Call for Papers

Date: March 25-27, 2021

Venue: Warsaw, Poland

Abstract Submission Deadline: November 1, 2020

Using the media may be a way to assert and affirm already existing religious identities, as well as an opportunity to challenge and construct them more independently but still in connection with discursive developments that define lines of similarities and conflict between various subject positions involved. In this process, the meaning of religion changes as well.

The conference seeks to address this change in question which stems from the organizers’ own interrogation of the topic of mediatized identity construction which was conducted in the project “Minorities and the Media,” funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the National Science Centre in Poland (NCN). It will be an opportunity to discuss the results with a wider academic community, and investigate the dynamics of the changes which religious identity construction.

The list of topics of particular interest includes, but is not limited to, the following:

• the use of media by religious institutions and organizations to construct and negotiate their religious identity,

• the construction, maintenance, and negotiation of individual religious identity through media and media use (incl. social media, gaming, apps)

• the construction of alternative, unorthodox, resistant religious/spiritual identities, as well as non-religious and secular identities in contemporary media and through media use

• tensions inscribed in the process of religious identities’ display and construction in the media

• the use of religious identity in media broadcast (incl. advertising, secular content, apps, social media, etc.)

• comparative analyses between identity construction in different types of media, various cultural and religious environments, media ensembles, and/or institutional settings,

• discussion of methodological approaches, challenges to established methods and tools, suggestions of new methodological approaches (qualitative, quantitative, mixed methods)

More information on: media.religion2021.uni-bremen.de