Call for Papers — Rewiring the House of God: Religious Self-World Relations in the Digital Environment

Call for Papers — Rewiring the House of God: Religious Self-World Relations in the Digital Environment

Call for Papers — Rewiring the House of God: Religious Self-World Relations in the Digital Environment

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Online Workshop
15–17 September 2021
 


Deadline: 2 April 2021


Organized by Fouad Gehad Marei (University of Birmingham) 
and Gabriel Malli (University of Graz / University of Erfurt)

The outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic and ensuing lockdown measures disrupted many aspects of social and economic life and imposed new social realities. Digital technologies provided alternative avenues for social interactions and became central features of the ‘New Normal’. Communities and people of faith were no exception in these trying times. Worldwide, houses of worship closed their doors and urged the faithful to obey social distancing measures. In response, wo/men of faith exploited digital technologies and virtual platforms to worship and to observe time-honored rituals cultures.

This online workshop capitalizes on the amplified importance of faith-related digital practices and devices, recognizing that people of faith have been entangled with the effects and conditions of the digital environment for decades. It seeks to engage with scholarly works concerned with ‘digital religion’, mediatization of religion, and religion on the Internet. The workshop will examine the mutually transformative relationship between digital technologies and contemporary modes of religiosity, with a particular interest in three broad themes:

Theme 1: Religious subjectivities and digital technologies:


Digital environments are a site for the articulation and performance of religious subjectivities. These religiously informed modes of self-understanding and conduct inform individuals’ moralities and practices. Religious self-presentation on social media, participation in online rituals and the promotion of pious lifestyles through online and digital media are only some of the manifold digital practices by which new possibilities for the formation of religious subjectivities are created.

Theme 2: Communities of faith in an era of digital culture:


By enabling new forms of social interaction, digital technologies effect processes of community-building and alter the ways in which people experience religious socialization. Given their global reach, they embed community members in life-worlds that extend trans-locally, far beyond their immediate surroundings. In some contexts, the use of digital technologies by religious elites re-affirmed and expanded their reach and claim for authority. In other contexts, these technologies broadened participation in processual constructions of faith communities as well as the production and circulation of religious knowledge, thus transforming relations among social actors.

Theme 3: The occult and other-worldly in the digital environment


Digital devices generate novel ways of conjuring the emotive power of the sacred in the everyday lives of pious individuals. Livestreaming technologies connect wo/men of faith with sacred sites in faraway lands at the touch of a screen and bring the occult to their laptops and smartphones. Meanwhile video games and virtual realities allow them to ‘live’ events from hagiographic pasts and eschatological futures, offering emotive and corporeal experiences of the other-worldly.

Call for Papers


We invite scholarly contributions that interrogate the relationship between digital technologies and religious life-worlds. We understand ‘religion’ broadly and welcome contributions examining different religious traditions. Scholars of all career levels and disciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds are encouraged to apply, including from anthropology, sociology, religious studies, political science, media studies, cultural studies, and related disciplines.

We encourage empirically informed contributions which engage with and contribute to the theoretical debates on one or more of the thematic areas outlined above, namely:

  • The role of digital media in processes of religious subjectivation;
  • The impact of digital media on processual constructions of imagined communities of faith and the political and socio-religious life of the religious community; and
  • The relationship between digital technologies and imaginal engagements with the Elsewhere and the other-worldly.

Speakers and Panel Discussants


We are pleased to announce that Prof. Gary R. Bunt (University of Wales Trinity Saint David, UK),
Dr. Tim Hutchings (University of Nottingham, UK), and Prof. Mia Lövheim (Uppsala University, Sweden) will discuss and provide feedback on workshop papers.

To Apply


Applications should be sent to mwk-ifaith@uni-erfurt.de by 2 April 2021. They should include the full title of your paper, an abstract of 350 words, six keywords describing your research, and the names and affiliations of the author(s). Papers must be unpublished. Published articles and articles in print will not be considered.

Decisions will be made and a notification of acceptance will be given by mid-April.

Submissions and Publication


Authors should submit full-length draft articles by 16 August. Draft articles will be pre-circulated to workshop participants and discussants for in-depth comments and feedback. While the emphasis is on scientific quality, articles should be approximately 7,500 words (including all notes and references).

Selected papers will be included in a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal, tentatively planned for autumn 2022. Workshop participants should be willing to revise their papers and resubmit them for inclusion in the special issue.

This workshop is a collaboration between the Max Weber Centre at the University of Erfurt and the Department of Religion and Theology at the University of Birmingham. It is funded through grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG), the European Research Council (ERC), and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      The entire globe stands behind Israel as it faces its most intractable existential crisis since it started its slow-motion Genocide in 1948. People of conscience the world over are in tears as Israel has completely run out of morals and laws to violate during its current faster-paced Genocide in Gaza. Israelis, state and society, feel helpless, like sitting ducks, as they search and scramble for an inkling of hope that they might find one more human value to desecrate, but, alas, their efforts remain futile. They have covered their grounds impeccably and now have to face the music. This is an emergency call for immediate global solidarity with Israel’s quest far a lot more annihilation. Please lend a helping limb.

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      In this episode, Mandy Turner discusses the vital role think tanks play in the policy process, and in manufacturing consent for government policy. Turner recently published a landmark study of leading Western think tanks and their positions on Israel and Palestine, tracing pronounced pro-Israel bias, where the the key role is primarily the work of senior staff within these institutions, the so-called “gatekeepers.”

    • Long Form Podcast: Our Next Three Episodes

      Long Form Podcast: Our Next Three Episodes
      Long Form Podcast(Episodes 7, 8, & 9) Upcoming Guests:Mandy TurnerHala RharritHatem Bazian Hosts:Mouin RabbaniBassam Haddad   Watch Here:Youtube.com/JadaliyyaX.com/Jadaliyya There can be

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412