Dr Angela Coco CELTA(Cam), DipT(BCAE), BA(Hons)(UQ), PhD(UQ) Research interests include cultural and organisational change, particularly the ways these are affected by the diffusion of information and communication technologies. Feminist theories and methodological issues inform my research processes. I have conducted research in community development settlings, higher education organization and teaching, and new religious and spiritual sensibilities particularly the goddess and pagan movements. I have experience in a wide range of research methods including; in-depth Sense-making interviewing (Dervin 1999), questionnaire design and analysis, phenomenological ethnography, participatory action research, multi-methods and focus groups. My interdisciplinary approach is unified by research and publications that explore issues of power, gender, identity and community. I took up my lecturing position with the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University in January 2004. My doctorate was awarded in the sociology of religion at the University of Queensland in 1999 for the thesis titled Catholics' meaning-making in critical situations. This will be published as a book entitled Catholics, conflicts and choices: an exploration of power relations in the Catholic church in December 2012 with Equinox Publishing. I acquired ten years lecturing experience at The University of Queensland and the Australian Catholic University teaching introductory sociology, sociology of religion, work, the family, qualitative and quantitative methods, and women's studies.
Journal articles
Using communications theory to explore emergent organisation in Pagan culture, Australian Religion Studies Review (2011)
Pagan culture presents a paradoxical case to the traditional frameworks and methodologies social scientists have...
Pagans online and offline: locating community in post-modern times, Sociological Spectrum (2008)
This article examines the ways Australian Pagans use e-mail discussion lists as a means of...
Clients, colleagues or experts? Defining identities in an action research project (with Catherine Varnier and Chris Deftereos), Journal of Institutional Research in Australasia (2007)
This article examines how discourses shaped and were shaped by participants’ identities in a participatory...
Discourses of authenticity in a pagan community: the emergence of the ‘fluffy bunny’ sanction (with Ian Woodward), Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (2007)
The commodification of the religious impulse finds its most overt expression in the New Age...
Books
Catholics, conflicts and choices: and exploration of power relations in the Catholic Church (2013)
Many Catholics today are disenchanted with the Church’s continuing distrust of women and laity. But,...
Home, school and community partnerships to support children’s numeracy (with Merrilyn Goos, Daniel Lincoln, Sandra Frid, Peter Galbraith, Marj Horne, Lesley Jolly, Alex Kostogritz, Tom Lowrie, Trisch Short, and Mohammad Ghoam), Home, school and community partnerships to support children’s numeracy (2004)
Key findings:
An Australia-wide survey of primary schools for the project identified 606 numeracy partnership...
Book chapters
Transformation starts at home: understanding e-readiness in local communities, Closing the digital divide: transforming regional economies and communities with information technology (2003)
Conference publications
Pagan religiousness as 'networked individualism', Spirituality: theory, praxis and pedagogy (2012)
In the age of the internet, the types of place and group bounded fixtures that...
Sense-making as methodology for spirituality theory, praxis, pedagogy and research (with Brenda Dervin, Kathleen D Clark, Lois Foreman-Wernet, Christlin P Rajendram, and CarrieLynn Reinhard), Spirituality: theory, praxis and pedagogy (2012)
Barometers of institutional inflexibility: using the movement through timespace conceptualizations of Dervin’s sense-making methodology, 59th Annual International Communication Society Conference: workshop Addressing Communication's Keywords Communicatively: Multicontext Exemplars and Interrogations of the Uses of Dervin's sense-making methodology (2009)
Understanding students’ reception of study materials: Applying Dervin’s sense-making methodology, 59th Annual International Communication Society Conference: workshop Addressing Communication's Keywords Communicatively: Multicontext Exemplars and Interrogations of the Uses of Dervin's sense-making methodology (2009)
Gender: Pagan style, Society for Biblical Literature, Australian Association for the Study of Religions and Women Scholars of Religion and Theology Conference (2008)
Reports