The next biennial conference of the International Society for Media, Religion and Culture will be held be hosted by the University of Kent in Canterbury on 4-6 August 2014, followed by a post-conference workshop on the mediation and mediatization of religion on 7 August.
Over the past decade the study of media, religion and culture has broadened out from interests in media representation to thinking about the religious uses and aesthetics of media, the significance of media for religion in public life, and the role of media technologies for new forms of religious life and practice.Building on this, this conference will explore how we can understand societies in which much public encounter with religion takes place through media and in which religious life takes place through a multiplicity of mediated practices and networks. It will explore questions such as what difference do media content, aesthetics, technologies and networks make to the ways in which religion is understood and practiced? And how do we understand the nature of power in relation to these mediated networks and practices?
Keynote speakers will include Professor Jonathan Walton (Harvard), author of Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism, with an address also given by the inaugural President of the society, Professor Stewart Hoover (Colorado). Further details about the conference are available at https://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/thrs/events/event2014-08-06.html
The conference organisers are now accepting paper proposals of up to 350 words; panel proposals (which must include paper titles, 150 word abstracts for each paper, and names and titles of four participants plus a moderator/respondent); and proposals for exhibitions and/or workshops of up to 350 words. Sessions will be 1½ hours in length.
Some of the issues that may be addressed in paper, panel, workshop, or exhibition proposals include:
· The role of media in shaping religious and cultural understandings
· Emergent networks of meaning, religion, and power
· Theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of religion and media
· The role of religious and humanitarian organizations in cross-national justice and media initiatives
· Media and human rights
· Media, religion, and authority
· Religious conflict and media representation
· Religion and film
· Growing up multi-cultural and multi-religious in a mediated world
· Religion, globalization and cosmopolitanism
· The role of media in the emergence of global religious and cultural movements
· Diasporic media and transnational religious communities
· Media, religion and global politics
· The mediatization of religion
· Religion, media, and the global marketplace
Proposals should be sent to Prof. Lynn Schofield Clark, University of Denver (Lynn.Clark@du.edu) by 3 December 2013. Notification of acceptances will be sent out from 15th January 2014.