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Staff Profile

Dr Josep Almudever Chanza

Lecturer in Social Geography

Background

I grew up in the Mediterranean coast of Spain, and studied in London (BA Hons Philosophy, University of Roehampton; MA Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University), and in Edinburgh (PhD, University of Edinburgh). I have taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Human Geography and in Social Anthropology. My broad areas of expertise and research interest are:


  • Religion, faith and spirituality
  • The Catholic Church
  • Gender, sex and sexuality
  • The European South; post-authoritarian societies
  • Ethnography
  • Poetry as research method


I am also a poet. You can read some of my work in Under the Radar, The Missing Slate, Eye Flash Poetry, and Brittle Star.

Research

Since completing my ethnography-based PhD (2021), I have been pursuing different strands of research following the themes and interests emanating from the thesis.

  • The intersections between faith and sexuality. My research here attends to the concept and spatiality of the closet in Catholicism, extending this remit and studying how religions around the globe respond to non-normative sexualities and genders.
  • Religious renewal and innovation, in particular the role of women as leaders in the context of faiths in which women's knowledge and practices have historically been marginalised and misinterpreted.
  • Intradenominational competition and co-existence, paying attention to how new religious movements and fashions enter into conflict with established/traditional ideologies and practices without causing schisms or separation.
  • The democratisation of religion, the (re)creation of people-led sacraments sometimes in parallel, sometimes against the institutional Church.
  • Faith-based material practices, their development, decay, abandonment or renewal, in particular in the context of European secularism.


Some new avenues and projects involve:

  • The concept and practice of camp, in particular non-Anglo-Saxon genealogies linked to the (Catholic) Baroque in Southern Europe and Latin America.
  • The lives of provincial LGBTQ+ people in Europe.
  • Christian graffiti.
Teaching

Currently module convener for GEO2140 Research Design and Planning, and for GEO3162 The Politics of Difference and Identity, I also teach in research methods courses in the social sciences, with a focus on creative methods (poetry) and ethnography. My areas of research interest and expertise cover religion and spirituality, gender and sexuality, feminist philosophy, Southern European societies.


I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. 

Publications