All three interviews and talks assigned for this unit underscore the importance of moving beyond stereotypical representations of religion. Each source highlights the harm that stems from a lack of awareness of the diverse nature of religious beliefs—particularly within teaching, intercultural understanding, and sport. They go on to explore the way these issues are often compounded when religion intersects with race and gender.
Kwame Anthony Appiah (2014) urges us to reject monolithic definitions of religion, advocating instead for a nuanced understanding of people’s beliefs, practices, and interpretations. He traces the colonial origins of the modern concept of religion, showing how Western epistemological divides between science and religion positioned non-Western knowledge systems as merely ‘beliefs’. This divide—between ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’—continues to dominate higher education (HE), where knowledge is often expected to be shareable, repeatable, and grounded in causal reasoning. Such criteria are often at odds with intuitive, spiritual, or embodied ways of knowing.
Catherine Manathunga (2015), like Appiah, critiques the universalising tendencies of Western epistemologies in HE. She calls for specificity in pedagogical approaches to counter the tendency to treat knowledge as ‘universal and un-located’ (Manathunga, 2015: 118). Such an approach allows for the inclusion of Indigenous and spiritual knowledges, which can then exist in dialogue with, rather than in subjugation to, dominant Western frameworks.
Building on Miranda Fricker’s (2007) work on epistemic injustice, Rekis (2016) argues that religious individuals are frequently denied credibility as knowers within secular educational settings. She suggests that this non-recognition often stems from ‘a false understanding’ of the kinds of knowledge these individuals bring. Particularly relevant to HE, Rekis explores the intersectional challenges faced by religious students, noting the dual harm inflicted when individuals feel unable to offer religious experience as testimony, both to the individual and to the classroom, which loses access to the ‘intuitive knowledge’ that could have been shared.
Recent data from the University of the Arts London (UAL, 2024) reveals that 42% of students identify with a religion or faith, with 12% identifying as Christian. This figure surprised me, particularly the prominence of Christianity, and raises questions about why religion is not more explicitly integrated into the curriculum. In the MA Performance: Society programme, students have occasionally shared prayers, rituals, and chants as expressions of performance and knowledge. Discussions of positionality have sometimes included faith, but I have not made an explicit invitation to explore this dimension of students’ experiences within HE.
Notably, 10.7% of respondents selected ‘I’d prefer not to say’ in response to questions about religious belief—a category strangely included among non-religious responses. I acknowledge that religion is deeply personal for many, while for others, it is made visible through choices like wearing a veil. Jawad (2022) uses the term ‘visible Muslim women’ to refer to Muslim women who wear the hijab, highlighting how religious visibility can expose individuals to compounded forms of discrimination at the intersection of race, gender, and religion.
While I remain cautious about explicitly encouraging students to share religious identities in academic settings, it is evident that these identities are already present. What remains is to find respectful and inclusive ways of voicing and engaging with their implications within HE.
References
Appiah, K.A. (2014) Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question). [Online video] TED Talks. Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/kwame_anthony_appiah_is_religion_good_or_bad_this_is_a_trick_question [Accessed 23 May 2025].
Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jawad, H. (2022) Islam, Women and Sport: The Case of Visible Muslim Women. [Online video] BBC Ideas. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/islam-women-and-sport-the-case-of-visible-muslim-women/p0b9v04h [Accessed 23 May 2025].
Manathunga, C. (2015) ‘Intercultural doctoral supervision: The centrality of place, time and other forms of knowledge’, Teaching in Higher Education, 20(2), pp. 114–125. DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2014.978354.
Rekis, L. (2016) ‘Religion and Epistemic Injustice in Higher Education’. In: Trinity University, Challenging Race, Religion, and Stereotypes in the Classroom. [Online video] Available at: https://www.trinity.edu/news/challenging-race-religion-and-stereotypes-classroom [Accessed 23 May 2025].
University of the Arts London (2024) Religious Beliefs in the UAL Student Population: Annual Diversity Report. London: UAL.
I really like how often you reference ‘intuitive’ knowledge that can be found in religion and held by religious individuals, and how this is often not acknowledged as much as secular beliefs are within higher education, which often tries too hard to be impartial to the extent that whole branches of knowledge are excluded.
You say that your students sometimes bring their faith to the classroom in the form of staging communal prayers and chants, but that you’re hesitant to encourage them to share this (which I, and a lot of other people in education too, would also agree with). I wonder what your thoughts are on if we are being too overcautious in being percieved as non-biased that we are potentially stopping discussions from taking place? Perhaps the students are more able to handle the nuance and different perspecctives that we give them credit?
I like Catherine Manathunga’s point a lot – I had not previously come across her in my research but I think her calling for specificity in where knowledge comes from creates the space for allowing knowledge to be attributed to multiple and varied sources.