UC Press Blog

We'd like to introduce you to JRPC's new associate editor, Francis Stewart, who pens the editorial in the journal's issue 38.1. She joins Editor-in-Chief David Feltmate on the editorial team. Stewart is a lecturer in Sociology within the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Stirling in Scotland. She researches and writes about punk and anarchist subcultures and their connections with, resistance to, and shaping by religion. In particular she focuses on straight edge punk; punk in Northern Ireland; punk and disability; and punk pedagogies. She is also the director for the Edward Bailey Research Centre for Implicit Religion. We asked Stewart to tell us more about her background and her aims for the journal as she joins its editorial team.

Tell us about yourself and your research interests.

Popular culture, in its various forms, is an integral part of people’s lives that is able to evoke meaning through its unique appeal to human emotions, relationships and social life. A meaning that many of us begin to encounter within our childhoods. The Northern Ireland of my childhood and adolescence was a divided and violent place undergoing a 30+ year civil war known colloquially as The Troubles. You always had to be hyper aware. For your own safety from a very young age, you had to learn to read signs, symbols, body language and codes in clothing, gestures, tattoos and so on. 

The first time I met a Catholic was at my first punk show in 90s Belfast, the band was Stiff Little Fingers. I looked up at this person standing next to me, singing along to the same songs and immediately recognized all the markers of a Catholic. My immediate response was to figure out where the exits were and how quickly I could get to them when others realized what he was and inevitably attacked him. I looked around to see if there were any other Catholics in the hopes that after he had been attacked someone could drag him to safety. I realized that there were a lot of Catholics in the room, probably nearly half of the crowd, and there were just as many Protestants, and they were singing along together, dancing together, drinking together and just having a great time. Nobody seemed to care if we were Catholic, Protestant, something else or nothing at all. Something about punk rock let us all transcend those entrenched divisions. 

I didn’t have the language and understanding at the time to articulate it, but it stuck with me and grew into a real desire to know how and why the music and the subculture of punk could achieve what nothing else could. This eventually led to an academic career focused on religion and popular culture. Although my interest has remained punk rock, it has, nonetheless, been a wider foray into the established and important field of religion and popular culture. Over time I have become fascinated by the interaction between punk rock, religion, and disability and my work on popular culture has increasingly moved in that direction in recent years. 

What drew you to the associate editorship of the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture?

Primarily an understanding of the journal as a potential site for having a much-needed conversation within the field, along with an opportunity to help shape that conversation. Many of us have been yearning for that conversation for years, holding it amongst ourselves when we meet at conferences, or with one another as colleagues but becoming increasingly frustrated by the lack of it within publications that we could share with our students. My editorial details some of the reasons why that lack exists, and David Feltmate’s previous editorial focuses on how we can use the journal to create and sustain the conversation we want and need as an academic discipline. 

Secondly, and more personally, I wanted to work with David Feltmate, whom I’ve known for several years. We don’t always agree with one another, and we have different approaches to the study of popular culture, but that ultimately makes for a richer journal as we bring different things to the editorial roles we have. I didn’t want to work with someone who would just agree with me or my vision, or someone who wanted things to stay as they are either in terms of what the journal is doing or the conversations we are having within the field of religion and popular culture. Our differences mean that together we can support other scholars through new and vibrant ways to develop the journal and the wider disciplinary conversation and direction. 

What are those new and vibrant ways you want to help to develop the journal?

Building a space in which there is an intentionality to creating a research agenda for religion and popular culture as a field, and especially as a field that exists outside of the global north. We want to support people at varying stages of their academic careers to enter into and contribute to a wider conversation about religion and popular culture that can then move beyond the journal and into other spaces including classrooms but also the spaces in which popular culture occurs. 

Developing the journal as a space in which there is a sustained and sustainable record of the disagreements, debates and arguments that our field has. They matter—they are part of a field shaping and growing and we need a record of them to help the people after us understand how the field became whatever it becomes. Such a space also helps to hold scholars, and the discipline, to account in regard to important things such as power, structural inequalities, and epistemology—who and what we consider knowledge (and why). 

Becoming a journal that values and centers methodology is an important part of developing and sustaining a disciplinary accountability and conversation. Too often methodology is shunted into a couple of sentences, or ignored altogether, but how can we teach those coming after us how we did our research if we don’t detail it? How can we be properly accountable if we don’t reflect on the research design choices that we made? 

JRPC currently has an open call for papers focused on music and sound. Where can people submit manuscripts on this or other topics?

Please submit your manuscripts through Scholastica. 

We invite you to read Francis Stewart's editorial, "Sharing a Research Approach within the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture," and the rest of JRPC's April 2026 issue, for free online for a limited time.

Print copies of JRPC's April 2026 issue (issue 83.1), as well as other individual issues of JRPC, can be purchased on the journal’s site. 

To ensure ongoing access to JRPC, please ask your librarian to subscribe and/or purchase an individual subscription.