Faith

UAL Website – Religion, Belief and Faith Identities

Case Studies:

Pen Portraits

Travelling Cultures

Quiet Capsule Design Project

• Allowing religion, belief to be embedded in conversations around cultural identity

• There needs to be no pressure to delve or share in depth

• Tutors and students must share

• Not just happening at one time but at multiple points, identity in flux

• The importance of drawing on different cultural reference points in work, official and formal (V&A, Science Museum) but also unofficial and varied (Black Cultural Archive, Hackney Market)

• Students understanding historical and cultural context

• Getting students to design something to address belief questions themselves

In response to this I could do:

Expanded Storytelling Activity

Within illustration, we create, explore and interpret narratives. I would like to move beyond official sources and tellers and include exploration and analysis of non-conventional contexts and content, for example, oral narrative. I have touched on this in my own creative practice and would like to develop it as part of my Inclusive Artefact for this unit.

Sharing Context Talks

Students could select a creative object/artefact/artwork and present the cultural and historical context to their peers.

Becoming Conversations

Students could have conversations around identity with staff, once a term over the 3 years of BA. Different questions each term but same ones each year to track and share changing and developing thinking.

Sense-Making Workshop

Workshop around belief asking – How do you make sense of the world? Students could be asked to document 5 cultural references that help them answer the question. Religious or seculat, light or heavy sources could be offered up. Discussion could be had around possible pre-conceptions and assumptions. Students could be encouraged to incorporate the familiar and important as well as discovering the new.

Religion in Britain Challenges for Higher Education

Paper 2: Religion the public sphere and higher education. By Professor Craig Calhoun

• UK. is secular but generally Christian. Space is made for some religions more than others

• Israel/Palestine issues – religious issues overlapping with racial issues

• ‘The creation of successfully integrative academic communities means encouraging abundant activities that cross religious boundaries. If universities accept too much tacit segregation of students into subcultures, they reduce the learning they offer and the contribution they make to the larger society. However the pursuit of integration shouldn’t block attempts by minorities to create their own cohesive groups.’

• ‘The point is that members of minorities may need some level of in-group solidarity and recognition as a basis for extending themselves into wider relations. Despite this, it is common for casual observers to criticise the self-segregation of minorities and not of majorities.’

• ‘Some of the ‘new atheists’ have taken a cue from controversies over religious cartoons in Denmark and France and made a point of mocking religious convictions and symbols. This can be as much a disruption to campus harmony as any clash between religions.’

• ‘The challenge, in other words, is not just for religion to be the main focus of discussion on some occasions and to handle those occasions without exacerbating conflict. It is for religion to be part of discussions of many topics on other occasions without dominating or derailing the discussion.’

• Confronting our ideas of teaching which in turn are often influenced by how we were taught – ‘all of us are products of our youth.’

• ‘We update our knowledge in our areas of specialism more than we update our tacit understanding of other aspects of social life, such as the religious life of our students. Academics in or past middle age sometimes find it hard to fully realise that we aren’t living in the 1970s anymore.’

• Religion shaping the relations of students to each other and individual personal lives and wellbeing

• Religion needs to be addressed in intellectual discussion and within university because it is important in the world.

The first learning point that struck me was the fact that students need not only cross-group socialising but in-group socialisation. This idea has helped build and refine my thinking around community development. In Community and Inclusion meetings our staff team has discussed in-group socialisation particularly amongst international students and I have been working to develop more projects (like community gardens) that include everyone and expand on the traditional range events on offer (like pub quizzes). I am now able to confidently channel energy into this inclusive activity knowing that in-group socialisation is not a problem

The second learning point that struck me was the idea that religion needs to be present in many discussions on many subjects rather than in separate select spaces, even if well-managed. This has helped me see that religion needs to be embedded in subject discipline. Going forward, what I need to do is spend more time thinking about the key ideas of my subject and where belief and religion connect.

This is where my question/provocation would come in – Where could religion be discussed within Illustration? My first thoughts are that Illustration as a design discipline is concerned with communicating to an audience and the analysis of this audience would be a good opportunity.

