Social Media, Religion, and Culture

Overview

Social media platforms are the modern public square, supporting and fostering publics and counterpublics (Castells 1996; Warner 2001). Networked counter/publics, as social technologies (Marres 2017), both reflect analog spaces and provide digital contact between ideologies, religious practices, political thought, and cultures. This volume delves into the cultural production apparatus of social media (Bourdieu 1983; Baym 2010). It also builds on earlier work on social media, religion, and digital culture, including conceptualizations of internet religion (Cowan and Hadden 2000; Basher, 2004; Hoover, 2006), religion, media, and branding (Einstein 2007) and digital religion and new media (Helland, 2002; Campbell, 2010, 2013), digital rituals and games (Wagner 2013; Campbell and Grieve (2014), religious authority online (Hoover 2016) and more recently, digital religion and third space (Echchaibi and Hoover 2023). Digital cultural studies and new media have progressed to consider how identity and intersectional politics impact digital spaces such as histories and imaginaries of software (Chun 2013); gender and media (Gill 2007; Lövheim 2013, 2019; Russell 2020; Krijnen and Van Bauwel 2021); race, media, technology (Nakamura 2000, 2002, 2007, 2011; Browne 2015; Benjamin 2019a; Noble 2018; Buolawini 2023), digital iterations of queer and trans identity and sexuality (Berry, Martin, and Yue 2003; O’Riordan and Phillips 2007; Pullen and Cooper 2010; Carter, Steiner, and McLaughlin 2014; Carilli and Cambell 2013, 2017; Hilton-Morrow and Battles 2015; Siebler 2016; Griffin 2017; Berliner 2018; Cassidy 2018; Das and Farber 2020; Cardenas 2022) and internet activism, social justice networks, and digital surveillance (De Jong, Shaw, Stammers 2005; Joyce 2010; Leivrouw 2013; Trottier and Fuchs 2014; Meikle 2014, 2018; Mendes 2015; Baruh and Hawks 2015; Pickard and Yang 2017; Cernison 2019; Schradie 2019; Jackson, Bailey, and Welles 2020; Alperstein 2021; Balbi, Ribero, and Schafer 2021; Treré 2018; Benjamin 2019b, 2024, Biswas 2023; Browne 2024).

Four earlier volumes on social media, digital religion, and culture ground our project: Digital Religion, Social Media, and Culture (Cheong et al 2012), a pathbreaking volume exploring religious and cultural expressions online, Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (Jose van Dijck 2012) which is a comprehensive historiography of social media that offers an incisive view of social media platforms, Media, Gender, and Religion (Mia Lovheim (ed.) 2013) which considers a variety of case studies to explore how media and gender studies intersect through the lens of key theoretical and methodological issues and debates within gender studies, and Media, Religion, and Culture (Jeffrey Mahan (ed.) 2014) which collected scholarship on the religious content of media texts, considered how new media forms impact on religious voices/identities, and explored how religious consumers appropriate and reuse media in their own religious work. While these sources are by no means exhaustive, as foundational scholarship on social media, culture, and religion, they show how much of the published work in this area has focused on the global north. Part of the impetus for this volume is to broaden the discussion on new media and social media by platforming scholars within and scholarly work on Indigenous, Black, and global south communities, cultures, and traditions. To this point, we are working towards making this volume open-access.

This volume brings together “religion” and “culture” as broad, discursive fields within social media to understand how publics, communities, and meaning-making mechanisms are formed, how they interact with the analog world, and how the affordances of social media enable new iterative aspects of canon, praxis, and affinity. In this sense, “religion” includes institutional and non-institutional spiritual, devotional, and canonical traditions and beliefs, as well as, more broadly, the communities of practice that form in social media spaces. We engage the term “culture” to mean the affinities that form within social media spaces, which include narratives of belonging, spiritual connections, activism, political imagination, shared histories and stories, traditional teachings of identity, and other practices that serve to knit together communities.  

In an effort to address a gap in the literature on the intersections of social media, culture, and community from non-majoritarian spaces and/or communities, the volume has a deliberate slant toward scholars and communities within the global south whose digital content creation has had little representation within internet research publications. We hope the scholarship collected here will expand current media, religion, and culture scholarship, which has often sought to think about online and offline publics as networked or connected, as well as the social media presence of white and western influencers. The contributions to this volume trouble such directional scholarship to consider how online and offline spaces are both part of the “real.” In this sense, the online and offline work together to shape communities’ lived experiences, political and social narratives, policymaking, and cultural identities. 

Call for Submissions

Timeline:

• Submit a 300-word abstract and title by Dec 16, 2024. Also include name and affiliation (if any).

• Selected authors will be notified by January 10, 2025.

• 4000 word essays should be submitted to authors by July 31, 2025. Peer-review of chapters is available upon request.

We expect the completed volume to be published by February 2026.

We seek contributions that explore topics related to social media, culture, and religion in broad terms. Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

The role of AI in cultural production and religious identity

AI, technosalvationism, and/or technolibertarianism

AI, capitalism, and culture

AI, labor, and religion

Religion/Culture, brands, and social media

Religion/Culture, identity, and social networks, platform moderation

Religion, ethnonationalism, and social media

Digital hate cultures and social media

LGBTQIA+ activism, religion, and social media; particular interest in Transgender communities, identities, solidarities, activism and social media

Black religions, cultures, and social networks

Areligious, agnosticism, atheism, and “nones” and social media

Race/Racialization, religion/culture, and social networking

Anti-caste activism, publics, social networks, and solidarities

Islamophobia and social networks

Indigenous sacred spaces, rituals, communities and social networks

Religious traditions, rituals, cultural practices, identities, communities, publics, and social networks.

Religious affinity groups on social media platforms

Social media, fascist politics, religion/culture

Religion, environmentalism, identity and social media

Intersections of social media and democracy

Social media, memes, and identity

Social media activism and affinity groups

Social media, Indigenous cultures and communities, and identity

Publics, counterpublics, and micropublics on social media

Social media devotional publics and networks

Global gurus and cultural influencers

Meaning-making mechanisms and social media

Social media cultural production

Intersections between social media, religion, and capitalism

Social media art and activism

Digital canons and social media

Social media and political religion

Indigenous art, social media platforms, and commerce

Virality, social media, and cultural movements

Contact: Please reach out to Dheepa Sundaram (dheepa.sundaram@du.edu) and Cindy Tekobbe (ctek@uic.edu) with any questions. 

We look forward to receiving your proposals!