About us

Humanities scholarship has had an uncomfortable relationship with technology research. While this has changed over the past 20 years, the “site” of the internet has remained subordinate to so-called “authentic” analog spaces of research, particularly when considering analytical frames such as textual analysis, semiotics, religious authority, cultural studies, and the making of publics. Our edited volume also seeks to disrupt these majoritarian perspectives in scholarly materials focused on technology, religion, and culture and ameliorates inequity of representation in extant scholarship. The digital project will build on this approach to create a public-facing resource that will expand on the volume’s innovative scholarship to place these scholarly trajectories in conversation with technology policy, democratic governance structures, the use of generative AI in government and non-government organizations, the making of digital publics, and the spread of (dis) and (mis) information within internet spaces. 

The digital project introduces scholars to a holistic understanding of the ways that the online and offline work together to shape communities’ lived experience, political and social narratives, policymaking, and cultural identities. Through its content and emphasis on the intersections of social media, world religions, and cultures, the digital project highlights marginalized and underrepresented voices, communities, and cultural processes related to internet and social media platforms, particularly in ways that often are not legible to internet researchers and students who focus primarily on data from the global North.

The editors of the edited volume and builders of this webspace are female, nonbinary scholars of color who, through this project, seek to evaluate the practices and impact of digital scholarship to date on research, scholarly communication, and public engagement so as to reframe scholarship and highlight innovative approaches, particularly in relation to questions of how artificial intelligence and surveillance are experienced in relation to indigeneity, race, solidarity and affinity networks, and democratic society. The digital project expands on the volume and has solicited contributors who speak to the lacunae in internet studies of research on religion and culture focused on/from the Global South.