English Archives - Recovira

Exploring Religious Socialisation in a Mediatised World

Posted on August 22, 2024 - 2:02 pm by Recovira

Author: Erkan Binici, Research Associate, University of Tübingen

Erkan Binici, a research associate and doctoral candidate in Islamic religious education at the University of Tübingen, introduced his research in the Dialogue Conference of ReCoVirA-Project Germany on June 24^th. This perspective expanded the projects’ findings and understanding of the situation of adolescents in religious communities and the shifts from the pandemic.

In today’s digital age, the intersection of media and religion is prominent in various contexts. Multiple examples from popular culture, illustrate how religion is represented and used in media. This blend of religion and media is particularly significant among young people.

Manfred L. Pirner, a protestant religious educator, proposed in 2004 that the media socialisation of children and adolescents also involves religious socialisation, coining the term ‘religious media socialisation’: “The diverse interconnections and parallels between media and religion in our culture suggest that the media socialisation of today’s children and adolescents is also, to a significant extent, religious socialisation” (Pirner 2004, p. 11)¹.

To better understand this phenomenon, I designed an empirical study as part of my doctoral dissertation. This research investigates how young Muslims in Germany perceive and engage with religion in media. Through qualitative interviews with twelve Muslim adolescents aged 12-19, the study explores their media use and the presence of religion in their everyday media interactions. The research integrates theories of mediatisation, socialisation, and praxeological sociology of knowledge. This framework operationalises the research subject for empirical investigation into religious socialisation in a mediatised world.

In examining how young Muslims in Germany perceive and engage with religion in the media, some key themes emerged:
– Many interviewees noted that the portrayal of Islam and Muslims in the media is predominantly negative, characterised by repetitive stereotypes and a lack of positive representation. They also criticised discrimination and double standards in media reporting, especially concerning crime.

– Despite using media for religious information, the participants expressed distrust and scepticism towards media sources, often preferring personal sources like parents. Media exposure triggered religious questions, leading to information overload and further reliance on trusted individuals.

– Muslim influencers were relevant to the participants, even when the content was not explicitly religious. Representation remained important, with influencers like the Datteltäter² satire group being frequently mentioned. Religious influencers also played a role in their everyday engagement with religious topics.

– The adolescents generally exhibit a critical stance towards media and commonly express a desire to avoid extremist content. However, several interviewees reported using certain websites and consuming content originating from extremist groups without recognizing its extremist nature. This observation suggests that a general critical attitude towards media is insufficient to prevent the consumption of problematic content. Instead, it necessitates a deeper engagement and critical understanding of the specific characteristics and messages of extremist media.

– The impact of religiosity on media usage varied, with some participants practicing self-imposed media restrictions based on religious beliefs, such as avoiding sexualised content and adhering to respectful communication norms. For religious practice, various media tools were utilised, such as prayer time apps and Quran apps, with some media being repurposed pragmatically for religious activities.

The analysis reveals that the interaction with religion in media is deeply embedded in the general media practices of young Muslims. This study underscores the significant intersection of media and religion in their lives, with important implications for Islamic religious education and media pedagogy. By understanding these dynamics, educators can better align religious education with the lived experiences of adolescents, making it more relevant and engaging. The study will be published soon and aims to enrich research in this area, calling for further empirical studies to continue exploring these critical intersections.

Literature

Pirner, M. L. (2004). Religiöse Mediensozialisation. Empirische Studien zu Zusammenhängen zwischen Mediennutzung und Religiosität bei SchülerInnen und deren Wahrnehmung durch LehrerInnen. kopaed.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF_oOFgq8qwi7HRGTJSsZ-g

Image credit: Image provided by the author

The Online Eventification in Religious Communities in Denmark

Posted on August 1, 2024 - 9:21 am by Recovira

Anne Lundahl Mauritsen, Postdoctoral Researcher, Aarhus University

As the summer vacations come to an end in Denmark, we can reflect upon the current work the Danish Recovira team is undertaking. In the last blogpost, we investigated the importance of the senses in relation to how members of religious groups conceptualized the feeling of community. We highlighted how digital tools clearly had limitations in the construction of ‘authentic’ community for our informants. Nevertheless, there are ways in which the communities employ digital tools, and we will present these in this blogpost.

It is clear from our data that all religious groups do in fact have digital presences across various media such as Facebook, Instagram and websites. The ideational dimension of the homepages show that community building is indeed important for the groups as shown through advertising their offline activities. Members can get knowledge of others in the community, they can communicate with each other, the community as such can communicate to its members, and it can share values and history on the digital platforms. There is, however, one particularly important function that social media fulfill: the communication of events in the religious groups or the eventification in these groups. Eventification (sometimes used interchangeably with festivalization) encompasses the “social phenomenon that seems to compensate for the lack of physical contact in modern life and cyberspace, but also the lack of meaning in an overly material world. Humans like (and need) to be together, to touch, hug, celebrate, experience, feel happy. Intentional communities, free cultural spaces, parties, and festivals make us feel connected, tolerant, and inclined to share” (Sala 2021). While meeting in the digital sphere thus seemed less meaningful to an overwhelmingly big proportion of our informants, the online meditation of physical events taking place in the various groups was an essential feature of social media and should not be underestimated. We are told in interviews that informants routinely check the websites and Facebook pages of their respective communities, and that this eases accessibility as well as entrance to the groups. We explore this theme in a forthcoming article and promise to return to this point.

