June 24-26, 2012
Abstracts (in order of presentation)
Pre-Occupied by the borders of art, religion and activism
How do we understand religion’s presence in various forms of cultural/political activism? How do religious modes give meaningful structure or authority to performative politics, particularly politics based on various ethical positions?
Ayala Fader (Fordham University) and Owen Gottlieb (NYU)
Occupy Judaism: “Bringing the Jews to Occupy Wall Street, Bringing Occupy Wall Street to the Jews” (Facebook, Occupy Judaism, 2011)
Occupy Judaism is a political religious movement inspired by Occupy Wall Street and historic Jewish political protest. Beginning with a Yom Kippur service (Occupy Yom Kippur) in October 2011, organized through social media and held across the street from Zuccotti Park, OJ brought a Jewish leftist ethical and political stance to a the then-secular Occupy Wall Street movement. Much of the movement since has focused on bringing ritual (spiritual) observance of Jewish holidays to sites of protest. OJ participants often link religious text and observance to more controversial social justice issues, including income inequality. At the same time, OJ uses the progressive politics of OWS to critique the Jewish establishment of North America. Indeed, the Jewish community has been divided on OJ and OWS. Recently, Occupy Judaism members are debating the support by Occupy Oakland of the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) of Israel, a key political fracture line among American Jews today.
In this presentation we trace the development of the movement from its inception to the present. We place the movement in the context of other Occupy Faith movements, as well as the ways that critiques of Israel as part of a progressive agenda is increasingly creating dissent among OJ. Analyses include interviews with key organizers and dissenters, participant observation at ritual celebrations (the upcoming Occupy Exodus for Passover) and content analysis of Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. We consider how social media has been used, especially in contrast to OWS. Our analysis will include consideration of the circulation of religious and ethnic images ( e.g. Tevye fiddling on the Bull) which draw on and define particular iterations of Judaism, as well as how the religious, the political and the spiritual are configured in OJ.
Nathan Schneider (The Immanent Frame, SSRC)
Is Occupy Wall Street All a Giant Art Project?
The Occupy movement began with an alluring ad in an art-and-activism magazine. Then, as I saw during the planning process in August, lot of the key organizers (and agitators) were artists. This has continued to be the case as the movement prepares for a busy spring. In fact, last summer, I was actually reporting on the planning processes of two separate plans to mount massive occupations, one by a group of seasoned activists, carefully and meticulously planning at every step—and then the haphazard and chaotic, but art-ful, preparation for OWS. It seems striking that, last fall, the capacity of art to capture the imagination seemed more effective, strategically, than mere strategizing and organizing. Now, as various factions wrestle for control over the Occupy movement’s meaning and purpose, the contest can be seen as one between competing aesthetic visions—of what a resistance movement should look like, and of what to want from a world redeemed. I suspect that the vision with the best artists behind it will win.
Elizabeth Drescher (Santa Clara University)
“Church as Occupied or Occupier?: The Ethics of Religious (Mis)Appropriation in the Trinity Wall St./Occupy Controversy”
The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement enjoyed considerable practical and spiritual support from churches in New York City, not least Trinity Episcopal Church, Wall Street. Trinity Wall Street (TWS) provided meeting space, temporary shelter, food, and other supplies to the protestors, and clergy regularly reinforced the narrative of the protests from the pulpit in expressly biblical and Christian terms. Given the robust engagement of the church with the OWS protests, it is a sad irony that TWS came, as the Advent season lit the way to the celebration of Christ’s birth on the Christian liturgical calendar, to stand for the most entrenched forms of socioeconomic corruption against which the OWS movement had railed.
Among the many ethical questions raised by the OWS/TWS controversy are those related to how, on the one hand, the OWS community made use of the church as a particular kind of authorizing symbol within an otherwise expressly secular movement. On the other, it is fair to ask how the church itself appropriated the OWS movement to reinforce Christian themes of social justice that functioned very differently within the largely anti-institutional movement than they do within the institutional church. This paper considers the OWS/TWS controversy as a spectacular site of mutual misappropriation of meaning that exposes ecclesiological limitations on social justice activism in progressive mainline churches and the secular occupation of religious symbols by the OWS movement. It attends in particular to the performative ethics of widely distributed videos of retired Episcopal Bishop George Packard, fully vested in purple robes, climbing the fence around Duarte Square (the TWS property protesters hoped to secure as a winter camp), and riding in a paddy wagon after his arrest in relation to a live streamed lecture series on economic justice hosted by TWS after the controversy had somewhat abated.
Jolyon Mitchell (New College, the University of Edinburgh)
Contest @ St Paul’s: representations, descriptions and interpretations
In this illustrated paper I analyse the different ways in which the St Paul’s Occupy protest in London became a point of contest. Many journalists observed in October 2011 that for the first time since London’s Blitz during the Second World War, the doors of St Paul’s Cathedral were closed to the public. It was noted that, by contrast, the flaps of the tents of the anti-capitalist protestors, camping in front of the cathedral, were left open to visitors. Numerous reporters, religious leaders, political activists and tourists visited the ‘Occupy’ camp, listened to speeches, recorded interviews and photographed the placards. This evolving story was covered not only by religion correspondents, programmes, and papers, but also attracted news coverage from all over the world, as well as multiple online comments.
