"A Global Lab: Religion among scientists in International Context."
The YRT Team hosted the Winter Faculty Roundtable at Yale on Wednesday evening, Feb. 24th, 2016. Rice Sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund was the primary presenter. Dr. Rick Schneider responded to Dr. Ecklund's comments with a short introduction to the sociology of knowledge and insights from the work of Mannheim and Bourdieu that shed light on some of the pressures of religious conformity under which modern laboratory researchers must function.
Professor Ecklund is director of the Religion and Public Life Program in the Social Sciences Research Institute and a Rice Scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy. Exploring mechanisms of institutional change draws together Ecklund's research. Specifically, she is interested in how individuals develop cognitive schema—ways of interpreting the world—that are at odds with institutions that constrain them. She then examines how individuals use such frameworks to bring changes to these larger institutions. Her research addresses this theoretical topic in the areas of religion, immigration, science, and gender. Ecklund is the author of two books with Oxford University Press, over 40 peer-reviewed research articles, and numerous op-eds. She has received over 4 million dollars in grants and awards, including those from the National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, John Templeton Foundation, and Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Her latest book,Science Vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think, was chosen by Times Higher Education as an international book of the week and named a book of the year on religion by the Huffington Post. Her research has been covered in national and international news media, including USA Today, Nature, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist.
The Faculty Roundtable is sponsored by the Rivendell Institute at Yale University.
