Religion, Media, and Culture Unit
The Religion, Media, and Culture Unit invites individual presentations, paper/multimedia research presentation sessions, and roundtable proposals on the following themes:
- religious understandings of crypto/crypto as religious currency
- media materiality and infrastructure: waste, e-waste, recycling, remediation, and discard
- digital apocalypse: platform outages, demise of Twitter and other online spaces, disappearing archives; or more broadly, apocalyptic thought online
- religion, media and place: pilgrimage, GIS mapping, Google Earth, virtual reality, the metaverse
- religious dating apps, marketing of religious dating apps
- religion apps and digital surveillance: data mining and selling, productivity and spirituality apps as capitalist spirituality
- the role of non-institutionalized media consumers in shaping content and culture of media
- first person shooter manifestos, auteurism, and the role of digital transcendence
- hashtags and ritualization, memorialization, and ethnography (#BlackLivesMatter, #IGotOut, etc)
- AI Art
- state of the field/critical methods and new directions in the study of religion and media
RMC is committed to diversity and inclusivity. Pre-arranged panels should reflect gender and racial/ethnic diversity as well as diversity of field, method, and scholarly rank as appropriate. We strongly prefer papers that include audio/visual media and ask that proposals make use of media clear. We are also particularly interested in session proposals and presentations that break from traditional paper-reading formats. We encourage panels that propose innovative ways to develop collaborative conversation, especially those that allow for timely analysis of current events.
This Unit provides a multidisciplinary forum for exploring the intersections between media and religion. Areas of interest include the participation of religion in digital culture, mediation of religion, the interplay between religious and media communities and between religious and media practices, and the significance of both media and religion in the transformation of religious structures and practices.