The protest became a magnet for multiple contest and debates. From many possible, I consider three mediated contests: first, contested visual representations of the physical space; second, contested journalistic descriptions; and third contested online interpretations over the value, legitimacy and outcomes of a highly visible protest that lasted over four months. In the light of these discussions, my aim is to explore how these contests themselves circulated, fragmented and evolved, contributing to wider global debates relating to religion, the uses of violence and economic justice.
Mass mediated sacrality
How do digital forms amplify religious influence in volatile political contexts, where the capacity of new technologies renders these processes visible and audible on the political stage?
Gordon Lynch (Religious Studies, University of Kent)
Media and the performance of the sacred in public life
From television images of anti-capitalist protestors camped around St Paul’s Cathedral in London to the popularity of the Facebook page, ‘We are all Khaled Said’, recent political conflicts have continued to demonstrate the symbolic power of media content in mobilising movements and shaping social life. This paper examines how this may be understood through a theoretical framework of a sociology of the sacred, developed in relation to the ‘strong programme’ of cultural sociology associated particularly with the work of Jeffrey Alexander. The paper notes key elements of Alexander’s understanding of the role of sacred meanings in social life, drawn from his understanding of a broad tradition of scholarship influenced by Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, as well as the ways in which he has come to emphasize the central role of media in the circulation of sacred, using case studies from the Watergate Crisis to the successful Obama election campaign of 2008. Drawing on Alexander’s recent work on social performance, his understanding of the fragility and contingency of sacred performance through media is discussed as a useful alternative to more rigid notions of media ritual derived from Dayan and Katz’s work on media events. Using the example of BBC news coverage of the on-going phone hacking scandal, the persistence of sacred meaning through ostensibly impartial news journalism is also discussed. The paper then goes on to consider the very specific nature of sacred meaning in social life, considering its potentially limited role as a source of social integration and mobilization, as well as the inevitability of such sacred meaning being enacted primarily through media structures in modern societies. This leads to the conclusion that public and social media represent a primary institutional focus of study for a contemporary sociology of the sacred, but that such study also needs to be situated in an understanding of other forms of social meaning, ties and obligations which influence the social significance of the public mediation of the sacred.
Maria Jose de Abreu (University of Lisbon)
Technological Indeterminacy: a comparative perspective on time and causation in religion, politics and media
For some time now technological determinism, a theory that broadly speaking explains the relation between technology and humans in terms of historical causation, has been the target of intense criticism. In this presentation, I reassess a few of these criticisms in light of the influence of the digital in what I consider to be the constitution of a new temporal sensibility. Rather than explained in causational terms, I characterize the latter as a tendency to place causes in the future, as virtual causes. Placing causes in the future means to convert technological determinism into an instance of indeterminacy that allows religious groups, political actors and global media corporations to act as an imminent future gets effected on the present. By referring to the journalistic mediations of events by TV global news broadcasting corporations such as the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings or Pastor Terry Jone’s threat to burn copies of the Quran on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, this study offers an alternative epistemology on time and mediation in politics, religion and media.
Sean O’Callaghan (Politics, Philosophy and Religion, University of Lancaster)
Massacre as Performance Art: The very theatrical debut of Anders Behring Breivik
On July 22nd 2011, Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian militant nationalist set off a bomb in the government district of Oslo. Eight people were killed and almost 100 were injured. While the authorities and emergency services were preoccupied with dealing with the aftermath of this massive explosion, Breivik travelled to the small island of Utoya, close to Oslo. There, he proceeded over a period of about an hour and a half to systematically hunt down and shoot dead 69 people, injuring 66. Breivik surrendered to the police once they had arrived on the island, thus ensuring that the performance could continue off-stage.
There are several aspects of Anders Behring Breivik’s actions on that day, and subsequently, which have strong performative elements to them. His actions constitute a performance of two halves: the opening scene is set in Oslo, but this is a distraction. It is literally a scene which has been ‘set up’ meticulously for the next stage in the performance, the killings at Utoya. In the transition from one scene to the next, Breivik even undergoes a costume change, from civilian clothes to those of a policeman. This costume change confers an authority on him and transforms his character from killer to rescuer. Breivik quickly switches back to killer again, the mask of the concerned and kindly rescuer slipping as he gathers the young people on the island around him, ostensibly to provide advice on protection and security following the events in nearby Oslo, news of which has reached their ears. At this point he begins the massacre, traversing the island in a manner which is reminiscent of practised stagecraft. Later, when the authentic police force arrives on the island, the young people, seeing their uniforms, experience huge conflicts of trust as they now know that not everything is at it might seem. They have become prey to fact-fiction reversal and, as in any good theatre performance, the audience find themselves looking on wondering who is hero and who is villain. However, this performance had its genesis in the digital womb of the cyberspiritual. It was conceived in the underworld of online millennialist forums, formed by violent forces and born into in the full glare of a global twenty-four hour media. The victims communicated with the outside world by text-messaging as they hid in the undergrowth of the isolated island.
