Professor Kathryn Chan Awarded the 2014-15 Faculty Fellowship at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society
Professor Chan’s project “Faith-Based Organizations (FBOs) as Loci of Law: A Malawian Case Study” has been selected for a 2014-15 Faculty Fellowship at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society (CSRS). The Fellowship will give Professor Chan the opportunity to conduct her research as a Fellow in residence at Centre from January to June 2015. Her project looks at how faith-based organizations reflect and generate religious normative orders, and how those orders may come into conflict with state-derived normative orders. While academic debates about these conflicts often take place against the backdrop of the hegemony of state law, Professor Chan aims to bring a legal pluralism analysis to bear on these conflicts, using that perspective to analyze data from a four-year research study that involved senior leaders of Malawian FBOs in a participatory process to construct an inter-faith theology of HIV-AIDS.
The CSRS’s mandate is to promote “the scholarly study of religion in relation to any and all aspects of society and culture, both contemporary and historical.”