Methods, concepts, theories, and new research avenues
The media landscape allows various religious and non-religious actors to convey a certain image of religion and belief but also to engage in debates with other religious and secular worldviews. Not only does it allow to connect with beliefs, institutions, and a wider religious community, but it also becomes a space of religious expression and negotiation of religious identity. Therefore, 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 organisers’ own interrogation of the topic of mediatised 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 undergoes through media use.