In this paper, I will map out the ‘theatre’ which Breivik created, as the space around Oslo and Utoya was turned into a stage for the theatrical debut of his political message and the prequel to his subsequent arrival onto the far grander world stage. I will examine the theology, influence and implications of his ‘Manifesto’, a lengthy digital document which sets out his religious and political Islamo-phobic, Xenophobic and White Christian nationalist worldviews which inspired his performance. I will place it into its context as an example of many other millennialist worldviews in our very recent history which have resulted in religious-inspired violence. I will explore the creation of his many personas, his ‘character roles’, as he prepared himself for his greatest role, posting on online forums and elsewhere in cyberspace: Breivik as Knight Templar and as Crusader, but also as curious mixture of Christo-pagan and lover of white nationalist music. His demands that his court appearances be televised and broadcast by the world’s media provide further evidence for his view of himself as an ‘actor’ giving the greatest performance of his life. The various images of Breivik, which constitute a kind of filmography of his roles before, during and after July 22nd 2011, also tell their own story.
Deborah Whitehead ( Religious Studies, University of Colorado)
“Tebowing” as Conspicuous Religious Practice
My presentation will engage the topic of “spectacular activism” by focusing on issues of religious spectacle and display in relation to Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow and the phenomenon known as “Tebowing.” Since his college days, Tebow has captured national media attention not so much for his football skills but for his one-kneed prayer stance before, during, and after games, as well as the wearing of “John 3:16” on his eye black (now banned by the so-called “Tebow rule”). With his unlikely successes in the NFL playoffs last fall, Tebow was thrust even more into the spotlight, and a new internet meme, “tebowing,” meaning “to get down on a knee and start praying, even if everyone else around you is doing something completely different,” was born. The website tebowing.com captured people performing the act of tebowing in various circumstances and locations around the world, giving the practice itself, if not the religious convictions behind it, tremendous media visibility.
As I will address in my presentation, tebowing is fundamentally an act of public religious display, that is, of performing an action understood to be religious in a very public and visible way, but—and this is key—in such a way that the performance is seen to be “out of place.” This “spectacle” has made tebowing wildly popular (albeit humorously so), but it has also made Tebow himself a lightning rod for criticism from those who feel that public displays of religion are wholly inappropriate, overly conspicuous, and out of place in public arenas like football stadiums (or via television, in the homes of viewers watching). On the other side are those who have embraced Tebow because they admire his religious convictions and willingness to display them openly. Either way, what is at issue is the public visibility and meaning of religious displays, in this case evangelical Christian ones, for what they reveal or conceal about the relationship between inner faith and outward practice via the body of the performer. For critics, the public performance of faith compromises its authenticity and renders the performer suspect, while for admirers, Tebow’s performances reveal a rare inner sincerity and authenticity. My presentation, therefore, will focus on the performative hermeneutics of authenticity and sincerity as revealed through the mediated phenomenon of tebowing, contextualizing the issue in the history of U.S. evangelicalism’s emphasis on the necessity of inward/outward correspondence (i.e. that outward behavior should and does reveal inner experience and conviction), as well as in relation to Birgit Meyer’s notion of aesthetic formations. While it is not my intention to argue that Tebow’s performances or the performing of tebowing itself lead to new forms of activism, I do think that this case study will add to the conference focus by arguing for new ways of imagining and studying the connections between spectacle, display, and meaning in such highly mediated forms of contemporary religion.
Networking toward revolution
How is knowledge about religion and its implications for international politics, diplomacy and human rights being transformed via online commentary, citizen journalism, and the blgosphere?
Ramesh Srinivasan (Information Studies, UCLA)
Tahrir’s Networks of Faith
Networks are both imagined and directly experienced. Networks speak to the link between the local and global – linking an event in a small village in Tunisia to the evening news in London. Yet they not only bind peoples and ideas across distance, but also in proximity. In my desire to understand how networks are being imagined in the context of political action in the Arab World, I decided to travel, listen, and learn, ultimately by immersing myself in revolutionary Cairo. By piecing together the stories of those I spoke with across class, gendered, occupational, and generational lines, I tell a story that argues for the power of street and institutional networks, particularly mosques and faith-based institutions that empower and build social capital across demographic lines. These networks communicate harmoniously and dissonantly with the more globally fetishized networks of social media technologies. A subtle story of how faith, neighborhoods, institutions, and technologies interact in contemporary Egypt presents an opportunity to humanize a struggle that is so easily and incorrectly spun into fetishized narratives.
Yasmin Moll (Anthropology, NYU)
The Ethical Revolution: Islamic Televangelists and the Performance of “Sincere” Citizenship in Egypt
Appearing on state television after the fall of Mubarak for the first time in his career, the Egyptian Islamic televangelist Amr Khaled told the program host that he “saw God in Tahrir.” “When you entered Tahrir Square you immediately noticed a different spirit,” he said. “It is as if God was with the people there.” For Islamic televangelists and their followers, the revolution of January 25th is first and foremost an ethical revolution, with the protest actions at Tahrir Square framed as an exemplary performance of a “New Egypt.” Within televangelist discourse, the actualization of the “New Egypt” is predicated on the cultivation of the “ethics of the Square” within individual citizen-believers. Indeed, televangelists have framed Egypt’s fraught transitional period as an azma akhlaqia, or an ethical crisis, in which the formation of correct ethico-religious dispositions is central to the project of national systemic reform.
