This chapter examines petitioners and petitioning communities within a range of localities to explore the politics of place. First, the analysis demonstrates the ways in which particular topics, such as those associated with mass subscription campaigns, could bring together petitioners from across the four nations. Second, the chapter zooms in to survey a range of localities to offer a comparative study of petitioning communities, emphasising similarities and patterns as well as local variations and differences. Religious congregations were a particularly important, and enduring, form of petitioning community across the period. On other issues, petitioning communities were defined by occupation, profession, trade, or perceived economic interest, such as shipowners or merchants in port cities. Petitioning communities could also be defined by official roles, as when local boards of poor law guardians petitioned regarding social policy, or associational memberships. More generally, it is possible to discern particular continuities and traditions within particular places that reflected the interplay between local political culture and petitioning communities. A study of petitioning communities reveals the diversity of local political cultures, but also shows how they were connected horizontally to petitioners in other localities, and vertically, to national institutions such as Parliament.

Despite the existence of long-held binaries between secular and sacred, private and public spaces, school and religious literacies in many contemporary societies, the significance of religion and its relationship to education and society more broadly has become increasingly topical. Yet, it is only recently that the investigation of the nexus of discourse and religion in educational practice has started to receive some scholarly attention. In this chapter, religion is understood as a cultural practice, historically situated and embedded in specific local and global contexts. This view of religion stresses the social alongside the subjective or experiential dimensions. It explores how, through active participation and apprenticeship in culturally appropriate practices and behaviors, often mediated intergenerationally, and the mobilization of linguistic and other semiotic resources but also affective, social and material resources, membership in religious communities is constructed and affirmed. The chapter reviews research strands that have explored different aspects of discourse and religion in educational practice as a growing interdisciplinary field. Research strands have examined the place and purpose of religion in general and evangelical Christianity in particular in English Language Teaching (ELT) programs and the interplay of religion and teaching and learning in a wide range of religious and increasingly secular educational contexts. They provide useful insights for scholars of discourse studies into issues of identity, socialization, pedagogy and language policy.