This special issue is the result of concerns about the marginalized status of gender within the sociology of religion. The collection of exciting new research in this special issue advocates for the importance of a gender lens on questions of religion in order to highlight issues, practices, peoples, and theories that would otherwise not be central to the discipline. We encourage sociologists who study religion to engage more in interdisciplinary and intersectional scholarship, acknowledge developments in the global South, and develop more compelling theoretical frameworks that analyze religion from a gendered perspective. Our aim is to bring religion to the attention of gender and feminist scholars and to encourage religion scholars to consider gender not just as a variable but as a social structure. We hope that both groups of scholars will consider gender and religion as mutually constitutive social categories.

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This article describes an experiment in collaborative course design in a midlevel sociology course. Unlike most of the literature on collaborative teaching and learning, which often deals with collaboration among students, this article discusses collaboration between the instructor and students. The students in this course collaborated with the instructor in designing the course—choosing the readings and developing the assignments—from the first day of class. Student feedback on the experiment was overwhelmingly positive. Three major themes that emerged from the student feedback were (1) higher levels of student engagement, (2) a sense of personal accountability, and (3) student empowerment. While the results of the student feedback mostly point to positive experiences, collaboration between students and instructors does bring a high level of uncertainty and extra work for the instructor involved. The article ends with some further guidance for those considering collaborative learning in their classrooms.

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