearly as intimidating as they had feared. Many of our students have even reported that the experience was fun! One of the most satisfying professional experiences for each of us is that first conversation with a student after a presentation. Students express relief that they overcame nervousness to give a solid presentation and, most exciting, gratitude for the experience of sharing their work with people genuinely interested in it. It has been

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through positive experiences at campus symposia that most of our students who have gone on to present at national conferences gained the confidence to do so. If your college or university does not yet hold a symposium on student scholarships, you have a few options to pursue. The first is to ask faculty who know the quality of your work if they will provide an opportunity for you and some of your peers to share your work in the department as panel presentations or posters. In fact, many universities’ larger events started with individual department efforts. And plenty of individual departments find that they value the small seminar-style symposia so much that they will keep hosting those events even if a larger showcase takes off on their campus. The second option is to locate an institution nearby that hosts an annual symposium of student work and ask whether students from neighboring campuses could participate. Finally, you may find a state or regional undergraduate research conference with the welcoming environment of a campus-based event.

National, State, and Regional Undergraduate Research Conferences Statewide and regional conferences of undergraduate research offer a moderate “step-up” in presentation experience. Many such meetings accept most applicants, as they are not intended to be highly selective, but to give as many students as possible the opportunity to share their work beyond their home campuses. The more selective state conferences are “posters at the capitol” events, for which a set number of students across that state are chosen to present posters, usually in the capitol building itself. The purposes of such events, beyond the great experience and prestige afforded the student-presenters, are to show legislators and their staff members the importance and quality of research and creative inquiry taking place in their districts and across the state, and more or less directly, advocate for research, arts, and higher-education funding in the state. Traditionally, most of the posters at the capitol feature science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) research, but the importance of scholarly work in the arts and humanities is becoming more widespread in recent years. As faculty and administrators with longtime participation in the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR), we cannot say enough about what a valuable experience that annual event offers for student-presenters. NCUR has an over-30-year tradition of bringing together thousands of students from across the nation—as well as dozens from other countries—each year on a different college campus to present their research and creative scholarship. Over 3,500 students presented at Kennesaw State University in Georgia in April 2019, in the form of posters, oral presentations, art exhibits with gallery talks, and lecture-recitals (in which students in the performing arts perform a piece of music or dance and provide a brief lecture on it). NCUR

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Jamiless Lopez (Trinity ’20) presents the results of her research at the Trinity University Summer Symposium in 2019. For a description of Jamiless’ research project, see Chapter 11.

has a high rate of acceptance, usually over 80%, and maintains strong quality in its presentations. Besides the distinction of presenting at a national conference with a large, engaged audience, NCUR offers the opportunity to meet students in your own field and every major imaginable from across the country and the world. The conference hosts a graduate-school fair of hundreds of different programs, inspiring keynote speakers, and social events.

Disciplinary Academic Meetings/Conferences As the tide of undergraduate research has swept through higher education in the past two decades, many of the disciplinary professional organizations in which university faculty participate and present their scholarly work have provided venues for undergraduates in their respective areas to present too. Our universities’ undergraduate-research offices regularly receive notifications of new opportunities for students to present at academic organizations’ regional and national meetings. Although some professional organizations in the arts and humanities have carved out sessions for undergraduates within the larger

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meeting, giving students the dual benefit of attending presentations by scholars in their field of study while having a space for presenting at the undergraduate level, this is still uncommon in the field of religious studies. Perhaps this is because the organizers feel that putting undergraduates side-by-side with renowned scholars can be intimidating for the students. Although it might not be possible for undergraduates to give solo presentations at most religious studies conferences—there are some local and regional conferences where it is possible—one workaround with the apprenticeship model is for students to co-present with their faculty mentors. In fact, one of the authors of this book (Chad Spigel) has co-presented with three different undergraduate students at the Southwest Commission on Religious Studies conference, which is held annually in Dallas, Texas. Co-presenting at professional conferences provides undergraduates with the opportunity to present at the highest levels while at the same time diminishing the intimidation factor by presenting alongside their faculty mentors.

Undergraduate Research Journals Undergraduate students are most often published in a journal of student work. Many colleges and universities publish their own students’ work in campusbased journals. In addition to campus-based journals, a few college and university consortia, such as the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges, and state-university systems publish journals featuring work by students at any of the member institutions. A few student journals publish work by undergraduates in multiple disciplines from any college or university. These include the Journal of Student Research (www.jofsr.com/index.php/path/index), the American Journal of Undergraduate Research (www.ajuronline.org/), and the Journal of Undergraduate Research and Scholarly Excellence (www.jurpress.org/). The Mellon Initiative for Undergraduate Research in the Arts and Humanities at Trinity University keeps an updated list of undergraduate research journals as well (www.trinity.edu/sites/ mellon-initiative/resources/student-resources). When considering journals, it is important to keep in mind the cross-disciplinary nature of religious studies. Depending on the methods you utilize in your religious studies research, you might be able to submit your work to journals that focus on a variety of academic fields, including history, literature, classical studies, sociology, and anthropology.

Peer-Reviewed Academic Journals If your audience is made up of professionals in the field and your purpose is to demonstrate high-level competence as a scholar, perhaps with the goal of attending a selective graduate program in religious studies, publishing your

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work in a peer-reviewed journal may be something you want to consider. Publishing in peer-reviewed journals is the “gold standard” for the dissemination of scholarly work. Undergraduate research is usually not considered for such publications unless the work is co-authored with a faculty member, as meeting the standards for such journals requires expertise in the field that most scholars attain through graduate study and in their academic careers. If you are collaborating with a professor on a shared project, your professor may already be thinking in terms of peer-reviewed publication. Having papers accepted for such journals is an expectation for university faculty as they seek tenure and promotion; in addition, most academics enjoy disseminating their work as part of their engagement in the field of study. If a peer-reviewed journal publication is the goal, your professor will likely take the lead as first author, but the expectations for your contributions will likely be demanding.

Forms of Dissemination Abstract To present your scholarly work, you will first need to submit an abstract or summary of the work. The abstract is the basis for conference organizers vetting your application to present (sometimes additional documents such as a personal statement are requested). If you are accepted to present, your abstract will appear in the conference program. An abstract is a one-paragraph overview of a project or study. An abstract for a conference may need to be as brief as 60 words or may go as long as 350 words; always check the conference’s Call for Abstracts for requirements. Write the abstract after your work is complete or is at least far enough along that you have initial findings to report. The abstract focuses on the results and the significance of the work. At the top of the page, include a thoughtful, interesting, and informative title, with the first letter of each main word capitalized—no quotation marks, italics, or underlining. Be sure to include the name(s) of the authors(s). An abstract is usually structured with the following parts: • • • •

Sentences 1–2: What is the problem, question, need, or important context that prompted your work? Sentences 2–3: Identify the purpose/focus of the study. For example, “The purpose of this project was to determine/examine/analyze/assess . . .” Next 2–3 sentences: Statement of the methods or process you undertook to fulfill the purpose. Remainder of the abstract: Explain the results and significance of your work. This will entail discussing how your project relates to others’ work, how the discipline will benefit from your results, and how your research can be expanded.