image credit: Photo by Nitin Dhumal: https://www.pexels.com/photo/red-lens-sunglasses-on-sand-near-sea-at-sunset-selective-focus-photography-46710/

Presenting the Recovira project at the joint conference of religious studies and theology

Posted on May 30, 2024 - 3:05 pm by Recovira

Katriina Hulkkonen and Linda Annunen, Åbo Akademi University

The biannual Research Conference in Theology and Religion was held in Turku on May 22–24. The conference was organized this year for the third time under the theme “Traditions and transitions. Milestones and continuities”. The conference brings together mainly Finnish researchers of religion who are interested in a wide variety of topics. We presented our Recovira research in the session “Seven keys in understanding lived religion”, chaired by Björn Vikström, Professor of Theology and Tomas Ray, University Teacher at Åbo Akademi University.

During the lived religion session, Ilona Blumgrund and Iiris Nikanne used interview materials to discuss the conversion of asylum seekers to Christianity. Both of their presentations raised questions in the audience about authenticity and the relationship between researcher and interlocutors. In her paper, Martina Björkander discussed what it is like to study lived theology in the case of the Pentecostal community. In addition, she challenged the audience to discuss what theological research is like or could be. Tomas Ray analysed Lutheran identity in multicultural Malaysia from the perspective of Nancy Ammerman’s characteristics of lived religion, and Anoo Niskanen examined identity motives in her own study on the Laestadian community. First, interest in themes related to belonging and everyday practices united all these presentations. Second, these papers highlighted certain kinds of creativity, such as the diversity of belonging or the creativity of theology and religious studies.

Our presentation “COVID-19 pandemic and ritual renewal in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland – digital solutions and improvisation” concluded this session. In our paper, we addressed creativity – in the case of institutional religion and ritual. We discussed the ritual renewal caused by the pandemic from the perspective of improvisation. Our analysis focused on Facebook nightly hymn singing sessions that one urban congregation launched during the pandemic. With the help of this example, we examined the development of digital ritual, and the reasons for its popularity, such as accessibility and homespun style. Finally, we discussed the aspects that limit the renewal of digital rituals. According to this evening broadcast case, the ritual renewal initiated by the pandemic was a process of improvisation that took place especially in relation to digital tools, religious traditions, different spaces, and resources, and gave rise to a ritual culture of mundanity and permissiveness.

The presentations of the session offered an interesting setting for the study of contemporary everyday religiosity. Afterwards, we reflected, for example, on how conference presentations could be built in a more conversational direction, and how the researcher’s own childhood experiences could in some cases provide a starting point for analysis. In addition, the session raised questions about the benefits and shortcomings of the concept of lived religion and the need for longer-term follow-up studies on some research topics.

Islam and Covid on UK Twitter in early 2020

Posted on May 20, 2024 - 8:50 am by Recovira

Dr Sean Durbin, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Manchester Metropolitan University

In addition to the ethnographic fieldwork that we are conducting across different communities in Europe for this project, we have also been working on a social media strand, aimed at helping us understand how people online were discussing religion in relation to the restrictions imposed in the early months of the pandemic from March to June 2020.

To do this we have been using a social listening platform that allows us to scrape publicly available data off the web and analyse it, making it useful to conduct discourse analysis of large amounts of naturally occurring data. In this context, scraping refers to a technique for the automated collection of online data. Scrapers are essentially bits of software code that enable researchers to automatically download data from the web, which can then be classified and modelled in different ways.

Using boolean search terms related to Islam, Christianity and other religious traditions in conjunction with pandemic related keywords such as lockdown, COVID-19, etc, we originally hoped to see how different communities talked about what they were doing to adapt their practices to a the sudden requirement to stay indoors. However, in an effort at cross-country comparability, as well as other practical considerations, we opted instead to focus on the public discussion that was occurring online about religion/religious communities, and related issues (e.g. religious freedom).

What we have found in the UK, is that Muslims and Islam were vastly overrepresented in this online discussion. Although Muslims represent roughly 6% of the population in the UK they made up roughly 75% of the online discussion of religious groups in our data scrape. Christians and Christianity on the other hand made up only 19% of mentions online.

What accounts for this over representation? Based on our analysis of the most engaged tweets, much of the conversation around Muslims online was driven in some way by claims or beliefs that Muslims would not abide by lockdown rules, especially over the Ramadan period, and therefore would contribute to the spread of COVID-19. This topic was then spread further by other Twitter users who would mock or rebuke these claims, all of which contributed to the over-representation of Muslims in public Twitter discourse during our period of focus.

Digitalization and the Catholic community

Posted on May 19, 2024 - 5:57 pm by Recovira

Dr Ewa Stachowska, Institute of Social Prevention and Resocialization, University of Warsaw.

