Abstract: The increasing diversity of societies is one of the most important educational issues of the globalised era. However, while some attention has been paid to the schooling experiences of racial, ethnic and immigrant minorities in Western societies, little research has been conducted with religious adolescents.
This thesis explores the complexities of religious adolescents’ experiences of English secondary schools. As an exploratory study, I employed an emergent research design carrying out loosely-structured, group and single interviews at eleven places of worship to investigate the schooling experiences of 99 adolescent Christians, Jews and Muslims. In order to interpret their reported experiences, I applied a theoretical model based on the Students’ Multiple World Framework in conjunction with concepts of religious identity negotiation and construction.
The interview data show how Christians, Jews and Muslims negotiate their religious identities in the context of the numerous challenges presented by secondary schools in a religiously plural and largely secular society. In classroom worlds participants perceived their religious traditions to be distorted, inaccurately or unfairly represented. In peer worlds participants reported that they could experience prejudice, and criticism of their beliefs. Christians, Jews and Muslims reported two principal management strategies in the face of these challenges, either: declaring their religious identity openly, or by masking it in public.
The findings of this study are highly relevant to debates about the role of religion in education, including those concerning faith and Church schools and the nature and purpose of the curriculum subject Religious Education.
Abstract: This thesis attends to the major question ‘how is Jewish identity created and maintained in contemporary Britain?’ To answer this question, I have done one year of ethnographic fieldwork in Britain, which included 121 interviews with Jewish people of various ages and across different religious as well as non-religious denominations.
This thesis identifies four major elements informing the creation and perpetuation of Jewish identity: One, a sense of difference from the majority population creates and maintains the identity. Jews can perceive themselves to be different religiously, nationally, ethnically and/or culturally from white Christian British people. Two, trauma memory has an impact on the creation and sustenance of this identity. Vicarious group trauma, meaning trauma experienced by proxy of previous generations, can inform identity through its influence on everyday experiences. Three, community affiliation plays a role in creating and particularly reinforcing the identification. The Jewish community provides resources, social interaction and thus signalled attention, and regard; all of them respond to innate human needs that a person aims to have satisfied. Four, a group norm of continuity is important in the perpetuation of this identity within and across generations. This norm is created and sustained by its members through their focus on endogamy. Wanting to have a partner from one’s own group, have Jewish children and raise them in a Jewish lifestyle can, thereby, reinforce and maintain a sense of Jewishness (inter-) generationally. Without members marrying within the faith and having children that are raised with Judaism, it would be difficult to preserve Jewish identity in a country where the group does not constitute the majority.
The thesis concludes that there are two reasons why Jews in diaspora have been able to sustain as a group and maintain their identity over time. Firstly, the multi-dimensionality of the Jewish group and respective affiliation platforms have allowed its members to create a multi-faceted meaning of being Jewish, and, secondly, continuous external challenges to the group’s security together with constant reminders of those challenges; both have prevented the group from assimilating into mainstream society.
Abstract: This study, located in the disciplines of human geography and demography, explores the socio-spatial boundaries encapsulating Britain’s Jewish population, particularly at micro-scales. It highlights and challenges key narratives of both Jewish and general interest relating to residential segregation, assimilation, partnership formation, exogamy and household living arrangements.
It presents a critical exploration of the dual ethnic and religious components of
Jewish identity, arguing that this ‘White’ group has become ethnically ‘invisible’ in
British identity politics and, as a consequence, is largely overlooked. In addition, the key socio-demographic processes relating to Jewish partnership formation are addressed and a critical assessment of data pertaining to the decline of marriage, the rise of cohabitation and the vexed topic of Jewish exogamy, is presented. The analysis culminates by linking each of these issues to the micro-geographical scale of the household and develops a critical assessment of this key unit of Jewish (re)production. Jewish population change is contextualised within the framework of the second demographic transition.
This deliberately quantitative study is designed to exploit a recent glut of data
relating to Jews in Britain. It interrogates specially commissioned tables from
Britain’s 2001 Census as well as four separate communal survey data sources. It
highlights and challenges recent geographical critiques of quantitative
methodologies by presenting a rigorous defence of quantification in post-‘cultural
turn’ human geography. It emphasises the importance and relevance of this fruitful shift in geographical thought to quantitative methods and describes the role quantification can now play in the discipline. Above all, it synthesises two disparate sets of literature: one relating to geographical work on identity and segregation, and the other to work on the identity, demography and cultural practices of Jews. As a result, this thesis inserts the largely neglected ethno-religious Jewish case into the broader geographical literature whilst developing a critical quantitative spatial agenda for the study of Jews.