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Posters Academic posters constitute a distinct genre that calls for the planning and presentation of ideas in ways very different from research essays. Although poster presentations are uncommon in the humanities in general and the field of religious studies in particular—neither the annual SBL nor AAR conferences have regular poster sessions—we are big proponents of this type of presentation and encourage students to consider using this format to disseminate their research. When working on a poster presentation, it is important to remember that it should not be designed as a shortened research paper with images. Like any other text—in any genre or rhetorical situation—posters should be designed with the audience, context, and purpose in mind. Poster presentations offer certain advantages over traditional modes of presenting scholarship. For one, many more presenters and audience members can be accommodated during a single session, as opposed to the panels of just three or four presenters at a time, as is typical in oral presentation sessions. Another advantage of poster presentations is that students are required to think about their work in new ways, including how to articulate it more succinctly. Poster presenters not only gain skills in consolidating points into the content of the poster but also in their “poster talk” or “elevator speech”—the three-minute synopsis of the study they need to have ready to deliver. Preparing posters also help students develop skills in visual rhetoric and design thinking as they consider how to represent their points in visually appealing configurations. The rhetorical situation of poster presentations prompts additional considerations. Because of the opportunities for rich one-on-one interactions with audience members, poster presenters should ensure that the research question, purpose of the study, and major findings are immediately clear. If audience members can grasp the main points right away, the interactions can lead to more nuanced discussion. Consider what an engaged audience member needs to understand quickly in order to ask informed questions during the session. At the same time, think about what a casual observer should walk away with after a brief perusal of the poster. The uniqueness or distinctiveness of the work should be evident. Research posters usually include the following points: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Summary/abstract. Brief introductory/contextual information, including the research questions or project goals. Theory or critical approach of the researcher. Explanation of the process or methods. Findings/results/main ideas. Significance of the work. Key quotations from primary texts, participants, and/or the research paper.

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Photos, maps, illustrations, graphs. Shortened bibliography.

The poster document is usually created as a single PowerPoint slide, set up with the dimensions of the poster. A typical size is 42 inches in width by 36–38 inches in height, although some conferences require smaller posters. The following suggestions are for the structure and design of the poster, but you should feel free to be creative and innovative while always keeping in mind that your goal is to effectively communicate your research to your audience. 1. At the top, include the title, presenter’s name, mentor’s name, and your university’s and/or sponsoring organization’s name and logo. 2. Below the heading of title and names, set up three or four equal-sized columns for text and images. 3. The text for most of the poster should be in 32- to 70-point type so that it is readable at a distance of a few feet. The title can be larger (80–100 point), and captions for images can be smaller (22–24 point).

FIGURE 14.2

Poster presentation by Adam Toler, an undergraduate student at Trinity University who worked with his faculty mentor on creating an open-access digital archive of previously unpublished archaeological data. Image courtesy of Adam Toler (Summer 2019).

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4. Use a white or light background; it makes the poster easier to read, and keeping a white background costs less to print. 5. Use dark, coordinating colors for the body of the text, headings, borders, lines, etc. 6. Align the columns and use text boxes and borders to create neat lines and a sense of order. Avoid “jagged edges” by placing borders around some text boxes and fully justifying text (i.e., aligning it with both margins). 7. Follow a logical sequence and structure for reading left to right and top to bottom. 8. Maintain consistency in fonts, styles, sizes of text, and width of text boxes. 9. Keep some “white space” for ease of reading and visual calm. 10. Break up large amounts of text with images that you have permission to use and that are cited. The text should take up less than two-thirds of the poster. 11. Make sure that photos and logos are of high resolution. They should not appear pixelated when viewing the poster at 100% zoom. 12. Proofread meticulously before sending the document to the printer and, if possible, ask at least one other person to proofread it too. Minor errors are easy to miss on a computer screen but show up large on a poster. In addition to the guidelines listed above, we also recommend “Making an Exciting Poster in the Arts and Humanities” from the CUR Arts & Humanities website (available at http://curartsandhumanities.org/resources/posters-inthe-arts-and-humanities/) and “Poster-making 101” by Professor Brian Pfohl at Bates College (available online at http://abacus.bates.edu/~bpfohl/posters/).

Oral Presentations Oral presentations include several of the elements of posters, including images and bibliographies, which can appear on slides that accompany the presentation. Although the basic elements of research presentations are the same no matter the format, posters and talks are different genres and therefore require different considerations. An oral presentation requires a more formal, planned out, scripted (to some extent) presentation. The content of a poster is mostly fixed, so the live aspect of presenting is short and less formal and often changes depending on the interests and questions of the particular audience member. Oral presentations, however, have a longer time with the audience—usually 15–20 minutes, plus a few minutes for answering questions from the audience—that is fixed and often strictly enforced. Staying focused and organized is essential to completing the presentation in the scheduled session. Presenters of talks cultivate highly valued skills of public speaking that include effective use of body language, eye contact, and voice projection in addition to the writing and rhetorical skills developed by working on the content. Our

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best advice for preparing oral presentations is first to think about the engaging presentations you have attended, as well as those that were unsuccessful in maintaining your interest. What have other presenters done to maintain your attention or to turn you off from their presentation? How have slides and other visual aids been used effectively and ineffectively during oral presentations? We find with our students that it is easy to identify what has gone poorly in ineffective presentations—everything from the speaker reading straight from notes without making adequate eye contact with the audience to reading straight from the slides with their back facing the audience, from low voice volume to verbal tics and other nervous habits; from misspellings and typos on slides to mispronunciation of important terms. Simply avoiding those goes a long way toward giving a good oral presentation. As you prepare your script and slides, consider what a nonexpert could reasonably retain without losing interest while also ensuring that you engage knowledgeable audience members. That balance usually requires brief ly defining some key terms and theories before moving straight to the results and significance of your work. In addition to writing the script and designing slides, oral presenters should prepare for audience questions. Work with your faculty mentor and classmates to brainstorm what kinds of questions you should anticipate and how you will answer them. It is also helpful to prepare what to say when you do not know the answer to an audience question. There is no shame in acknowledging the limits of your study or explaining that the scope of your work did not encompass what is being asked. If you are prepared to respond, you will be far less anxious about difficult questions.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters For well over a century, the pinnacle of disseminating research in religious studies has been publishing books, journal articles, and chapters in books. As an undergraduate, it is unlikely that you will have the opportunity to publish an entire book, but as discussed above, it is completely within your reach to publish your research as an article in an undergraduate journal. Or, for those of you who are using the apprenticeship model, it is also within reach to co-author articles with your faculty mentor in professional journals or chapters in books. Whether your goal is an article in an undergraduate journal or a co-authored publication with your faculty mentor, we recommend the following considerations to help you prepare your manuscript for publication. The first step is to determine early on that publication is your goal so that you orient yourself from the beginning to do publishable work. Writing a publishable paper starts well in advance of the actual writing. Thinking about whether you want to publish your work at the beginning of your research when you are focusing on the topic and research question is not too soon. That

