Research Interests
Religion, place and space; diaspora, migration and religion; the religious and the secular in western modernity; religions of Asian communities in Britain; modern Hindu movements.
More than twenty postgraduates have successfully completed research degrees under Professor Knott's supervision, and a further eight are currently working with her, on subjects including popular Hindu practice, the role of Religious in urban spaces, black British and mixed heritage theological identities, and inter-religious encounter. She runs workshops for staff at the University on the internal examining of research degrees.
Professor Knott is Director of the AHRC Research Programme on Diasporas, Migration and Identities (2005-10).
She has recently completed The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis of the Left Hand (2005), and is the author of Hinduism in Leeds, My Sweet Lord: The Hare Krishna Movement, and Hinduism: A Very Short Introduction, for which she won the SHAP Book Prize in 1998. She has published articles on religion and identity, and the relationship between religion and ethnicity among South Asian communities in Britain. More recently she has worked on religion and destiny, insiders and outsiders in the study of religion, and religion and locality.
Other recent publications include translations of Hinduism: A Very Short Introduction (in German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Romanian, and Polish; also available as an e-book from Netlibrary), and articles on religion and locality, the Hare Krishna movement, and women and destiny.
Recent research projects directed by Professor Knott include ‘The roots, practices and consequences of terrorism: A literature review of research in the arts and humanities’ (funded by the Home Office, 2006, with Al McFadyen, Sean McLoughlin and Mat Francis), ‘Locating religion in the fabric of the secular: An experiment in two public sector organisations’ (funded by AHRB, 2004-05, with Myfanwy Franks, publications forthcoming), ‘Leeds pilot faiths consultation exercise on restorative justice and the rehabilitation of young male ex-offenders’ (2004, with Mat Francis, funded by the Home Office and managed by Leeds Church Institute, and ‘The feasibility of a regional faith forum for Yorkshire and the Humber’ (2003, with Sean McLoughlin and Mel Prideaux, funded by the Yorkshire and Humber Assembly and managed by the Churches Regional Commission).
She also worked with the regional assembly (with David Randolph-Horn) in 2001-02 to produce Religious Literacy: A Practical Guide to the Region’s Faith Communities, and to develop a training package to accompany it. Professor Knott has directed the Community Religions Project since 1989 and edited most of its nine monographs. Recently, she was academic facilitator of the British Hinduism Oral History Project (managed by the Oxford Centre for Vaishnava and Hindu Studies and sponsored by the Heritage Lottery Fund).
Research Supervision
Professor Knott currently supervises research students working on the following: religion and violence; bodies; boundaries and the sacred; charisma an religious leadership in the Hare Krishna movement; moral values in a socially-excluded inner city community; and the work of the Religious in urban contexts.
She would welcome applications from students wishing to conduct research in the sociology and geography of religion, particularly on religion, space and locality; religion in urban Britain; religion, migration and diaspora; and new Hindu movements.
Teaching
Professor Knott teaches in the geography and sociology of religions, with modules on 'The religious mapping of Leeds' (level 3), and 'Religion and Society: research process and methods' (MA). With Dr Tomalin she contributes to the teaching of Hindu studies. She offers a module on 'Multi-faith communities' in the MA in Healthcare Chaplaincy run by the School of Healthcare Studies.
Professor Knott participates in Socrates Teaching Exchanges with the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, and the University of Turku, Finland.
Publications
| The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis, Equinox 2005. ISBN 1904768 75 x |
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Her publications since 2000 are as follows:
- ‘Religion, values and knowledge-power in contemporary secular spaces: The case of an English medical centre’, T Ahlbäck and B Dahla, eds, Exercising Power. The role of religions in concord and conflict, pp. 160-181, Åbo, Finland, Donner Institute, 2007.
- With M. Franks, ‘Secular values and the location of religion: A spatial analysis of an English medical centre’, Health and Place, 13:1, pp. 224-37, 2007. www.elsevier.com/locate/healthplace
- ‘The Roots, Practices and Consequences of Terrorism: A Literature Review of Research in the Arts & Humanities. Final Report’ (with Al McFadyen, Sean McLoughlin and Mat Francis), 92pp, October, 2006 (for the Home Office).
- The case of the left hand: The location of religion in an everyday text. In: Elisabeth Arweck and Peter Collins (eds.) Texts and Religious Contexts, pp169-184, Ashgate ( 2006).
- ‘Space’, REVER: Revista de Estudos da Religião, 5:4, 6pp, 2005.
http://www.pucsp.br/rever/rv4_2005/t_knott.htm
- ‘Towards a history and politics of diasporas and migration: a grounded spatial approach’, ‘Flows and Spaces’, Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers, Diasporas, Migration and Identities Working Paper 1, http://www.diasporas.ac.uk, 2005.
- Spatial theory and method for the study of religion. Temenos, 41(2), pp153-184 ( 2005).
- Researching local and national pluralism: Britain's new religious landscape. In: Baumann, Martin and Behloul, Samuel M. (eds.) Religioser Pluralismus: Empirische Studien und analytische Perspektiven, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2005.
- Insider/outsider perspectives in the study of religions. In: John Hinnells (ed.) The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, Routledge, 2005, pp.243-58.
- The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis. Equinox, 2005, 264pp.
- Diasporas, Migration and Identities: AHRC Programme Specification, www.diasporas.ac.uk, 2005.
- Britain's changing religious landscape: drowning or waving?. Berichte zur Deutschen Landeskunde, 78(2), 2004, pp.213-229.
- The sense and nonsense of "community". In: Steven Sutcliffe (ed.) Religion: Empirical Studies, Ashgate, pp.67-90.
- Leeds Pilot Faiths Consultation Exercise on restorative justice and the rehabilitation of young male ex-offenders (with Mat Francis), 2004, 51pp.
- The Feasibility of a Faith Forum for Yorkshire and the Humber: Final Report (with Sean McLoughlin and Mel Prideaux), Yorkshire and Humber Assembly, 2004, 77pp.
- Healing the heart of ISKCON: the place of women. In: Edwin Bryant and Maria Ekstrand (eds.) The Hare Krishna Movement: the post-charismatic fate of a religious transplant, Columbia University Press, 2004, pp.291-311.
- Hinduismul: Foarte scurta introducere, 2002.
- The sense and nonsense of "community". British Association for the Study of Religions Occasional Paper 22, 2001, 20pp.
- Religious Literacy: A practical guide to the region's faith communities (with David Randolph-Horn), Yorkshire and Humber Assembly, 2002.
- Religion: family and kinship. In: Smelser, N.J. and Baltes, P.B. (eds.) International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Pergamon, 2001, pp.13066-13071.
- Hinduism . Vesmir Books, 2001.
- Community and Locality in the Study of Religions. In: T Jensen and M Rothstein (eds.) Secular Theories on Religion: Current Perspectives, Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 2000, pp.87-105.
- Hinduism in Britain. In: Harold Coward, John R. Hinnells, and Raymond Brady Williams (eds.) The South Asian Religious Diaspora in Great Britain, Canada and the United States, State University of New York Press, 2000, pp.89-107.
- In every town and village: Adaptive strategies in the communication of Krishna Consciousness in the UK, the first thirty years. Social Compass, 47(2), 2000, pp.153-66.
- Der Hinduismus: Eine kurze Einfuhrung. Reclam, 2000.
- Hinduism: A Very Short Introduction (Tamil edition).
Hinduism: A Very Short Introduction (Hebrew edition).
Hinduism: A Very Short Introduction (Bulgarian edition).
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