Matthew Richardson

Project description

This project explores expressions of queer Jewish identity in postsecular Britain.

I use Turner’s theory on ritual performance to outline the mythic, ritualistic, and symbolic praxes queer Jews engage with as modes of:

• identity arbitration
• self-construal
• self-actualisation

I recruited Eighteen queer Jews to take part in:

• unstructured, life story interviews
• semi-structured, thematic interviews; and
• participant observation

This culminated in around 68 hours spent conducting fieldwork and over 500,000 words of interview transcription and field notes.

The core of this research project explores how liminality is facilitated and communitas constructed through ritual performance – a process lending itself to the construction and maintenance of deeply affective (often uneven) topographies.

Publications

• Richardson, M. 2022. Geographic roots, anthropological routes: new avenues in geographies of religions. Geography Compass, 16(3), 1-13.
• Richardson, M. 2021. Religion, hypermobility, and digital media in global Asia: faith, flows, and fellowship. Social & Cultural Geography, 22(8), 1187-1188.
• Richardson M. 2019. Kittens and Kalashnikovs: an anthropological analysis of my time spent following the Islamic State on Twitter. Foundation, 11(1), 71-95.
• Richardson, M. 2018. Embodiment, habitus, and culture : grandmother’s tales and domestic religion in a kosher care centre. Foundation, 10(1), 143-160.

Presentations

• Richardson, M. 2022. Emic, etic, or something in-between? Ethnography for ethnographers who don’t fit the insider/outsider binary. (Re)defining Fieldwork, Durham University and Newcastle University, Durham and Newcastle, 3-4 February.
• Richardson, M. 2021. The funeral parlour in our living rooms: rethinking the borders of death, life, love, and loss in a time of Covid-19. The 15th International Conference on the Social Context of Death, Dying, and Disposal: Diversity and Decolonisation, The Association for the Study of Death and Society and Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, 1-4 September.
• Richardson, M. 2020. Ritual and resistance: performing queer Jewish identities in postsecular Britain. Geography and Anthropology: Dialogues Past, Present, and Future, The Royal Anthropological Society, London, 15-18 September.

Teaching

• GEO3159: Displacement and Migration
• GEO1010: Interconnected World

Academic qualifications

• MA Religious Studies, Durham University
• BA (hons) Religion, Philosophy, and Ethics, King’s College London