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early goal can help you set up a study that takes on something new, interesting, timely, and significant enough to interest journal editors, reviewers, and readers. And for those of you working with the apprenticeship model, it is important for both faculty and students to be on the same page about the dissemination goals from the beginning. You also need to decide early on what type of paper to write. Full articles of 15–30 pages are the most rigorous and thorough academic papers. They are complete reports of scholarship of importance in the field. Research briefs are much shorter pieces (typically 2–8 pages) that summarize the research and highlight the most important findings and implications. Practice-based papers of varying lengths include scholarly research but focus on community-based or other practitioner work, with implications for people doing work in schools, therapeutic settings, and other places in the community. Various journals publish certain types of papers and often have particular page-length requirements. Choosing the right journal for your work is therefore important in the early stages as well. If you are aiming to publish in an undergraduate journal, be sure to consider journals at your university but also at other universities that allow for open submissions. You should not submit your work to more than one journal at the same time. One way to determine whether a journal is the right one for your work is to look at the articles it has recently published. Is yours at a similar level of work and within the scope of what the journal publishes? If you are collaborating with your faculty mentor on their research—especially if you are beginning your work in the middle of the project—they will likely have a journal in mind. If this is the case, be sure you are aware of the journal and familiarize yourself with its requirements. Regardless of the type of project or the journal, keep in mind the criteria that the reviewers will be used to evaluate your paper. The journal guidelines may include evaluation criteria. If not, questions such as these are fairly typical for academic journals: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Does the paper contain new and interesting material? Are points presented concisely and in a well-organized format? Are the methods explained clearly? Are the findings/results presented clearly and convincingly? Is the analysis/discussion relevant and insightful? Are the implications/conclusions supported by the evidence presented? Are the vocabulary, style, and tone at a high level of sophistication? Are figures, tables, and images necessary and well-designed? Are all sources cited in the text and included in the bibliography?

Pay close attention to the journal’s submission guidelines. They generally include detailed expectations for the format of papers, submission procedures,

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and copyright policies. Most journal editors will not waste time on manuscripts that do not align with the guidelines. Questions for Students What are you most apprehensive about prior to presenting? How can you put your best foot forward? What do you feel you will gain from the experience? Questions for Faculty Which parts of my research are potential opportunities for co-presentations? Which parts of my research are potential opportunities for co-publications?

Bibliography Aristotle. 2018. Rhetoric. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Original work published in the 4th century BCE. Bitzer, Lloyd F. 1968. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 1 (1): 1–14. Council on Undergraduate Research. 2020. “About CUR.” www.cur.org/who/ organization/mission_and_vision/ Hart Research Associates. 2015. Falling Short? College Learning and Career Success. https://dgmg81phhvh63.cloudfront.net/content/user-photos/Research/PDFs/ 2015employerstudentsurvey.pdf Osborn, Jeffrey, and Kerry Karukstis. 2009. “The Benefits of Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity.” In Broadening Participation in Undergraduate Research: Fostering Excellence and Enhancing the Impact, edited by Mary K. Boyd and Jodi L. Wesemann, 41–52. Washington DC: Council on Undergraduate Research. Sheth, Shreya. 2019. “America’s Top Fears.” www.chapman.edu/wilkinson/researchcenters/babbie-center/_files/americas-top-fears-2019.pdf

APPENDIX 1 High Impact Research Embedded in Courses

Throughout this book, we have provided tools that both undergraduate students and faculty mentors need to effectively do undergraduate research in religious studies. We have also provided various examples of research that can be done by individual students doing their own research, as well as examples where undergraduate students and faculty mentors can collaborate on faculty-driven research projects. Both of these models are effective ways for undergraduate students to benefit from high-impact research experiences. And while it would be ideal if every undergraduate student could have these types of research experiences, for various reasons—e.g., time constraints, lack of funding, or just not knowing that these types of experiences are available or possible—only a very small percentage of undergraduate students participate in undergraduate research in the humanities generally, and religious studies more specifically. One way to increase the number of opportunities for undergraduate students to do original research in religious studies is for faculty to add original research opportunities to their courses. The most obvious and common place to put student-directed undergraduate research projects is the capstone course for graduating majors. Upper-level courses that are taken to fulfill the major requirements are additional opportunities for individual undergraduate research projects where both majors and non-majors can benefit from the experience. The chapters in this book provide a guide for both students and faculty in these courses as they work through their research. In this appendix, we provide a way to provide undergraduate research opportunities for students who may never even take an upper-level course in religious studies. The way to do this is to create Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) in lower-level religious studies courses that students typically take in their first or second year of college to fulfill general education requirements.

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What Is a CURE? Fundamentally, a CURE involves “whole classes of students in addressing a research question or problem that is of interest to the scientific community” (Corwin et al. 2014, 30). The goal is for students in the classroom to go beyond learning individual components of the academic research process and beyond working on traditional research papers, so that they have the opportunity to learn about research by working directly on a relevant and unfinished research project that is even new to the professor. CUREs are often described as using the methodologies employed in the particular field, including an element of discovery, being relevant to the wider scholarly community, including collaboration, and being iterative (Corwin et al. 2014, 30). The inclusion of iteration in typical definitions of CUREs highlights the fact that they were developed within and are most commonly found in STEM fields. But the general idea of using methods employed in a particular field to discover something new that is relevant to the wider scholarly community is something that applies to all academic fields, including religious studies. Nancy Hensel points out that CUREs can help students “become good observers, frame actionable questions, explain and defend their ideas, develop a tolerance for uncertainty, use evidence and work collaboratively” (Hensel 2018a, 9). These are skills that apply to the field of religious studies and skills that would benefit all students in religious studies courses, regardless of their major. Of course, CUREs in the humanities and religious studies are complicated by the same hurdles that have made undergraduate research, in general, slower to catch on in these fields—lack of background knowledge, the traditionally individual nature of research in the humanities, and research projects that can take years to complete—but with some creativity, faculty can create CUREs that give students the opportunity to work through the various components that comprise academic research in the field. One of the most difficult aspects of creating a CURE is figuring out how to start. There is no single approach, but a short two-page guide for getting started, developed by the Cottrell Scholar Collaborative (2017), provides suggestions as well as resources that are geared towards CUREs in STEM fields but are useful for religious studies as well. Another resource, CUREnet, was created in 2012 to “support networking among faculty developing, teaching, and assessing CUREs, to share CURE projects and resources, and to develop new tools and strategies for CURE instruction and assessment” (https://serc.carleton.edu/ curenet/about.html). And in 2018 Course-Based Undergraduate Research: Educational Equity and High-Impact Practice was published with a collection of articles that deal with the creation of CUREs in various fields, including the social sciences and humanities (Hensel and Davidson 2018). A few of the most important things to keep in mind when developing a CURE is to have clearly defined research and learning goals, to determine

