Cole N. Carnesecca

Cole Carnesecca (Phd Notre Dame, Sociology) is faculty in the department of sociology at Zhejiang university. His primary interests are in the sociology of religion, social movements, and theory/meta-theory and his research centers on questions of religion, solidarity, and civic engagement. His interest in religion also includes questions of method, looking at how the construction of our analytical categories can skew our data and comparisons across religions and regions. His current project looks at the fate of religion during state-formation projects in China and Japan, the role of institutions and ideological resource production, and the contingent nature of secularizing projects. An upcoming project will look at the role of collective identity development and civic engagement among congregations to see how differential participation is linked to differing understandings of what the church “is” and therefore how congregants ought to behave. He currently teaches courses in Contemporary Theory and Research Methods at Zhejiang University, but has also taught courses in Sociology of Religion and Cultural Sociology.