Ethnography

Religion is central to the everyday experiences of many individuals and communities worldwide. As a force for learning and socialisation and as an important marker of identity, it can provide a sense of membership and belonging within and across generations. The social and cultural practices in religions are shaped by individual as well as institutional, social and ideological forces and processes, instantiated locally, translocally and globally. Specific ways of utilising language and literacy can also be seen as a social practice that individuals draw upon for meaning making and building social relationships (Barton and Hamilton 1998). Language and literacy practices are then historically situated and embedded within power relations and societal discourses of distinction, where some languages and literacies become dominant and others are frequently silenced or considered irrelevant or problematic (Genishi and Dyson 2009). An emergent body of interdisciplinary scholarship has examined the intersection of language, literacy and religion from a social and cultural practice perspective. Methodologically, this body of research uses ethnography as a key conceptual approach to understanding social interaction for systematic knowledge building and the generation of theory