Researcher of the Month, October 2025: Jo Sadgrove
Joanna (Jo) Sadgrove is CRPL Visiting Research Fellow. Jo recently co-organised the research day "Reclaiming Histories: Slavery, Race and the Churches," which was held at the University of Leeds.
Tell us a little about your research journey - how did you get to where you are now?
As the daughter of an Anglican cleric, I grew up with an experiential understanding of the culture and dynamics within Church of England spaces and a commensurate number of questions about the nature of institutional power. I did an undergraduate degree in philosophy and theology at the University of Manchester, which I found, intellectually, a rather alienating experience. Disciplinary approaches favoured the (predominantly white male) European canon and I couldn’t discern at all how what I was learning related to daily life. This gulf - between precept and praxis - turned out to be axiomatic for me as a researcher.
I was fortunate to have been living in and out of communities in Uganda and decided, in my final year, to turn my attention to lively debates about the relationship between Kiganda ‘tradition’ and Christianity within the Kingdom of Buganda. Moving to a ‘study of religions’ field and challenging Eurocentric secular approaches to ‘religion’ fired a lasting interest in how religious expressions are recognised and refracted across worldviews. I went on to undertake an MA and PhD in African Christianities at SOAS and have worked as a researcher across the university and charity sectors for the past 15 years.
What are you currently, or about to start, working on?
I am involved in a collaboration between the University of Leeds and an Anglican mission agency, USPG, on transatlantic slavery and its entanglements with Anglicanism, early modern archives and reparative justice. USPG’s antecedent organisations include the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) which dates from 1701 and owned, exploited and benefitted from the labour of enslaved Africans on the Codrington Plantations in Barbados from 1710–1835. The issues of identity, legacy and belonging with which USPG is currently grappling as it seeks to engage with global partners in reparative ways are highly complex.
Our research collaboration has a number of aspects.
Archives: Archival engagement has been led by Dr Alison Searle in the School of English at Leeds. Work has focussed on the significance of USPG’s early modern manuscripts, particularly in relation to work around slavery in the Caribbean, and making material publicly available to communities whose histories are documented therein, but who do not have the privilege of being able to access archives within the UK.
Knowledge Exchange: I am employed part-time by USPG. An important aspect of my job has been to build relationships with academic researchers in relevant fields and communicate the complexities of USPG (and the Church of England’s) entanglements and complicity in the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans - to USPG, the wider Church of England and in national and international conversations about history, race, violence, the colonial church and reparations. A central concern is the relationship between ‘the archive’ and the present-day life of institutions and what thinking through the archive might reveal about patterns of institutional power that persist in the present.
Reparative Justice: Catalysed by work around SPG’s archive which brought to the fore a conversation about transatlantic slavery and re-engaged our Caribbean partners, USPG has now entered into a reparative justice project with the Codrington Trust, who manage the Codrington Plantations. Other reparative initiatives that USPG has supported include a writing and publishing program for Caribbean and West African Christian clerics, theologians and writers. It has been very exciting (and surprising) to feel that one’s research is directly informing and impacting reparative praxis in the UK, in West Africa and in the Caribbean.
In what way(s) does your work or research relate to some aspect of religion and public life?
My work has always engaged issues of religion and public life. As an ethnographer, I am interested in ‘religion’ insofar as it is one dynamic informing, shaping and being shaped by a wider social whole. My doctoral work focussed on the role of Pentecostalism in debates about sexual morality for students at Makerere University, Uganda, who were navigating the risks of HIV as they sought to negotiate the complex social, sexual and spiritual worlds of campus life. Thinking about how faith and health might be understood to inform and antagonise each other across cultural contexts has remained a longstanding area of interest which was reinvigorated in the context of the Covid pandemic. I have undertaken a considerable amount of work on Christianity, faith and sexuality – in the context of the HIV pandemic in Africa and debates about homosexuality in the Anglican Communion.
If there is a unifying theme to my work (any narrativization of coherence feels increasingly tenuous), it is an attempt to take the role of religion seriously as an often neglected or mis-understood dynamic that is frequently more powerful in public life than 21st century western secular imaginaries might suggest. Equally we must be wary not to overstate that significance and to recognise how religion continues to act in multiple and often contradictory ways. As the work on slavery and empire attests, Christian institutions can enact the most profound types of abuse and violence towards some whilst providing spaces that foster care, learning, literacy, support and community for others. These tensions are not easy to work with. Embracing polyphony whilst recognising where structural power lies, how it shapes the kinds of evidence we can gather and how such dynamics must be actively worked against methodologically and analytically is an ongoing excitement and challenge.