Professor Gordon Lynch
Professor of Religion, Society and Ethics
Address
- Street
-
School of Divinity
New College
Mound Place - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH1 2LX
Background
Gordon Lynch joined the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh in September 2024, having previously worked at the University of Kent where he held the Michael Ramsey Chair in Modern Theology. Over his career he has won numerous fellowships, grants and funded studentships for projects exploring forms of meaning and value in contemporary societies, with a particular interest in the social uses and consequences of sacred moral commitments. Over the past ten years, he has also undertaken a range of work on historic institutional abuse, with his work on UK child migration schemes including a national museum exhibition and substantial expert witness work for both the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse and the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry.
He has a range of leadership experience with subject groups and networks and served as the national sub-panel Chair for Theology and Religious Studies in REF2021. He has been active in developing national training for doctoral students in the study of contemporary religion and previously served as the Director of the Graduate and Researcher College at Kent. He has extensive experience of partnership work with organisations and professionals including in the museum sector, think-tanks and third sector organisations, digital education and the creative arts.
Qualifications
B.A. (Hons) in Theology, University of Durham
PG Diploma in Psychodynamic Counselling, University of Birmingham
M.A. in Histories of Art and Design, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design (UCE),
PhD in Theology, University of Birmingham
Undergraduate teaching
For the 2024-25 academic year, I will be co-teaching on the Theorising Religion course, as well as teaching and convening the course on Film, Religion and Ethics.
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
Yes
Areas of interest for supervision
I have previously supervised students to completion on a range of topics on the cultural study of religion, including moral meanings in the natural birth movement, the formation of conservative Evangelical subjectivities, visitor engagement with religious objects in museums, and the moral and ethical dimensions of student activism on Palestine-Israel at UK universities. In many cases, my previous students have used ethnographic methods in their research.
I am happy to discuss project ideas for doctoral supervision in the broad area of the study of religion and ethics in contemporary society. At present, I am particularly interested in working on projects exploring the ways in which people create moral subjectivities through contemporary social practices (whether religious or not), the role of moral meanings in social organisations and the significance of sacralised moral meanings in current social and political movements. I am also interested in supporting work on religion and abuse, as well as factors and cultures giving rise to abuse in organisational contexts.
Research summary
My research crosses the boundaries between ethics and cultural sociology. I am deeply interested in the role that moral meanings play in social life - whether in creating a sense of identity for individuals and groups, underpinning organisations' understanding of their work or shaping the way in which public life is narrated through media and politics. I am also fascinated by the ways in which these moral commitments can have positive and harmful consequences and how we might develop greater understanding and ethical reflection about our most fundamental moral convictions. These interests touch on a wide range of current social issues, from the role of moral meanings in political populism and culture wars, the reasons why organisations act in harmful ways despite their espoused moral missions and the moral implications of how we remember difficult institutional histories.
Current research interests
I am currently in the process of concluding a large AHRC-funded grant project on Abuse in Religious Contexts, which is one of the first studies to have attempted a study of abuse across a range of different religious communities and settings. This has involved leading a research team including scholars from different disciplines within theology and the study of religion, psychologists, professional practitioners in law and safeguarding and advocates/survivors. We are in the process of completing findings from this project and will begin to disseminate these from late 2024 onwards. I am also continuing to collaborate with colleagues involved in an extensive digital mapping of institutions across the island of Ireland identified in historic abuse inquiries.Past research interests
Over a number of years, I undertook a range of projects focused on contemporary forms of meaning and value beyond institutional religion. These included books on the role that media and popular culture play as sources of meaning (Understanding Theology and Popular Culture, 2004) and forms of 'progressive spirituality' (The New Spirituality, 2007). Having benefited from time as a fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, I developed further work on the particular forms that the 'sacred' - understood as inviolable moral commitments - play in social life which led to my books The Sacred in the Modern World and On the Sacred, both published in 2012. For the past ten years my research has focused particular on issues of historic institutional abuse, including the ways in which morally-framed social interventions have had harmful consequences for children and vulnerable adults. Within this wider body of work, I developed particular research on UK child migration programmes including the role of moral meanings in underpinning these schemes (Remembering Child Migration, 2014) and a study of the organisational causes of the failure to safeguard children according to standards of the day in post-war child migration to Australia (UK Child Migration to Australia, 1945-1970: A Study in Policy Failure). I have also worked closely with colleagues in Ireland on issues of historic institutional abuse in post-independence welfare institutions. My experience of working closely with two national abuse inquiries has also led me to work about the roles of inquiries as public history and the significance of archival research in wider processes of transitional justice.Knowledge exchange
I have a long-standing commitment to working with a range of organisations on shared projects. Over a number of years, I worked with the BAFTA award-winning digital education channel, TrueTube, on films around my research on the sacred. Two other films made with TrueTube on the UK child migration schemes and women's experiences in Magdalene Laundries in Ireland were shortlisted for national religious broadcasting awards, with the latter winning a national Learning on Screen Award.
I was the academic curator for the national exhbition, 'On Their Own: Britain's Child Migrants' at the V&A Museum of Childhood, and have also undertaken collaborative work on religious material culture in museums. My expert witness evidence, with Professor Stephen Constantine, to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse was extensively cited in the Inquiry's report on UK child migration schemes and underpinned its ultimately successful recommendation for the creation of a national compensation scheme for former child migrants by the UK Government. My expert witness work for the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry included one of the first attempts to use a range of archival sources to map possible networks between alleged abusers at institutions housing child migrants run by the Christian Brothers in Western Australia.
Working with the leading folk music producer, John Leonard, and internationally-known folk musicians, we created an album and performance, 'The Ballads of Child Migration', which received extensive play on the BBC, including at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Music Awards at the Royal Albert Hall.