The Science & Belief in Society Podcast

Rachael Shillitoe is a sociologist and a senior social scientist in the British civil service. She was previously a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham where she studied what primary school age children think about religion. Dr Elizabeth Barnes is an Assistant Professor of Biology Education at Middle Tennessee State University, who explores how to teach culturally controversial topics.

Dr Anna Halafoff, an Associate Professor of Sociology and coordinator of the Spirituality and Wellbeing (SWell) Research Network, SWELL, based at Deakin University in Melbourne, and Dr Tom Aechtner, Associate Professor at the University of Queensland where he researches Australian-specific sources of vaccine hesitancies around COVID-19 and other diseases and their relationship with religious beliefs, join Deborah Cohen to discuss their research.

Dr Amy Adamczyk, Professor of Sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of City University of New York, and Dr Reynaldo Rivera and Dr Maria Sol Barbera, from the School of Communications at the Universidad Australin Buenos Aries in Argentina, discuss their research on how different contexts and personal religious beliefs shape people’s health-related attitudes and behaviors, in particular medical interventions such as abortion and assisted conception, at the beginning of life.  Amy Adamczyk’s book Fetal Positions, is published by OxfordUniversity Press.

In the third episode of our new series, Dr Rebecca Catto, Associate Professor of Sociology at Kent State University (USA) who was for a decade a Principal Investigator on the Science and Religion, Exploring the Spectrum projects, talks about her research into science and non-religion.