News

Metin Koca presents at CEST Symposium in Naples

January 16, 2026

Metin Koca participated in the CEST Symposium Who Owns the Nation? Imperial Imaginaries and Cultural Resistance in Contemporary Turkey, held on 14–16 January 2026 at the University of Naples L’Orientale. The symposium brought together scholars from across the world to examine the production and contestation of cultural hegemony in contemporary Turkey, with a particular focus on imperial imaginaries, nationalism, and resistance across political and cultural fields

Koca presented a paper titled “Muslim Deconversion and the Unravelling of Turkey’s Islamist–Kemalist Divide” as part of the panel Reimagining the Nation: Identity and Ideological Ruptures. Drawing on cultural-sociological perspectives, the paper explored how experiences of deconversion complicate established binaries in Turkish political life and open up new fault lines in debates over the governance of religion. The symposium was convened under the auspices of the Consortium for European Symposia on Turkey (CEST) and hosted by University of Naples L’Orientale, with support from Stiftung Mercator and partner institutions across Europe.

New book chapter on Turkey in the Yearbook of Muslims in Europe

January 1, 2026

Metin Koca has published a new chapter on Turkey in the Yearbook of Muslims in Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2026). The chapter examines how, with the benefit of hindsight on 2024, international developments and foreign policy issues were reframed through domestic political contestations, drawing everyday moral, cultural, and social debates into the realm of high politics.

The final empirical episode Dr Koca analysed in the chapter is the pro-Palestine rally of 1 January 2025, where references to Gaza were intertwined with explicitly domestic messages—most notably through symbolic parallels with Hagia Sophia and implicit contrasts between different Turkish social types. Koca concludes that the early days of 2026 already confirm the persistence of a familiar pattern, in which complex international agendas are channelled into domestic fault lines and redeployed for internal political positioning.

Anna Strhan shares her research on humanism and nonreligious childhoods via Humanists UK events

December 9, 2025

Anna Strhan has been sharing her research on humanism and nonreligious childhoods from her co-authored book Growing Up Godless  (Princeton University Press) with Humanist networks.

She spoke as part of the annual Humanists UK's  Education Day,  which provides CPD for Humanists UK's education networks, and also took part in a lively discussion about the book at the York Humanists December meeting.

New article in The Sociological Review 

November 3rd, 2025

Researchers from the University of York, Dr Anna Strhan and Dr Joanna Malone have recently had a new article published open access in The Sociological Review with colleagues Dr Peter Hemming (University of Surrey) and Professor Sarah Neal (University of Sheffield).  The article explores the nature and scope of therapeutic education in the post-COVID educational context, its relationship with citizenship and character education, and the role of religion, Read it online here.

The research is part of the Becoming Citizens of 'Post-Secular' Britain: Religion in Primary School Life project.

Lucy Potter begins new ESRC fellowship on Blasphemy and Apostasy in the UK Asylum System

October 1, 2025

Lucy Potter has joined the RASSC Lab as a ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow. Her expertise bridges the fields of forced migration studies and non-religion.

Lucy's research explores the journeys of 'apostate' refugees in becoming non-religious in contexts with blasphemy and/or apostasy laws; and their asylum claims in the UK. By analysing the policy and practice surrounding these claims, she unpacks the ways asylum bureaucracies impose stereotypical notions of non-religiosity. 

The core of her work explores how refugees negotiate rigid expectations, outlining the complexities of identity construction and the adequacy of the British asylum system in making accurate decisions.

You can read more about Lucy's research in The Conversation, and listen to her discuss her work on the Humanism Now podcast.

Metin Koca Presents Preliminary Findings of His British Academy Fellowship Research at Turkey's National Political Science Congress

September 22, 2025

At the 4th National Political Science Congress of the Turkish Association of Political Science, hosted by Izmir University of Economics in the city of Izmir on 20-21 September, Metin Koca presented preliminary arguments from his ongoing British Academy International Fellowship research at the University of York.

Speaking in the panel Religion and Politics in Turkey, Koca delivered a talk titled “‘Mistaken but Righteous: Islamism’s Encounter with Nonreligion in the Shift from Divine to Humane Politics.” His presentation examined how successive generations of Islamist governance reconfigure the boundaries between religious and nonreligious frameworks, highlighting the paradoxical ways state-sponsored religious socialisation creates new grounds for disaffiliation.

This was the first occasion on which Koca shared his fellowship research in Turkey. With his participation, the University of York was among the 21 universities from outside Turkey represented at the congress.

Anna Strhan discusses Growing Up Godless on the New Books Network podcast and at the European Humanist Services Network

September 10, 2025

In a recent New Books Network podcast, Anna Strhan and Rachael Shillitoe discussed their new book, Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England (Princeton University Press) with Prof. Dave O'Brien. 

Anna also spoke about the book at the European Humanist Services Network seminar in Berlin in September.

You can listen to the podcast here and find out more about the book in a brief interview Anna and Rachael did for The Society Pages.

Alex Arthur-Hastie co-organises British Sociological Association Sociology of Religion Study Group 50th Anniversary Annual Conference

July 16, 2025

In the role of co- Events Officer for the British Sociological Association's Sociology of Religion Study Group (SocRel), Alex spent much of the summer organising and running the study group's 50th anniversary annual conference with co-organiser, Dr Jennifer Riley. The conference, held at Durham university in July, focused on the history of both the study group (and the field) and the future directions for the sociology of religion, and several RASSC members presented their research there. 

The support of scholarly communities like SocRel becomes all the more important during turbulent times for UK higher education, and Alex and co-organiser Jennie worked through some adversity to ensure that the annual conference came to be and were able to offer a record number of funded places for PGRs and scholars without access to institutional support to be able to attend. Alex and Jennie have already begun work on SocRel '26, the venue for which they expect to announce soon.