Senior Lecturer in Religion

Current Research Projects:

1          Religious Education in secondary schools and higher education in the UK.

My colleague Dr John I’Anson (Faculty of Applied Social Sciences, University of Stirling) and I are working to identify new directions of travel in relation to RE; a vision of programmatic change that we hope has implications for both research and educational practice. The intention is to offer a distinctively educational account providing new critical, ethical and experiential insights within a field that in recent years has been foreclosed by the existing settlement or official account of religious education.

Relevant recent publications:

• John I’Anson & Alison Jasper: August 2017.  Schooling Indifference Re-Imagining RE in Multi-Cultural and Gendered Spaces.   London & NY: Routledge.

2          Women’s subjectivity – female genius.

“Female genius” describes what women achieve  within patriarchy in ways that  establishes their capacity to transcend its limitations. The term was first used by  the French philosopher Julia Kristeva (2000-2004, vol I, ix-xxi). It requires and implies an understanding of the best women can be and marks her capacity for all kinds of bringing to birth – there are powerful connections here with the work Hannah Arendt on ‘natality’ (1958) –  in terms of new relations, ideas and pathways taking them beyond mere survival in what feminist theory of all kinds has identified as a man’s world. It  addresses the view of women as entirely constrained by male normative structures and institutions as yet one more obstacle to their capacities to flourish. However, it does not do this by denying the limitations and obstructions posed by male normative frameworks but by trying to underline or point out the ways in which privileged values and gendered assumptions have overshadowed and hidden these singular achievements

Relevant recent publication:

• Alison Jasper: 2012.  Because of Beauvoir: Christianity and the Cultivation of Female Genius, Texas: Baylor University Press.
• Alison Jasper: October 2017.  “Reflections on Reading the Bible: From Flesh to Female Genius (Jane Leade),” In Sherwood, Yvonne (ed.) The Bible, Feminism and Gender: Remapping the Field.  Oxford: OUP.

 

To see all my blog postings on the Critical Religion website, click here. Please contact me directly using the form below if you would like to discuss supervision in any of these areas.