Presenter Biography:

Sian Reid is a sociologist with Carleton University in Ottawa. Her primary research area is Canadian neopaganism, and she is the general editor of a collection of academic essays on contemporary paganism to be released by CSPI in October. She was a major contributor to Rabinovitch and Lewis' Encyclopedia of Modern Witchcraft and Neo-Paganism, and writes directly for the pagan community under a pseudonym. She is a long-time participant in the Craft community, having first become involved in 1982. Her current research is an extension of a project that was begun in 1995, to collect time-series data about Pagans in Canada.

Speaker Topic:

• "Who Are the Witches, Where do they come from" -- The Canadian Pagan Survey Project
... And the Heathens, and the Druids, and the Reconstructionists...One of the reasons why it is often easy for people to misrepresent Pagans is that there is no reliable data about them. Because Paganism is radically decentralized, there are no membership records, as there are in most organized religions. This ongoing project seeks to collect data about Pagans over time on demographic basics such as sex, geographical location, highest level of education completed, family income, and family composition, as well as information about how people became involved in their pagan practice and why.

This seminar looks back on the research done from 1995 to 1998 and explores some of its findings, as well as looking forward to the results of the research that is currently underway.