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how the CURE fits into the course, to create clear research guidelines for the course, and to be prepared to be f lexible. This last point is probably the most important since no matter how much planning is done, the nature of CUREs means that there are a lot of “unknowns.” These “unknowns” include the amount of time it will take for different students to conduct the research, the motivations of different students, and even whether or not the CURE will provide the anticipated results. Faculty should, therefore, be prepared to pivot both within an individual iteration of a CURE and between iterations.

CUREs in Lower-Division Courses Although CUREs can be created in any university course, we recommend creating them in lower-division courses. Not only will this provide students with the skills and knowledge they will need to carry out higher-level research projects either independently or with faculty later in their undergraduate career, but perhaps more importantly, placing high-impact research opportunities in lowerlevel courses—especially courses that fulfill general university requirements— provides a larger and more diverse group of students with high impact research experiences. The idea is to provide a complete research experience for students while they are still exploring different areas of study so they can have opportunities to pursue additional research experiences throughout their time in college. Having CUREs in lower-division courses also creates an environment that fosters a more diverse and inclusive undergraduate arts and humanities research community. By involving an entire class in a research experience, CUREs “serve all students who enroll in a course—not only self-selecting students” (Corwin et al. 2014, 30). Studies show that these experiences help “students from historically underrepresented groups” improve “their persistence” and “feel part of the research community” (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2017, 217). While there are clear benefits to having CUREs in lower-division courses, there are also a number of challenges. Not only will you be working with students who might not be interested in doing research in religious studies, but you will also be working with students who have various amounts of experience and who are planning to major in a variety of fields. As Nancy Hensel points out, the challenges associated with CUREs—especially CUREs in lower-division courses—means that mentoring plays an even more important role than when the apprenticeship model is applied (Hensel 2018b, 223).

Example: CUREing the Museum of the Bible The details of the CURE that you create for your course will depend on the course you are teaching, the skills your students possess and will require for the research, your area of expertise, and whether you are comfortable mentoring

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students in research that might not be in your research wheelhouse. This CURE was created to be part of a lower-division course that introduces students to the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament with a focus on the Ancient Near Eastern context within which these texts were written and initially disseminated. The course is structured primarily as lectures, with class participation mixed into each class to foster active learning opportunities throughout the semester. To create a CURE for this course, it was necessary to find a research project that didn’t require knowledge of Biblical Hebrew and could be accomplished with only a basic understanding of historical-critical approaches to studying the biblical texts, approaches the students would learn how to apply early in the semester. There was a bit of serendipity, therefore, when the Museum of the Bible opened in Washington D.C., in 2017. Even before the museum opened its doors, it had been through several controversies. One continuing controversy concerns the fact that the museum was funded by the evangelical owners of Hobby Lobby who consider it their duty to fight for “Christian values” and “religious freedom.” While it is certainly their right to promote their values, and even teach about biblical texts from a religious perspective, according to the official mission statement, the museum presents itself as “a global, innovative, educational institution whose purpose is to invite all people to engage with the transformative power of the Bible.” This statement, the name of the museum, and several quotes by museum leaders in interviews give the impression that in the museum, the bible is presented from an academic perspective or at least from a perspective that is not subjectively evangelical. Needless to say, biblical and religious studies scholars have been skeptical. Experts in these fields spend their lives studying the complex contents and histories of what is commonly referred to as “the bible,” and most have come to realize that there is no single bible but multiple bibles whose makeup depends on what’s included, what’s excluded, the order of the texts, when and where the texts are read, and the lenses through which people interpret the texts. With this in mind, even before the museum opened its doors, scholars started asking questions: Would the museum really be an “educational institution” that invites “all people” to engage with the bible? Most of the scholarly research has focused on the creation of the museum and on the exhibits and events that take place at the museum. The museum’s website and social media, however, had not garnered much scholarly attention. And this provided an opportunity to create a CURE in the Hebrew Bible course. The CURE is a two or three-week unit at the end of the semester and involves the students doing original research about the Museum of the Bible’s official website by starting with the question: does the website fulfill the museum’s mission to be a museum for all or does it mislead visitors by presenting a particularly evangelical bible as if it were the (real) Bible? In order to address this research question, students work in small groups of 3 or 4 and address more narrow research questions that build upon scholarly

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research that has already been published about the physical museum. For example, some students will begin with a scholarly article that shows how the museum’s Hebrew Bible exhibit is imbued with Christian theological presuppositions that aren’t native to the Hebrew Bible and then turn their attention to videos on the website that focus on stories in the Hebrew Bible with the goal of determining whether the stories in the videos stick to the details that appear in the text or whether they veer into specific theological interpretations. Since by the time the CURE takes place, the students in the course have already studied most of these stories from an academic perspective, they are prepared to assess the videos on the MOTB website with the aid of the scholarly literature about the biblical texts and the scholarly literature about the exhibits at the physical museum. One important aspect of a CURE, especially when conducted in lower-level courses, is to make sure students aren’t being asked to do more than is feasible based on their background knowledge but also in terms of the time limitations of the course. Therefore, in this example, students aren’t asked to come up with their own research question. They simply do not have the background nor the time to do so; asking them to begin a research project about the Hebrew Bible from scratch would be unfair. It would also be unfair to ask them to address a pre-determined research question without providing a framework for them to do so. With this example, to keep the research manageable, each group focuses on a narrow question with a narrow set of evidence to consider: each group focuses on one video of approximately 5–10 minutes in length from a collection of twenty-one videos with stories from the Hebrew Bible. While part of their research involves choosing the specific video they will focus on, once they choose a video, their entire attention is focused on watching that short video, comparing it to the text as it appears in translations of the Hebrew Bible, and using the scholarly literature to try and answer their research question. With 3–4 students collaborating on this research project, it is entirely possible for them to conduct their research and to produce a 500–1,000-word short article with the results of their research and to do this within the timeframe of the 2–3 weeks allotted for the CURE within the larger course. And since disseminating the results of one’s research is an important part of the CURE experience, the short articles are peer-reviewed by the faculty member. Groups who have effectively done the research and written the results of their research will be published on the CURE website, which will not only be utilized by students in later iterations of the course but is also available publicly. One thing you will notice with this example is that the students are not expected to complete the entire research process from soup to nuts. Expecting this of undergraduate students in any field would be unreasonable and unrealistic. The fact that faculty will likely need to come up with the research question, identify sources of data/evidence, and lay out the mode of disseminating the results of the research, however, does not diminish the impact that CUREs can have on the lives of the undergraduates.