In this paper, I examine the ways in which ethics emerge as a key site for constructing and performing normative practices of citizenship for Islamic televangelists and their followers. I look at the role ascribed to (religious) media by televangelists in producing ideal citizens and how viewers make sense of such media within the constantly shifting socio-political terrains of revolutionary Egypt. I show how televangelists have subsumed civic participation within a broader narrative of religious redemption that appropriates the criteria of socio-political utility gendered by the modern-state to determine both the “sincerity” of inner belief and the efficacy of its embodied practice.
Steve Knowles (Theology and Religion, University of Chester)
The Arab Spring, Digital Revolution and Fiscal Meltdown: Signs of the End or Symptoms of World Risk Society?
The last twelve months have witnessed tumultuous events on the world stage. Starting in Tunisia in December 2010, what became known as the ‘Arab Spring’ created a domino effect of uprising and rebellion across Northern Africa and into the Middle East. The result of this, to date, has seen the ousting of four Arab leaders and a radical shift in both attitude and sense of power of those involved. Such events were unparalleled in both scope and speed. Interestingly, these events were facilitated by new media technology. The use of Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites enabled swift organisation and communication between those involved.
However, this is the low brow end of new digital technology. Far more advanced developments that, for example, foster a more integrated union between the human being and advanced technology are seen by some to blur the boundaries between that which is deemed ethically acceptable and ethically repugnant.
Talk of both a Euro-geddon and a Dollar-geddon has led to increasing anxiety in global economics. With major European countries such as Greece staring down the barrel of bankruptcy, panic has spread like a virus through the international money markets causing widespread alarm among governments and their economic advisors.
This paper will examine some elements of the above through two lenses. The first will be that of some Christian fundamentalist apocalyptic groups, particularly through their online presence. For such groups, the above examples are readily interpreted as signs of an impending apocalypse. The second lens through which analysis of some of these events will be viewed is Ulrich Beck’s ‘World Risk Society’ thesis. For Beck such examples are a product of ‘second modernity’: a time when the risk of catastrophe is an inherent danger of contemporary society. I will examine how far ideas such as those posited by Beck (and with reference to Slavoj Žižek) fan the flames of apocalyptic fervour of those hungry for signs of the end of the times.
Nabil Echaibi (Journalism and Mass communication, University of Colorado)
Coffee Shop Islam: Salafyo Costa and the Promise of a Unified Egypt
The remarkable social uprisings which toppled repressive dictatorship in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have been hailed as a successful social media revolution. The Internet, the argument went, functioned as an effective tool in the hands of a civil society faced with a lack of genuine representative democracy and brutal police states notorious for their clamping down on free speech. The significance of these revolutions is indeed unparalleled in Arab political history, but one of their most enduring consequences might be the emergence of a transnational wave of young Islamist activists whose creative use of digital media is opening up new venues of political and religious commentary. The resounding success of re-configured Islamist parties in recent elections in Tunisia and Egypt has been construed in the West as a vindication of an age-old politicized Islam and a potential warning of cultural confrontation. The remarkable surge of support for Islamists, I argue, represents a paradigmatic shift as a new generation of Muslims seeks alternative frames of political and cultural identification beyond the exclusionary binaries of modern-traditional, Western-non-Western or even religious-secular. This paper examines how a young group of Egyptian salafis called Salafyo Costa uses political satire to bring together Egyptians with deep political and religious divisions. Founded in the wake of Tahrir demonstrations by activist Mohammad Tolba, a young IT executive raised in a well-off secular family, Salafyo Costa hosts ‘coffee hours’ in the British coffee shop chain “Costa” in Cairo and virtual conversations on Facebook and YouTube with Christians, secular Muslims and Orthodox Salafis about political reforms and the place of faith in public life. This paper analyzes how digital forms of deliberation affect existing norms and ethics of ‘pious’ and ‘secular’ discussions of religion in Egypt.
Keynote by Charles Hirschkind
Salafi Islam, Online Ethics, and the Future of the Egyptian Revolution
In this talk, I analyze the politics of the contemporary Salafi movement in Egypt in relation to changing practices of religious media consumption. I give particular attention, first, to the norms of aesthetic and ethical reception that shape the use and circulation of Salafi media, and second, to the contribution of such norms to the forms of political mobilization that have emerged in Egypt over the last year. The Salafi movement, I argue, is the political face of a much broader and heterogeneous current within Egyptian society, one grounded less in a specific interpretive tradition within Islam than in a grassroots movement centered on ethical reform. In my discussion, I trace the development of this movement over recent decades, with an aim to highlighting its unique forms of religio-political thought and action.
Mediating ethical challenges and antagonisms
How does the eruption of violence associated with these contested arenas itself becomes the object of performative ethical critique, especially when particular events become memes re-presented and circulated in mediated form? How do ethical notions slip into the religious as they make their way into the very fabric of the performative?
