Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Chris Cotter who lectures for the Open University and has a rich background in podcasts. He co-founded the Religious Studies Project podcast in 2012, and we talk about our thoughts on podcasts and why academics want to discuss their research. Chris comes from near Belfast, where his father is a Church of Ireland minister, and moved to Edinburgh in 2004 initially to do a degree in Physics. He had discovered amateur dramatics at the end of high school and was also involved in a band, performing Shakespeare and other plays and came to the conclusion that a Physics degree was the wrong call. He ended up migrating to Religious Studies. Chris’s area of research is in the critical study of religion, theory and method, and we learn about his interests in New Atheism, non-religion and ethnography. Chris talks about his relatively privileged upbringing, his experience of growing up in Northern Ireland prior to the Good Friday Agreement, and what has, and what hasn’t, changed. He became known as