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Bibliography Corwin, Lisa Auchincloss, et al. 2014. “Assessment of Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences: A Meeting Report.” CBE: Life Sciences Education 13: 29–40. Cottrell Scholar Collaborative. 2017. Adding Research to a Class. http://rescorp.org/ cottrell-scholars/cottrell-scholars-collaborative Hensel, Nancy H. 2018a. “Crazy Observations, Audacious Questions.” In Course-Based Undergraduate Research: Educational Equity and High-Impact Practice, edited by Nancy H. Hensel, 1–12. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing. Hensel, Nancy H. 2018b. “Course-Based Research Mentoring.” In Course-Based Undergraduate Research: Educational Equity and High-Impact Practice, edited by Nancy H. Hensel, 223–31. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing. Hensel, Nancy H., and Cathy N. Davidson, eds. 2018. Course-Based Undergraduate Research: Educational Equity and High-Impact Practice. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing. “National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.” 2017. Undergraduate Research Experiences for STEM Students: Successes, Challenges, and Opportunities. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

APPENDIX 2 Humanities Labs

Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences, as described in Appendix #1, provide opportunities for the largest number of students to have highimpact research experiences because they are intentionally parts of courses that fulfill general university requirements, even reaching students who might otherwise not be interested in doing research in the field of religious studies. While humanities labs don’t provide as many opportunities as CUREs, they do provide opportunities for more students than the typical summer research experience as well as opportunities for students who aren’t ready to commit an entire summer to doing research or can’t commit their summers to research because of other obligations.

What Are Humanities Labs? One of the benefits of research labs in STEM fields is that they create opportunities for faculty and students with various levels of experience to work together throughout the academic year on long-term faculty-driven research projects. Students often start working in a particular faculty member’s lab during their first or second year of college and continue working in the lab until they graduate, gradually learning and developing research skills along the way. By including students with various levels of research experience in a single lab, opportunities are provided to scaffold research skills within the lab and for more experienced students to mentor students who are just learning new research skills. The purpose of humanities labs is to create similar opportunities for undergraduate students in the humanities. While physical labs are rarely required for faculty research in the humanities, it is possible to create a lab concept

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where faculty and several students work together as a team on a common research project. For example, at Colby College, several humanities labs are offered and described as “innovative courses promote experiential learning by incorporating observation, hands-on experimentation, and skill-building perspectives more commonly associated with the natural sciences” (Colby College 2021). In one of the labs, titled “Mapping Waterville, undergraduate students “analyze and interpret the town’s material and spatial character, track and explain changes across time, and publish their interpretations online using innovative digital mapping technologies” (Colby College 2021, 2022). And in another lab, “The History of Colby College,” undergraduate students do research in the university archives and help write the history of the college (Colby College 2021). These examples show how the local community can provide a variety of opportunities to create original research projects organized as humanities labs. Similar labs could be created by faculty in religious studies to do original research about the religious history of the university or the local community. In addition to creating humanities labs based on research projects designed specifically with the lab in mind, it is also possible to create humanities labs for faculty research projects that the faculty member would otherwise complete on their own. This type of humanities lab provides opportunities for students to earn course credit while working on faculty-driven research projects throughout the academic year and has been a focus at Trinity University in San Antonio since 2017. At Trinity University, we have created humanities labs with two or three faculty members who utilize similar research methods or whose research overlaps in some manner. Ideally, labs are specific enough to include the faculty’s research but general enough to allow different faculty who utilize similar methods to take over the lab in subsequent years when individual projects end or faculty go on sabbatical, leave the university, or decide to focus on different types of research. Since, unlike most science labs, there isn’t always a physical space where humanities research must take place, humanities labs at Trinity have been structured in a variety of ways, depending on the specific faculty members and the specific types of research taking place. Nonetheless, creating each lab required a significant amount of thought and preparation to make sure that both faculty and students got the most out of the experience. Preparation includes determining the focus of the research, the ideal number of students to allow into the lab, the scaffolded research assignments that would take place within the lab, how the students should be evaluated, and the pedagogical framework for each semester (e.g., orientation, readings, work done together in the lab versus work done out of lab time). Based on the experiences of the labs at Trinity University, we recommend that the following guidelines be considered when developing humanities labs:

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•

•

•

•

•

•

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To make sure that the students in the lab are prepared to do the work, faculty should choose the student members of the lab. This can be accomplished by advertising the lab and allowing students who show interest to enroll, but faculty should also reach out to students to join the lab. The latter is a great way to include students who might be interested but are not comfortable approaching faculty. Based on the experiences of several humanities labs at Trinity University, labs work best when there are between five and ten students participating at any given time. Keeping the number of students on the lower end helps create a team atmosphere within the lab while still allowing for both faculty and peer mentorship and the possibility of accomplishing the research goals. Labs should meet on a regular basis—typically once a week—to provide structure for the students and to provide regular opportunities for the faculty mentor to check in with the students. Students will come to the lab with different backgrounds and different levels of experience in the field of study, so it is important to assign appropriate parts of the research to each student. Students should be allowed to participate in the lab over multiple semesters, and “veteran” students should help mentor newer students when they join the lab. Faculty mentorship is a crucial component of a humanities lab. While the lab is not a traditional course, it is also not traditional humanities research where faculty typically work individually and don’t have to worry about organizing and assessing the work of collaborators. Faculty running humanities labs need to make sure that students are provided with enough background information about the project, the resources they will need to complete their part of the project, and clear instructions about what they are expected to work on and if necessary, instruction on how to do the specific research. We recommend that the course credit in each lab count towards the major within each faculty member’s department.