David Herbert (Institute of Religion, Philosophy and History, University of Agder)
Spectacular and Banal Activism: Islam, Islamophobia, and the role of social and mass media in the Dutch culture wars
More than in any other European country, anti-Islamic sentiment has been politically consequential in the Netherlands, with effects including the formation of three political parties on a principally anti-Islamic platform since 2000, and the dismantling of key aspects of state supported multiculturalism, including the cessation of ethnic monitoring of labour market participation, the withdrawal of national-level funding for minority group organisations, and the introduction of an immigration process designed to discriminate against social conservatives (Meer and Modood 2009: 474, Butler 2008:3). This paper will examine the role of religion both as an ascribed and resistance identity (Castells 1997: 356-7) in the discourse and performance of ‘activists’ engaged both in resistance to perceived Islamisation of Dutch society, and conversely to Islamophobia. In both cases, spectacular performances have played a significant role in mobilisation, including on one side the memorialisation of Theo van Gogh and the release of anti-Islam video compilation Fitna on the internet by Geert Wilders, and on the other the contested memorialisation of Ali El Bejjati in 2005 by Dutch Moroccan activists, and the protests against Geert Wilders proposed headscarf tax (Margry 2007, Stengs 2007, Leurs et al. 2012). It will be argued that behind such spectacular events lies a quotidian or ‘banal’ activism (following Billig 1995 and Hjarvard 2011), especially facilitated by social media, and that to properly assess the social significance of both forms of activism one must analyse their interaction both with other media and social and political institutions and actors. The dramatic dismantling of Dutch multiculturalism in the face of a wave of apparently popular Islamophobia, and the resistance it has provoked, provides an opportunity to study these interactions.
Ruth Deller (Meida, Sheffield Hallam University)
Portrayals of Religious Activism and Politicisation on British Television
Much has been made in both academia and the media about how religious groups are engaged in public forms of political engagement. In this paper I explore the way that British television construct this engagement and presents religious protest as something at best eccentric and at worst dangerous.
I explore the portrayal in documentary and current affairs of several different examples of politicised religion, from ‘Islamist’ groups, to Christian protests against abortion and embryo screenings, to Sikh protests against the play Behzti. I show how television discourse presents these examples of activism and politicisation in contrast to more ‘moderate’ believers who do not engage in such activities, reinforcing the ‘deviance’ of the politicised religious both from British norms and from the mainstreams of their own faith groups.
Patrick Eisenlohr (Department of Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University)
Religious mobilization and minority activism: the “Muharram Awareness Campaign” in Mumbai
In contemporary India, Muslims are in the position of a beleaguered and marginal minority, whose loyalty and very belonging to India is constantly questioned. In response to state policies of securitization and the persistent suspicions of involvement in terrorism and collaboration with archenemy Pakistan, Muslim activists have embarked on media campaigns that fuse religious mobilization with claims to good citizenship. Taking the annual “Muharram awareness campaign” of a Shia Muslim media center in Mumbai as an example, I explore how such activists draw on the ritual commemoration of the battle of Karbala in 680 AD to portray Shia Muslims as the world´s original victims of terrorism whose moral values and commitment to ideals of justice make them ideal Indian citizens following Gandhian traditions. In a further step, I analyze how regimes of governing religion and religious diversity in India profoundly shape this mediatic strategy. There, the public presence of religion is not only taken for granted, but Indian traditions of secularism and governing religious diversity often cast religious traditions in the role of shaping moral and productive citizens that will peacefully coexist with others. Since the 1970s, the mobilization of what has come to be known as the “Karbala paradigm” for the rights and interests of Shia Muslims has become a transnational phenomenon that has also aimed to position Shia Muslims away from marginal or minority positions towards leadership in issues that are perceived by many Muslims to be of global significance. At the same time, my paper shows that national regimes of governing religion heavily constrain and shape such transnational activism.
Elizabeth Poole (Media Studies, Keele University; co-written with Siobhan Holohan, Joanna Redden and Justin Schlosberg)
Do Diasporic or Minority Media Matter? Everyday Media Use among British Muslims
In a period when attention is focused on social media and its ‘revolutionary’ capabilities, what other sources are available to British Muslims for accessing and interacting with alternative media content? This paper examines research from a recent project (Muslims in the European Mediascape: UK Project Report, Holohan and Poole, 2012) which studied media production and consumption among Muslims in the UK. Previous studies have shown that minority media (specialist media largely produced by and targeted at minority, in this case Muslim, groups) offers British Muslims a platform to voice their diverse concerns over social and political issues, to counter negative mainstream discourse about Muslims and Islam, and provides a positive and diasporic space for identity and community building (Ahmed, 2006; Dayan, 1998, Gillespie, 2006). Evidence from this project demonstrates that these are central aims for producers working in media predominantly targeted at British Muslim populations (e.g. Q-News, Muslim News, Islam Online etc). However, despite these positive intentions and the celebratory discourse around new media sources, the consumption side of the project demonstrates that, except at particularly disruptive moments, everyday audience practices are more mundane, mainstream and ‘ordinary’ (amongst this sample). In the context of these results and the rising popularity of social media we ask the question do these minority media matter? What forms of activism take place via media? Who’s talking and who’s listening?
Online live with worldly consequences
What new senses of self and community become available through online, digital networks and practices that are named as religious? What are the consequences for politics, power and authority, inside and outside religious enclaves?
