Adjudicating Religion in UK Asylum Law

My research examines how the UK asylum system adjudicates religion-based claims for protection. Asylum is a particularly distinctive domain of law in that courts are required to undertake two related but distinct inquiries. On the one hand, they need to assess whether a claimant's professed religious identity is genuine in order to ground a claim for protection; on the other, in making this assessment, they necessarily make judgments about what counts as religion in the first place. The study therefore considers the implications of this dual task at a practical level.  I approach this problem using methods from both anthropology and law. In this regard, I am looking to combine classical legal analysis with ethnographic and interview-based research to examine the relationship between legal understandings of religion and the diverse ways in which religious belief and identity are actually lived. In this project, I am also particularly interested in examining forms of religious identity that might challenge certain assumptions inherent in asylum decision-making. This includes the exploration of how differences in important factors like religious practice, knowledge, affiliation, and expression, which may be taken for granted within a community but ultimately prove to be objects of scrutiny in the courtroom. Ultimately, what is at stake is how religion is accommodated within UK asylum law and how the process of adjudication itself might produce particular understandings of what religion is.