Humanities Labs Benefit Students and Faculty One of the benefits of running a humanities lab is that faculty are provided with an opportunity to break up a larger research project into smaller parts that would have to be done consecutively if the researcher were working alone, but within the lab setting, research can be worked on simultaneously by different students or different teams of students. This benefits the faculty because it creates the potential of completing some parts of the research project in less time, but also because it frees time to focus on parts of the project that students cannot complete because they might not have enough background in the field or the specific skills. For students, humanities labs provide opportunities to learn

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about what goes into a professional academic research project without having to be responsible for the entire project, opportunities to learn new research skills that they get to apply in practice, course credit for doing research, and if they decide to precipitate for more than one semester, the opportunity to be given increasingly more responsibility including the opportunity to mentor new students who join the lab.

Example of Religious Studies Lab: Roman World Lab The Roman World lab is the collaboration of a professor in the religion and classical studies departments at Trinity University in San Antonio that began in the fall of 2017 and, as of the writing of this book, had been running for five academic years and has included twenty-three undergraduates (“People” 2021). The lab was designed around a research project with the goal of creating interpretive guides and commentaries of several second-century texts that were written in Greek and Latin. To fill the lab, the faculty members recruited students and accepted applications. According to the lab website, they are “always seeking students with a research interest in this period, and

FIG. APPENDIX 2.1

Screenshot of the Roman World Lab website.

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will assess applications based on a variety of factors, including research experience in the humanities and past coursework on the ancient Greco-Roman world. Working knowledge of Ancient Greek or Latin is preferred, but not required” (“People” 2021). The religious studies section of the lab has focused on two early Christian texts: The Gospel of Peter and Kerygma Petri (Preaching of Peter). Over the years, students have helped research the history of the two texts, write introductions for each text, and students with enough background in ancient Greek have helped write original translations. For example, Kathleen Arbogast (Trinity ’21) and Zoe Grout (Trinity ’22) co-authored with their faculty mentor an introduction to Kerygma Petri. In addition to being utilized by undergraduate students at Trinity University, the introduction was also published by Bible Odyssey, an online peer-reviewed publication run by the Society of Biblical Literature (Arbogast et al., 2022). And since Kathleen had sufficient background in ancient Greek, she co-authored a translation of the same text (Arbogast and Dupertuis 2021). Kathleen also collaborated with another undergraduate student, Victoria Ydens (Trinity ’22), to co-author the English translation of the Gospel of Peter (2021). In addition to the dedication of both the faculty and students in the lab, one thing that has made the Roman World Lab effective is the focused nature of the research. Students and faculty in the lab have clear goals in mind, both in terms of what they are researching and how they will disseminate the results of their research. These focused goals not only keep the research on track but they also provide opportunities for students who work in the lab over multiple academic years to both do the research and publish the results. Another aspect of the lab that is important to point out is that the name of the lab is somewhat general: the Roman World Lab. The naming was intentionally general to allow both religious studies and classical studies projects to be part of the lab and to allow the current faculty to end their involvement without having to shut down the lab. Instead, different faculty who research ancient Greek and Latin texts, the history of the Roman world, or even archaeology from the period can join the lab and have students work on their research.

Bibliography Arbogast, Kathleen, and Rubén Dupertuis. 2021. “The Preaching of Peter.” Roman World Lab. https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001& context=class_romanworldlab Arbogast, Kathleen, Victoria Ydens, and Rubén Dupertuis. 2021. “The Gospel of Peter.” Roman World Lab. https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=1000&context=class_romanworldlab Arbogast, Kathleen, Zoe Grout, and Rubén R. Dupertuis. 2022. “Preaching of Peter.” Bible Odyssey.

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Colby College. 2021. “Humanities Labs Break the Mold.” https://cah.colby.edu/ student-experience/humanities-labs/ Colby College. 2022. “Mapping Waterville.”https://web.colby.edu/mapping-waterville/ Dupertuis, Rubén, and Timothy O’Sullivan. “Roman World Lab.” https://romanworld lab.wordpress.com/ “People.” 2021. Roman World Lab Website. https://romanworldlab.wordpress.com/ people/

INDEX

Note: Boldface page references indicate tables. Italic references indicate figures. abstracts: dissemination of research results and 135; from ethnographic research 79– 82; reading 20; sample, from National Conference for Undergraduate Research 66–7, 79– 82 Agrawal, Nupur 94–5 Allocco, Amy 81 alphabetical list of open access historical newspapers and other periodicals in Middle East and Islamic studies 121 Amar, Abhishek 68 American Academy of Religion (AAR) 91, 117 American Psychological Association (APA) citation format 50, 113–14 American Theological Library Association 119, 121 analyzing research data 51–5 annotated bibliography 15 apprenticeship model of research: archives and 67–9; basis of 5; material culture research and 107–9; undergraduate research and 4 –5; usage of term 1 Arbogast, Kathleen 89, 93 archaeology 101–3, 103 archival data 50 ArchiveGrid 58, 124 archives: apprenticeship model and 67–9; Association of Religion Data Archives 59; bigger picture and, fitting into

62–3; defining 56–7; digital 64–5; Duke University Galilee Database 64; finding for specific research study/project 57– 8; Houston Jewish History Archive 64; interpreting documents and 62; material within, finding 61; methods of using 60–3; new, creating 63–5; online resources 117, 124–5; overview 56; physical 63– 4, 65; preservation of original documents and 48; purpose of 60; research question development and 58–9; scanning documents and 61–2; university collections 59; Vatican Apostolic Archives 57 argument, effective 42 Aristotle 130 art history resources 121 art online resources 121–3 Asian Classics Input Project 121 Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) 59, 124 audience for writing 127–30 Australian Conference on Undergraduate Research (ACUR) 2 authentic audience 127– 8 Bayer, Ronald 35 Berkson, Mark 80 Berman Jewish Databank 124 bias, avoiding research 45– 6

Index

bibliography: additional sources and, identifying 19; annotated 15; citation styles and 113–15, 118–19; on Islam in contemporary Sub Saharan Africa 119; online resources 119–20; overview 111; rationale for 111–12 Bielo, James 109 Birkenstein, Cathy 113 book chapters for disseminating research results 139– 41 Boolean operators 18 Brackett, Jeffrey 73 brainstorming topics for research 25– 6, 31 British Conference on Undergraduate Research (BCUR) 2 Brown, Karen McCarthy 74 Brown, Mackenzie 93–5 Buddhist Studies Virtual Library 119 bullet points, organizing content in 23 campus symposiums of undergraduate research 131–2 , 133 Carp, Richard 99–100 case studies 49 Center for Research Libraries 119 Chapman University Survey of American Fears 128 Chicago Manual of Style citation guide 21, 111, 113–15, 118 Childress, Herb 113 Chinese Text Project 121 Christian Classics Ethereal Library 120 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints History Catalog 121 citation styles 21, 111, 113–15, 118–19 Clines, Gregory 87 coding 54–5 Colby University’s Maine Jewish History project 78 Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) 34, 38 Collinger, Benjamin 78–9, 79 conferences: disciplinary 133– 4; research 132–3 Conley, Erin 88 context of writing 130 Cooperative Digital Resources Initiative 121 Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum 121 correlation of data 53– 4 Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) 1–2 , 126–7