Sam Han (Sociology, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
The Performance of Christianity Online: “Liveness,” Banalization and Immanence
After several decades of research into the field of digital religion whereby the analytic dichotomy of “religion-online vs. online-religion” (Chris Helland) was dominant, it has recently been noted rightly by many scholars in this area that this division was unproductive, especially in the wake of a new, global media ecology that has been described with various terms, including but not limited to “social media,” “Web 2.0” or “convergent.” Part of the problem with this dichotomy was the devaluation, whether intended or not, of religious practice that occurred over digital platforms.
Taking the jettisoning of this dichotomy as a welcomed development, this paper aims to examine the relationship of religion and digital media technologies as it is in evidenced in what I call the digital milieu of online Christianity, which includes online worship spaces but also microsites, such as blogs, as well as Facebook. I suggest that this particular form of performing Christianity occasions a reconsideration of “religious participation” as largely “sensational” (Birgit Meyer). Specifically, I argue that online churches are blurring the division between religious participation and sociality. I do so by presenting a sustained analysis of a particular church, LifeChurch.tv, whose use of social media is acute. I look specifically at its Church Online, Facebook page, and its microsites (e.g., its blogs). Particularly drawing on the work of Michel Maffesoli on “proxemics,” Nick Couldry on “liveness,” and Richard Grusin on “premediation,” I argue that online churches have blurred the lines between sociality and religious practice. This, in turn, I maintain, has the effect of banalizing religious practice and, more theologically, immanentizing the sacred.
Alexandra Boutros (Communication Studies, Wilfred Laurier University)
Religion, what is it good for?: The reclaimed religiosity of a black digital counter public
Despite a deep and historical connection, little attention has been paid the role of religion in social movements such as Black Nationalism and Afrocentrism. Although the Nation of Islam has been the subject of mass mediated anxiety in the West, the full transnational scope of the deployment of religiosity as a means of building solidarity in African diasporic social movements has gone largely unremarked. Pervasive assumptions that religion and technology are ontologically distinct arenas of experience, knowledge, and action (Stolow forthcoming) are mirrored by a pervasive belief in “black technophobia” (Everett 2009). While the use of social media in the Arab Spring has been highly visible of late, the digital networking practices among activists of the African diaspora (Gilroy 1993) are considerably less so. Nonetheless, online activists and ideologues often directly address the intersection of race, religion, and technology. Whether Islam is posited as a technologically sophisticated socio-religious system or the spread of Afro-Caribbean religions is discussed in the language of computer viruses, religion is at the fore of conscious constructions of a technologized black subjectivity. These counter discourses intersect with the technological affordances of new media, shaping the online religiosity of African diasporic activism. The infrastructure that governs what aggregates online attention—including, for instance, search engine algorithms that bump certain websites to the top of any search; social networking platforms that count “likes,” hits, or views; or publishing software that allows users to repost blog entries with ease—shapes, at least in part, the religiosity of online black activism, foregrounding some discourses while submerging others. This analysis examines the intersections of race, religion, and digital technology through a focus on what has come to be called the Afrosphere: a loosely organized, transnational network of “African/Black progressive minded bloggers.” Known for online mobilization around cases of racial injustice, the Afrosphere has been instrumental in mobilizing transnational grassroots protests, raising legal aid, and getting the attention of mainstream media. Building on a discursive analysis of participatory media, I argue that religion is central to the emergence of the Afrosphere as locus of “pan-African” activism. Forms of religious reclamation are instrumental to the creation of a black counter-public, engendering a black technologized subjectivity that is embodied, socially situated, and constructed in conscious contradistinction to hegemonic representations of transnational black subjectivity.
Rachel Wagner (Religious Studies, Ithaca College)
Shooter Religion: changing the rules of inter religious encounter
Religion: The Game will examine how contemporary religion mirrors, reflects, and affects gaming culture and query how our mediated gaming structures may affect interreligious dialogue. Many religious groups are developing video games, digitized ritual experiences, religious board games, trading cards, and other popular media that give them a sense of orientation in a globalizing, complex, and sometimes violent world. This production suggests that some see religion itself is a “game,” one that may urge believers to see everyone around them as allies or enemies. New forms of video game-based media have the ability to shape how people see themselves in relationship to others, suggesting a critical need for more awareness of how the “game” of religion is played today, and how we might, if we so choose, change the rules of encounter.
For our meeting in June, I propose a paper that focuses on one aspect of this new project, namely, the use of transmedia by religious groups to encourage a dualistic worldview, thus examining the intersection of videogames, novels, websites, board games, trading cards, and related media as these serve to reinforce, within exclusivist groups, dualistic patterns of interreligious engagement.
