Galen Watts

Research interests: Religion/Spirituality, Moral Culture, Class and Inequality, Social Solidarity, Comparative Sociology, Nationalism, Social and Cultural Theory.

Bio: I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo. My research focuses on cultural and institutional change in liberal democracies since the 1960s—with a focus on the spheres of religion, morality, work, and politics. My first book, The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity, published by Oxford University Press in 2022, examines the social and political implications of the shift from "religion" to "spirituality," which has, in recent years, transformed the religious landscape of the West. Since completing this project, I have turned my attention to investigating the religious and cultural dimensions of the growing "diploma divide" in Canada, unearthing the symbolic boundaries that urban university-educated professionals and rural nonuniversity-educated workers draw in their personal and professional lives. I have published academic articles in journals such as American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Civic Sociology, Religion, European Journal of Social Theory, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Cultural Sociology, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, and The Sociological Review, and regularly contribute to media outlets such as The Conversation. 

Research summary: Broadly speaking, I’m interested in cultural and institutional change in post-1960s liberal democracies. As a result, I’ve written on cultural transformations taking place in the spheres of religion, morality, and work. I also have long standing interests in social and political theory.  My main project at present is a cultural sociological investigation of the “diploma divide”--that is, the divide between those with and those without a university-degree–in my native Canada. For a couple years now I’ve been conducting interviews with Toronto-based professionals and members of the rural working-class in the province of Ontario in order to identify the symbolic boundaries, repertoires of evaluation, and scripts of the  self they espouse.   The goal is to identify how culture plays a role in fueling the diploma divide, as well as how it might serve to bridge it.

This information is accurate as of the affiliate year indicated. (last updated 12.28.2025)