155

Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) 142– 6 courses, high impact undergraduate research embedded in 142– 6 Creative Commons platform 112 credibility: check 21–2; of researcher 42–3; of sources 21–2 Database of Religious History 124 databases: Duke University Galilee Database 64; library 18–19; online resources 124–5; see also specific name data collection: analyzing 51–5; archival 50; bias and, avoiding 45– 6; coding and 54–5; correlation and 53– 4; credibility of researcher and 42–3; discussion section of research study and 50; frequency distribution and 54; impartial 45– 6; intentional 44–5; methodological approach and 41–2; mixed methods 50; multivariate analysis and 52; overview 41; qualitative methods 48–50, 54–5; quantitative methods 47, 52– 4; results of research study and 50; themes and 52; triangulated 43– 4, 44 Davidson, James West 60 Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library 122 De Bord, Jessica 35 designing research study/project 30–2 deviation 54 digital archives 64–5 digitized library 49 digital research tools in humanities software 118 Digital South Asian Library 120 Dipre, Kyle 87 direct correlation 53 direct observation 49–50 direct relationship 53 disciplinary academic meetings/ conferences 133– 4 discussion section of research study/ project 50 dissemination of research at 132 dissemination of research results: abstract for 135; audience and 127–30; benefits of 128–9; book chapters for 139–41; in campus symposium of undergraduate research 131–2, 133; context and 130; at disciplinary academic meetings/ conferences 133–4; forms 135–41; journal articles for 139–41; at National Conference on Undergraduate

156 Index

Research 132; oral presentations for 138–9; overview 126; in peerreviewed academic journals 134–5; places for 129–35; poster presentations for 136–8, 137; public speaking fears and 128; purpose of 130–1; reasons for 126–8; at research conferences 132–3; in rhetorical situations 129–31; with scholarly community 126; undergraduate research and, defining feature of 126–7; in undergraduate research journals 134 documents: analyzing 48–9; interpreting 62; scanning 61–2 double-blind peer reviews 16–7 draft, moving from notes to 24 Duke University Galilee Database 64 Dupertuis, Rubén 88 Early Christian Writings online resources 122 ecocritical approach 87 Elbow, Peter 28–9 Elfenbein, Caleb 69 Ellis, Isaiah 67– 8, 108 Emerson, Robert M. 73– 4 epistemologies 32 ethnographic research: abstracts from, sample 79– 82; examples of 77–9; in Garden of Hope 109; interviews and 76–7; overview 72; participant observer and 74– 6; preparation for 73– 4; in religious studies 72–3; surveys and 76–7; topics for, suggested 82 ethos 42–3 existing research 19 field observation 49–50 findings of research 50; see also dissemination of research results Fisher, Sarah 46 Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center 122 focus groups 48 foundational texts 84–5, 122; see also textual study freewriting 28–9 frequency distribution 54 Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society 122 Furman, Joshua 63– 4 Garden of Hope ethnographic research 109 Golden Elixir, The 123

Gottingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages 122 Graff, Gerald 113 Grossman, Rachel Ellen 106–7 “Guide to Writing in Religious Studies” (Harvard Divinity School) 85– 6 Haffenbredl, Tiara 87 haggadot collection at Duke University 66 Hall, Emily C. 80–1 “halo effect” 20 Harshavardhan, Ujjwala 78 Hatab, Dana 87 Hawthorne Effect 49 Hill, Michael 60 Hinnels, John 10 Houston Jewish History Archive 64 humanities 9 –10, 118 humanities labs 148–51 human research participants 34–5 human research subjects: defining 34; human participants versus 35; informed consent of 35–7; Institutional Review Board approval and 34, 37– 8; overview 34; training on research with 34, 38–9 impartial data collection 45– 6 informed consent 35–7 insider perspective in religious studies 10–11 Institute for New Testament Textual Research 123 Institutional Review Board (IRB): human research subjects and, approval and 34, 37– 8; methodological approaches and, approval of 50; participant-observer research and, approval of 75; research study/project and, approval of 30 intentional data collection 44–5 interdisciplinary research study/project 32 International Dunhuang Project, the 123 International Religious Freedom Reports 124 Internet Sacred Texts Archive 122 interpreting documents 62 interview guide 38 interviews 48, 76–7 inverse correlation 53– 4 inverse relationship 53– 4 Islamic Heritage Projects 122 Islamic History Sourcebook 120

Index

Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the National Library of Medicine 122 Islam in South Asia collection of resources 120 iterative process 60–1 Jain eLibrary 120 JDC (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) Archives 122 Johnson, Ruby Lee 66–7 journals: disseminating research results in articles of 139– 41; library databases of 18; peer-reviewed 134–5; undergraduate research 134 Karukstis, Kerry 127 Khan, Mariya A. 80–1 Kurtz, Madeline 78 Labyrinth, The 123 language challenges: original languages and 89, 91–2; overview 91, 97; reception history and 96–7; research study/project without requiring languages 95; textual study and 87; translation and 96; undergraduate studies with language skills and 93–5 library: databases 18–9; digitalized 49; online resources 119–20 Likert-scale responses 47 literature reviews: annotated bibliography versus 15; credibility of sources and 21–2; drafts, moving from notes to 24; format of 14–15; objectives of 15; organizing content of 22–3; overview 14; purposes of 14–15; reading ref lexively 19–21; in religious studies, analyzing 19–22; scholarly conversations and, joining 16; sources of 16–19; topics for research and 27 local places of worship 104 Lacks, Henrietta 36–7 logos 42–3 longitudinal study 50 Lopez, Jamiless 62, 107– 8, 133 Luhutsky, Nadia 92 Lytle, Mark 60 McGuire, Meredith 73 manuscript online resources 121–3 material culture research: apprenticeship model and, examples of 107–9; archaeology and 101–3, 103; local places of worship and 104;

