Galen Watts
Office: PAS 2059
Email: galen.watts@uwaterloo.ca
Link to Personal Website or CV: www.galenwatts.com
Education
Flanders Research Foundation (FWO) Junior Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for Sociological Research, KU Leuven (Belgium) (2022-2023)
Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for Sociological Research, KU Leuven (Belgium) & Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto (2020-2022)
PhD, Cultural Studies (Queen’s University, Canada)
Research and Teaching Interests
- Social Theory
- Culture
- Religion
- Morality
- Inequality
- Solidarity
- Political Philosophy
Current Research
My research falls into three strands.
First, the changing nature and function of religion in late modernity—especially as it relates to the West.
Second, culture, inequality, and solidarity; I am interested in the role culture plays in both dividing and uniting people. Shared meaning systems, repertoires of evaluation, and collective rituals can serve to exclude, stigmatize, and stratify. However, they can also function to unite people, and inspire them to act for the common good. In my work, I try to shed light on both of these functions. Further, I am particularly interested in the role national cultures play in fuelling as well as mitigating economic and social inequalities.
Third, social theory and the varieties of normative inquiry. Like Marx, I believe a key role of theory is to change the world. But I also believe that both social life and social theory are fundamentally hermeneutic in nature—thus one can never escape the need for interpretation. For this reason, I am interested in interrogating the presuppositions—theoretical and normative—that shape contemporary social theory. Finally, I am interested in reviving an older model of critical social theory, which the late Robert Bellah referred to as “social science as public philosophy.”
I am happy to supervise students in any of the above areas. Please reach out if you’d like to discuss working together.
Selected Publications
Books:
- Galen Watts. 2022. The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity. Oxford University Press.
Articles:
- Galen Watts. 2023. “Capital and Distinction or Goods and Traditions? Toward a Post Bourdieusian Cultural Theory.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. Advance Online.
- Galen Watts and Dick Houtman. 2023. “The Spiritual Turn and the Disenchantment of the World: Max Weber, Peter Berger, and the Religion-Science Conflict.” The Sociological Review 71 (1): 261-279.
- Galen Watts and Dick Houtman. 2022. “Purification or Pollution? The Debate over ‘Workplace Spirituality’.” Cultural Sociology. 17 (4) 439-456.
- Galen Watts. 2022. “Are You a Neoliberal Subject? On the Uses and Abuses of a Concept.” European Journal of Social Theory 25 (3): 458-76.
- Galen Watts and Sharday C. Mosurinjohn. 2022. “Can critical religion play by its own rules? Why there must be more than one way to be ‘critical’ in the study of religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 90 (2): 317-334.
- Galen Watts. 2022. “Social Science as Public Philosophy Revived.” Civic Sociology 3 (1): 1-13.
- Galen Watts. 2022. “The Religion of the Heart: ‘Spirituality’ in Late Modernity.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. 10: 1-33.
- Sharday C. Mosurinjohn and Galen Watts. 2021. “Religious Studies and the Spiritual Turn.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. 33: 482-504.
- Galen Watts. 2020. “Making Sense of the Study of Spirituality: Late Modernity on Trial.” Religion 50(4): 590-614.
- Galen Watts. 2018. “On the Politics of Self-Spirituality: A Canadian Case Study.” Studies in Religion 47(3): 345-372.