The PERCS Outstanding Ethnography Award

This award recognizes the student who has conducted the most outstanding ethnographic research project at Elon University, judged according to the quality of both the process and product. The award is given by PERCS: The Program for Ethnographic Research and Community Studies.

Presented by Brian Pennington, Director of the Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society and Professor of Religious Studies

Transcript of Commendations

Brian Pennington, Director of the Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society and Professor of Religious Studies

My name is Brian Pennington. I am Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Elon Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society. Today I am here to present the PERCS Outstanding Ethnography Award. This award recognizes the student who has conducted the most outstanding ethnographic research project at Elon University, judged according to the quality of both process and product. The award is given by PERCS: The Program for Ethnographic Research and Community Studies.

This year we are pleased to award this honor to Madison Gray.

  • Majors: Environmental Studies
  • Minors: Interreligious Studies

As an outstanding member of Elon’s Multifaith Scholars program, Madison has pursued a two-year, multi-faceted study of Cambodian religiosity in Cambodia and in the US among Cambodian refugees and their descendants. In her junior year, she studied abroad at the School for Field Studies in Siem Reap, Cambodia, where she acquired valuable research experience on the sacred mountain of Phnom Kulen and co-authored a report to the Cambodian Ministry of Tourism. When COVID-19 torpedoed her plans to return to Cambodia to extend her study of religion and the environment, she responded with agility and maturity, turning her attention to the transformations in religious practice among Cambodians in the US, who first arrived in the late 1970s as refugees from the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. This shift required Madison to learn an entirely new body of scholarly literature as well as an entirely new methodology as she drafted, revised, field tested, and tirelessly disseminated a survey that documents marked generational change among Cambodian Americans. Madison has presented her research at a selective regional Religious Studies conference and National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR). She is currently producing a story map on Cambodian religion in the US that will be featured by Harvard University’s Pluralism Project and planning two publications.

Congratulations, Madison!