157

overview 99; religious objects and 104–5; in religious studies, defining 99–100; religious texts and 100–1; undergraduate research examples on 105–7 Materializing the Bible digital scholarship project 108–9 MAVCOR Material Objects Archive 124 mean statistical term 54 median statistical term 54 medieval theology resources 123 mentors for research study/project 32 methodological approaches: credibility of researcher and 42–3; data collection and 41–2; importance of 41–2; IRB approval and 50; mixed research 46–7, 50; qualitative research 46, 48–50; quantitative research 46–7; religious studies 10; textual study 86–9 Millar, Laura 56–7 mixed research 46–7, 50 Modern Language Association (MLA) citation style 113–14 mode statistical term 54 multiple-choice questions 47 multivariate analysis 52 Museum of the Bible 144– 6 museum collections 49 Mustafa, Ameera 81 Myhre, Paul 57, 59 National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR): abstracts from, sample 66–7, 79– 82; dissemination of research results at 132; undergraduate research activities and 1–2 National Council of Research Methods resources page 118 National Library of Israel 123 National Library of Medicine 122 National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections 58 Nation Master Statistics in Religion 124 negative correlation 53– 4 New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room 123 observations 49–50 Oliverio, Melina 81–2 Omer, Farah 69 online resources: archives 117, 124–5; art 121–3; bibliographies 119–20; for citations 118–19; databases 124–5; early Christian writings 122; importance of

158 Index

116–17; libraries 119–20; manuscripts/ text 121–3; overview 116; for research study/project procedures 117–18; writing 119; Zotero software 119; see also specific name Open Access Digital Theological Library 120 open-response questions 48 oral presentations of research results 138–9 O’Reilly, Karen 73, 76 original languages 89, 91–2 Osborn, Jeffrey 127 outsider perspective in religious studies 10–11 OWL (Online Writing Lab) at Purdue citation style examples 115 Palmer, Erin 87 participant observation 50, 74– 6 pathos 42–3 Payne, Rodger 106 Pedrick, Joshua 103 peer-reviewed academic journals 134–5 peer-reviewed sources 16–17 Perseus Digital Library 123 perspectives in religious studies, insider/ outsider 10–11 Pew Research Center religious data 125 physical archives 63– 4, 65 pilot study 50 plagiarism 112–13 positive correlation 53 poster presentations of research results 94, 136– 8, 137 post-tests 47 pre-tests 47 primary sources 19, 48 Princeton Digital Library of Islamic Manuscripts 123 Princeton Theological Seminary 120 principal investigator (PI) 37– 8 protocol 38 Prown, Jules David 100 public speaking, fears about 128 publishing research results 134, 139– 41; see also dissemination of research results purpose statements 31–2 purpose of writing 130–1 qualitative research: analyzing data from 54–5; defining 46; methods 48–50 quantitative research: analyzing data from 52– 4; defining 46; methods 47

questionnaires 47– 8, 53 questions: multiple-choice 47; openresponse 48; research 27– 8, 58–9 range statistical term 54 reading ref lexively 19–21 reception history 96–7 refining topics for research 26–30 religious objects 104–5 religious studies: challenges for beginning researchers 11–12; ethnographic research in 72–3; humanities and 9 –10; material culture in, defining 99–100; methodological approaches 10; overview 8; perspectives, insider/outsider 10–11; research in, analyzing existing 19–22; scholarly conversations and, joining 16; sciences and 9 –10; theology and 8 –9; topics for research in 29–30; undergraduate research and 2 – 4 religious studies project website 118 religious texts 47, 100–1; see also textual study research conferences 132–3 research methods see methodological approach research methods for the study of religion online training resource 118 research question 27– 8, 58–9 research study/project: archives for, finding 57– 8; designing 30–2; discussion section of 50; human subjects; implications of 52; interdisciplinary 32; IRB approval of 30; language challenges, not consisting of 95; limitations of 55; mentors for 32; online resources for 117–18; purpose statements for 31–2; results of 50; success of, measuring 32; timeline for 31, 31; see also data collection; human research subjects; methodological approaches; specific researcher’s name research topics see topics for research resources see online resources; specific name Responsible Conduct of Research course 38 results of research 50; see also dissemination of research results rhetoric 42 Rhetoric (Aristotle) 130 rhetorical situations 129–31 Roman World Lab 151–2 , 151

Index

sacred texts 84–5, 122; see also textual study Sam Houston State University Library 120 scanning documents 61–2 scholarly community 126 scholarly conversations, joining 16 secondary sources 19, 49 Shaw, Anna Howard 87 Singh, Simran 78–9, 79 Skloot, Rebecca 36 Smart, Ninian 9 social sciences 9 –10 Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) 91, 115, 118 sources: citation styles and 21, 113–15, 118–19; credibility of 21–2; library databases 18–9; of literature reviews 16–19; overview 111; peer-reviewed 16–17; plagiarism and, avoiding 112–13; primary 19, 48; rationale for 111–12; secondary 19, 49; TASL acronym and 112 Southern Methodist University (SMU) citation guide 118–9 spreadsheets, organizing content in 22–3 standard deviation 54 statistical analysis 47 statistical terms 54 statistics about Islam in Europe by country 125 structural analysis of religious texts 47 Sunnah and Hadith collection 121 surveys 47– 8, 53, 76–7 Syriac Reference Project 123 tables, organizing content in 22–3, 23 Tanakh 84 Tarango, Angela 62, 67– 8, 107– 8 TASL acronym (Title, Author, Source, and License) 112 tests of content knowledge/ability/skill 47, 53 texts: defining 86; online resources 121–3; religious 100–1; see also textual study textual study: evidence and, working with 85– 6; language challenges and 87; methodological approaches 86–9; opportunities for 89–90; original languages and 89; overview 84; sacred texts 84–5; structural analysis 47; text and, defining 86 themes 24, 52

159

Theological Commons 120 theology 8 –9 Thesaurus Literaturae Buddhicae 123 Tibetan and Himalayan Library 120 timeline for research study/project 31, 31 Toler, Adam 65 topics for research: brainstorming 25– 6, 31; for ethnographic research, suggested 82; freewriting and 28–9; literature reviews and 27; overview 25; questions for refining 27– 8; refining 26–30; in religious studies 29–30 training on human subjects research 34, 38–9 translation of languages 96 triangulated data collection 43– 4, 44 truncation symbols 18 Turabian citation style 118 undergraduate research (UR): abstracts from, sample 79– 82; activity, in last forty years 1–2; apprenticeship model and 4 –5; benefits of 2; campus symposium of 131–2, 133; conferences 132–3; courses, high impact embedded in 142– 6; defining 126–7; dissemination of research results as defining feature of 126–7; environment 1; examples of 66–7; humanities labs and 148–51; importance of 4; journals 134; limitations of 55; on material culture, examples of 105–7; missteps in, common 42; overview 1; religious studies and 2– 4; Roman World Lab and 151–2, 151; see also specific researcher’s name unethical research 36–7 university collection of documents 59 Upson-Saia, Kristi 88 Vatican Apostolic Archive 57 Vaughn, Claire 109 Wagner, Savannah 107 Wahl, Mariah 88–9 Weller, Eddie 81 World Congress for Undergraduate Researchers (WorldCUR) 2 worship places, local 104 Writing Commons website 119 Ydens, Victoria 89 Zotero software 119