Emilio Spadola (Sociology and Anthropology, Colgate University)
Expelling Difference: Online Spirit Exorcisms as Islamist Activism
Over the past two decades in Fez, Morocco, and throughout the Muslim ecumenic, young Islamist activists have produced and distributed cassettes and online videos of spirit (jinn) exorcisms as a public “da`wa” effort, or revivalist Call to Islam. This paper examines this revelatory form of activism, its practitioners, and the relationships of both to contemporary Moroccan politics and technological media ecologies. In particular it links practitioners’ spectacular jinn exorcisms with their broader political rhetoric of a technologized, or mass-mediated, call-to-Islam—the public exposure and expulsion of hidden dangers of jinns and sorcery, which pervade “cultural traditions” and “social relations” in Morocco. The logic and practice of activist exorcisms, I argue, rests on the enhanced exhibition—or even shock—value of Islamic activism in the age of technological reproducibility. More broadly, it illuminates a key political problem embedded in Islamist and other technologized calls to religious responsibility: how to promote unified (and uniform) belief and practice among a mass-mediated community expanded, distanced (and thus differentiated) by the very media that would summon and bind them?
Rites of citizenship
How do digital forms amplify religious influence in volatile political contexts, where the capacity of new technologies renders these processes visible and audible on the political stage?
This panel comprises four papers. Each paper is based on compelling, new empirical research exploring an emergent problematic that interconnects issues of religion, citizenship, protest and media. Tremlett’s paper explores the on-going Occupy London protests and the complex conjunctions of religious-moral discourses and radical politics. In particular, it explores the analogies drawn by Occupiers between anarchist organizational practices and the digital networking technologies they use and the importance of spectacle in the (ritual) staging of indignation against the injustices of neo-liberal capitalism. Salomonsen, by contrast, addresses the bombing of Oslo and the subsequent mass shooting by Anders Breivik of scores of young people on the island of Utoya. Breivik’s own use of digital media and religious symbolism to legitimize his acts, and the subsequent staging of grief across the media opens up contrasting ways to think about the complex conjunction of citizenship, religion and media through a rite of mourning. Harvey’s paper combines historical and ethnographic research around the UNESCO site Stonehenge as a place where religion and ritual, protest and dissent are conjoined. These conjoined moral-political processes are tracked through attention to changing mediations of Stonehenge, from the festivals of the 1960s-1980s on into the Facebook-enabled connectivities of the present. Finally Gillespie’s paper draws on a collaborative ethnography combining participant observation in the online newsroom of the BBC’s Arabic Service with analysis of automated digital data on users and discourse analysis. It examines how religious politics are ritualistically enacted on the social media platforms of the BBC’s Arabic Service prior to and during the Egyptian Elections. It demonstrates how everyday acts (rites) of mediated citizenship and activism are performed in the moral-political online spaces co-produced by users and producers. And a key line of debate fuels resistance to the notion that Islamist and democratic politics are mutually exclusive. However, these online spaces are neither as open or as inclusive as they might be.
Paul-François Tremlett (Religious Studies, The Open University, UK)
Occupying the Neo-Liberal Frontier: Moral Citizenship, Digital Organization, Spectacular Indignation
According to Jean Comaroff, “under the sway of neo-liberal policies, many states have relinquished significant responsibility for schooling, health and welfare” and for the “social reproduction of their citizens” (2010: 20). For Comaroff, neo-liberalism constitutes “a new stage in the life of capital – a shift that is less a complete rupture with the past than a reorganization of core components of capitalism as [a] social formation” (2010: 22). In particular, Comaroff claims that neo-liberal capitalism is characterized by a new opacity vis-à-vis the connections between sites of production and consumption and this opacity undermines the idea of a “national economy in which local interest groups recognize each other” (2010: 23) as participating in the same ‘imagined community’. According to Comaroff, it is the Pentecostal and charismatic churches that have thrived in the eviscerated social landscapes left by neo-liberal deregulation and outsourcing. Yet the ‘Occupy’ movement, which has been at the forefront of anti-capitalist protest around the world in the wake of the financial crash of 2007, has mobilized spectacular stagings of citizenships and experiments in organization with the help of new media technologies. This has involved the deliberate disruption and re-routing of spatial flows of communication and information that register an attempt to re-enchant, however fleetingly, the urban spaces most associated with the financial markets. A potent combination of religio-moral and anarchistic elements can be discerned in this attempt at re-enchantment. In this paper I discuss three interwoven aspects of the Occupy London Stock Exchange (OLSX) protest: (1) the emergence of moral citizenships profoundly inflected by a religio-existential critique of capitalism; (2) the proliferation of media networking by activists that mirror the anarchist organizational technologies through which OLSX constituted itself and (3) the importance of spectacle to OLSX’s (ritual) staging of indignation.
Jone Salomonsen (Theology, University of Oslo)
Massacre and Media in Oslo on July 22, 2011
On the afternoon of July 22, 2011, a 32-year old native Norwegian, Anders Behring Breivik, killed 77 people in and around Oslo. A majority of those killed where social democratic youth, camping on the island of Utøya. Dressed as a Norwegian policeman and carrying two heavy bags, he rode the ferry over to the island under the pretext of reporting on the terror attack in Oslo. Immediately on arriving at the camp he began shooting with the two weapons in the bags – a semi-automatic rifle and a pistol. Within seventy two minutes he killed 69 campers. Sixty six others were injured. He gave himself up without resistance to a special counter-terrorist police unit, declaring “mission accomplished”. He is currently in jail while awaiting trial. He has admitted planning and carrying out the attacks, but refuses to accept criminal responsibility because, he said, “It had to be done”.