Kwame Anthony Appiah Reith Lecture: Creed

• Identity as something both personal/individual and social/collective

Both need scales or facets need to be acknowledged and given space in the classroom.

• Appiah makes these large words and ideas specific – e.g. faith in his parents marriage.

‘They were each sustained by these slightly different variants of their faith. What some counted a burden, they counted a blessing.’

It could be useful to both explain myself and get other people to explain in these terms. Always seeing these issues as real people and situations.

• ‘I want to persuade you that religion is not, in the first instance, a matter of belief.’
• Religion as practice, community and beliefs. Complex interplay of these. You can engage with some and not others.

The truth of this seems so clear and resonant to me. My family are Catholic on the Irish side and Christian on the Ugandan side. I grew up in Birmingham and was friends and at school with people of all faiths. Though I have no religious belief myself, all of this culture seemed so deserving of respect and the ways myself and others interacted with these different areas are religion.

• Complexity at every stage, e.g. interpretation of text
• Challenges preconceptions about religion, e.g. Islam

Supportive, inclusive, non-confrontational preconceptions of religion. Builds on ideas of the previous paper, in making clear that you cannot understand anything properly without including, rather than writing off religion. Good approach to take into classroom discussion.

• ‘The recognition that identity endures through change—indeed, that it only endures by change—will be a useful touchstone for everyone involved. Religious identities, like all identities, as we shall see in the next three lectures, are transformed through history: that is how they survive.’

Identity of all kinds not fixed but in flux – such a powerful idea. Gives a sense of the active dialogue that is needed.

• ‘For none of us creates the world we inhabit from scratch; none of us crafts our values and commitments save in dialogue, or debate, with the past.’

There is great hope in this statement, it gives us a sense of the direction forward in terms of breaking down structures and instigating change.

• Modesty about what we know ‘the formulation of this that Sir Richard Burton, the 19^th century traveller, first Christian I think to get into Mecca because he was able to pass for a Pashtun, he said “Truth is the shattered mirror strown in myriad bits, while each believes his little piece the whole to own”.

This feels like its hand-in-hand with respect for what other people know and connected to meta-cultural sensitivity too.

Shades of Noir ToR: Higher Power

Interview with Rahul Patel

• Places of worship – ‘It was like the community went there and it was a way of getting together with the community.’ “ For those who are people of colour, racism plays a key role in how they keep together.’
• Faith ‘It is not debated, it is not theorised, it is not understood.’
• ‘Every university has chaplains and there will be some space, prayer space in most universities dominated by Christian union or Christianity in in one way or the other’

For me, this interview really builds and consolidates some ideas from the previous resource.

As a student, not that I had the language it at the time, but the way in which faith or religion was taboo felt like part of hidden messages about identity and the type of student you needed to be to succeed. There was an unspoken sense that people who had faith were foolish and bigoted and since where I’d grown up (Birmingham) a high proportion of people’s families were religious, and faith was a big cultural part of the immigrant communities that I and others were part of, this felt like people were saying that where I’d come from was inappropriate and backward.

Also, as highlighted by Patel, because some faiths were part of the structure of the university, it felt like this an echo of the overall identity and experience erasure going on. The idea that elements of identity were best left outside the classroom, only applied to some, mainly students of colour. For others their identity, background and faith were foundational to the space and institution.

SoN Case Study: Faith

• Page 7, Setting up a safe space through discussion and setting rules.

We do this already, but what I realised is that we often get the students to discuss amongst themselves and agree amongst themselves. Staff need to sign up to this equally.

I think we also need to use case studies like this one to explain why it is important in a real way. Sometimes, I think students understand making the agreement in a general way, like ‘yes we should obviously all be good respectful people’ but they cannot imagine in a specific way how they would not do that.

• Page 13, Making sure that students are able to identify bias and separate ‘fake news’ from real news.

I think we could have workshops where we analyse current news stories. This would sit well in projects where students create work on a given political issue.