CRCS Research Day: Being Religious Digitally

To register, please send an email to martijn.dekoning [at] ru.nl (martijn[dot]dekoning[at]ru[dot]nl).

Program

Location: EOS N01.610

10.30: opening
10.45: panel 1 - Representation & Community
12.15: lunch break (lunch provided)
13.30: panel 2 - Mediated Rituals
15.00: break
15.30: keynote - Giulia Evolvi - The Future of Digital Religion: Gender, Politics, AI
17.00: closing & borrel

Panel 1 - Representation & Community

Kirsten Smeets, Lena Richter, Jehan Nizar

This panel explores how digital spaces mediate the formation of religious, spiritual, and post-religious communities through acts of representation, community and visibility. Rather than viewing online environments as detached from “real” religious life, the panelists show how digital practices shape belonging, exclusion, and identity politics across diverse contexts. Through three case studies, the speakers examine how digital representations foster embodied forms of community and continuity, mobilize religious imagery to construct collective identity and political belonging; and how digital platforms enable new modes of expression and support. Together, these contributions question how visibility operates as both empowerment and risk, and how digital mediation redefines what it means to belong, to contest or to step outside religious and post-religious communities today.

Panel 2 - Mediated Rituals: Digital Spaces as Sites of Sacred Practice

Welmoed Wagenaar, Carmen Becker, Laila van Berge

This panel examines how digital platforms and devices have become crucial sites not just for the construction of meaning, identity, and communities, but also as active agents in ritual practices and everyday experiences. Through three ethnographic case studies, they explore how online networks and spaces mediate new forms of engagement with/in rituals—whether fictional, religious, or spiritual—that blur not just the traditional boundaries between on- /offline but also between notions of the sacred/ secular, the real /imagined, the individual/collective. The three panellists take a critical stance on the study of a strictly separated digital domain, like in “digital religion”. Instead, they argue for incorporating the study of the digital domain into an overarching ethnographic approach, examining the digital as just one dimension of everyday experiences and ritual practices—whether practiced by Sunni Muslims, spiritual seekers, or fans. During this discussion, the panellists will grapple with questions like: How are (sacred) spaces and (religious) rituals mediated in or via the digital domain? How do online sites enhance everyday experiences? And how can we study this?

Keynote - The Future of Digital Religion: Gender, Politics, AI

Giulia Evolvi

Digital religion is a field of study that focuses on the interactions between online and offline actions regarding religious beliefs, practices, and communities (Campbell & Tsuria, 2021). In a rapidly evolving world, where new technologies and platforms are continuously shaping and modifying communications, scholars need to keep reflecting on theoretical and methodological approaches they can apply to the field.

In this talk, she will offer a brief introduction to digital religion, which is conventionally divided into five waves of studies highlighting challenges and opportunities in the last three decades. Then, she will illustrate three trends that she sees as central to the future of digital religion: first, an increased attention to gender, which will ensure inclusion of people embodying marginalized experienced within religious communities and turn to the Internet for the creation of alternative religious spaces (Lovheim, 2013); second, incorporations of insights about politics, as religious-inspired narratives on the Internet are increasingly important for activism and political mobilization, be it far-right parties defending traditional religious values, or religious-inspired social justice movements for the marginalized (Snow & Beyerlein, 2018); third, reflections on the implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which allows the emergence of new religious authorities, narratives, and even fake news and disinformation (Singler, 2024). AI can also open methodological opportunities for researchers concerning big data and computer-assisted analysis that, she will contend, need to be considered in an interdisciplinary perspective and in relation to the researcher’s positionality. 

She will illustrate these three points through examples, mainly focusing, but not limited to, Christianity and Islam. In conclusion, she will discuss how the visibility of religion online compels reflections on the theory of (post) secularization, since religion is increasingly occupying new spaces in contemporary society (Griera et al., 2021), also in relation to Internet mediations.