Six hours before the bomb blast in Oslo he posted a video on YouTube urging radical conservatives in Europe and the USA to “embrace martyrdom”, calling for a return to the aggressive zeal of the early crusades, and showing a Knight Templar with an enormous sword drawn. In the video, he also posed with his semi-automatic gun, showing himself killing. He spoke of his gun as “Mjolner”, named after Thor’s magic hammer in Norse mythology. About 90 minutes before the attack, Breivik emailed 1003 select addresses a 1500-page manifesto written in English: 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence, in which he argues for the violent destruction of “Eurabia” – a notion seemingly referring to present-day European political realities, namely, the multiculturalism that he perceives as the effect of massive Islamic immigration and cultural Marxism. He asserts that destruction is the only way to preserve a so-called Christian Europe, and that promotion of so-called Pagan local and national identities will renew cultural identity and regional belonging.
I propose to analyze how a new identity project was launched in Oslo 22 July by means of deadly weapons and social media, and how the press used its power to revenge the event by giving voice to and favoring representations of a grieving people, united against fear, and erecting multi-religious street altars as they occupied Oslo.
Stephen Pihlaja (The Open University, UK)
Freedom to offend: The use of antagonism in the performance of free speech on You Tube
On the popular video-sharing website YouTube, issues of free speech and censorship are often at the forefront of discussions about criticising religion. Over the last three years, these issues have been particularly prescient as some users have participated in ‘Everybody Draw Muhammad Day’, making depictions of Muhammad ostensibly in protest of censorship. This movement has used offensive images and antagonistic speech towards Muslims to assert a right to free speech. The recent video “Youtube starts banning ‘religiously offensive’ videos” (Thunderf00t, 2012) by the popular atheist user, Thunderf00t, highlights how, in many ways, offensive language has become inextricably linked with ‘free speech’ on YouTube. With 309,698 views and 11,406 comments within the first week of its posting, the video presents a criticism of YouTube policy regarding hate speech about religion while, at the same time, also negatively representing Islam as a censoring agent. Using a case study discourse analysis of positioning (Harré & van Lagenhove, 1998) in this video, I will investigate how users justify offensive language about and attacks on Muslims by presenting a storyline in which free speech is threatened by both Islam and Neoliberalism. Analysis of the video talk and comments will show that defence of all offensive language as free speech can become a means of cultural hegemony, particularly as users employ pejorative images and talk about Muslims to support their right to express themselves.
NB Video shown in this presentation may include YouTube user depictions of Muhammad.
References
Harré, R., & van Lagenhove, L. (1998). Positioning Theory: Moral Contexts of Intentional Action. London: Blackwell Publishers.
Thunderf00t. (2012). Youtube starts banning ‘religiously offensive’ videos Retrieved March 3, 2012, from http://youtu.be/H1ho8tunttg
Marie Gillespie (Co-Director, Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at The Open University, UK)
Dissenting Citizens, Islamist Politics and Social Media Activism: The Egyptian Elections 2011-12 and the BBC Arabic Service
This paper draws on a collaborative ethnography that focuses on how networked audiences and political activists in the Middle East and its diasporas make use of social media platforms provided by the BBC Arabic Services – not only as a trans-national public arena on which to project their voices but also as an alternative platform of political debate and resistance to those made available by its key rivals Aljazeera and Alarabiyya. BBC Arabic’s digital platforms are designed to engage users in debate about their news and current affairs output, and to foster a ‘global conversation’ which transcends national, religious and ethnic boundaries’ and promotes democratic citizenship. Paradoxically perhaps, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office who fund the BBC Arabic Service, see digital debate forums as channels for public diplomacy and the promotion, albeit indirectly, of British strategic interests. At a time when social media are seen as a tool of empowering dissenting Arab citizens in their struggles for democracy, the question of whether the Arab Spring has been hi-jacked by Islamist parties has become a key focal point of heated and antagonistic social media debate around the Egyptian elections. Another key debate repeatedly voiced by users on BBCA platforms revolves around the perceived widespread prejudice against Islamist parties in the Arab and Anglo media spheres. The debate addresses directly the question of why democracy is understood as the sole preserve of liberals secularist and not Islamist political groups At a time when social media are seen as a tool of empowering dissenting Arab citizens in their struggles for democracy, the question of whether the Arab Spring has been hi-jacked by Islamist parties has become a key focal point of heated and antagonistic social media debate around the Egyptian elections. Another key debate repeatedly voiced by users on BBCA platforms revolves around the perceived widespread prejudice against Islamist parties in the Arab and Anglo media spheres. The debate addresses directly the question of why democracy is. The appropriation of social media by Arab citizens of international news organizations like the BBC Arabic Services throws up some interesting contradictions and ambivalences which this paper will explore. Based on extensive analyses of users and uses of interactive platforms prior to and during the Arab Spring, and at key moments in the Egyptian Elections (2011-12), we examine how religious and national political divisions are ritualistically enacted on these platforms that are neither as open nor as deliberative as they might be.
Gillespie’s paper is part of a larger Public Policy Fellowship funded by the AHRC entitled ‘The Art of Intercultural Dialogue: Global Conversation at the BBC World Service. For more details of this and other related projects see http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/news/public-policy-fellowship-at-the-bbc-world-service