In the springtime the Polish team is focused on work in two main areas. The first one is to prepare an article entitled Digitalization and the Catholic religious community in Poland, which revolves around the role and meaning of the process of digitalization in the Catholic community. The article includes an analysis of the preliminary results of the qualitative research conducted in this community. The Catholic Church is the largest denomination in Poland, hence the first of the articles presents results concerning this community. The process of digitalization is widespread in our times, and although in the Catholic community in Poland it is noticeable that not only the direct contact is approved of, the popularity of traditional media (such as the radio and TV) is also more visible, as it performed a crucial role in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital tools have been (and still are) a form of facilitating communication and information flow in the Catholic community. However, they are identified by the respondents as an instrument shaping the “digital sacred” to a smaller degree. It is worth noting that the aforementioned direction of perceiving digital tools is more noticeable among the older generations than among the young. What is more, the Catholic community in Poland is successively becoming a “senior community”, as secularization is accelerating especially among young people (which is shown in numerous research, e.g. carried out by PEW Research Center, CBOS – Public Opinion Research Center, ESS). An interesting thread emerging from the conducted research, which will undergo a broader analysis, is the fact that on the linguistic level the respondents perceive taking part in media rituals as “viewing”. This indicates a specific “oversimplification”, or even “trivialization” (cf. N. Postman) of participation in the media liturgy.

The second area of work undertaken by the Polish team concerns the preparation of papers for the 7^th International Congress of Religious Studies, which will be held in Gdynia (Poland) from 19^th-21^st June 2024.^[1] The Congress is a cyclical event in the circle of specialists of religious studies in Poland. This year its subject is: Religions. Tradition and Modernity. The engagement of the team during the Congress involves: participating in the scientific committee, coordinating the section of: Transformations of Religiosity and Non-religiosity in Sociological Research by Ewa Stachowska, delivering a paper entitled Minority Religious Communities and Digitalization in Poland. Moreover, arrangements are being made concerning the organization of a discussion panel Religion and Digitalization during the Congress.

[1] https://www.ptr.edu.pl/index.php/o-towarzystwie/aktualnosci/item/172-vii-miedzynarodowy-kongres-religioznawczy

Technology and the Jehovah’s Witnesses

Posted on May 18, 2024 - 5:15 pm by Recovira

Alexandra Berg, Åbo Akademi University

Alexandra Berg, first year student at Åbo Akademi University, has assisted the Finnish Recovira-team with participant observations for the projects’ aesthetic analysis. Here you can read about her observations and experiences when visiting the Jehovah’s Witnesses last winter.

Last year, in the gloomy midwinter, we went to visit the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They were a well-dressed group of people, who treated us with warmth and consideration. We attended an event set in the Kingdom Hall’s main lecture hall; a large and bright room filled with dozens of people. I was excited and a bit nervous. I had never been to a Jehovah’s Witness event before. My nervousness proved to be unnecessary, because when we arrived everyone was hospitable and did their best to make us feel welcome.

I found it very interesting to notice how highly digitised the gathering was. There were two large TV screens in the front of the hall, angled downwards, so the audience could easily see them. The TVs were actively used during the sermon, displaying text or pictures relevant to the topic. At one point, everyone who was able to, stood up and sang together, and the lyrics were shown on the TV screens. The atmosphere in the room was relaxed. I got the impression that everyone was comfortable singing, and the songs were familiar to them. There was a separate desk in the room with computer monitors. Towards the end of the sermon, the congregation watched videos portraying scenarios one might encounter when doing mission work, and how to navigate certain situations.

The usage of mobile phones was highly encouraged during the lecture. Almost everyone had an app containing material and resources related to the teachings of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The event’s schedule and program were available in the app, as well as reading materials, such as Bible verses, think-pieces about life and faith, and issues of Watchtower. In an interactive section during the sermon, people received prompts on their apps, and they could answer questions posed in the app.

Various speakers spoke into microphones. There were microphones located by the individual seats. Many members of the audience took their turns to answer questions or give their insights. The sound was loud enough to be clearly heard, but at a comfortable volume suited to the hall’s size and acoustic capabilities.

I really enjoyed the event and meeting all the people. They were very friendly and happy to converse with me. I was surprised at the smooth incorporation of technology, and it was very intriguing to meet so many new people.

-Alexandra Berg

Making sense of our data

Posted on May 17, 2024 - 5:18 pm by Recovira

Dr Sean Durbin, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Manchester Metropolitan University

When you’ve spent the better part of 12 months, getting to know and getting involved in the communities that are participating in this research project, the amount of information that a researcher gathers can be overwhelming.

In my case, I have spent the past year with different Church of England congregations. During that time I have attended and observed regular services, and participated in community events, including evening Bible studies, weekday cooking classes, and outdoor gardening activities. I have interviewed members and leaders, and simply observed what they have been doing.

All of this is part of the repertoire of research tools that comprise ethnographic research methods, which are used to inform our understanding how these different congregations function and, in our case, interact with the virtual age. Throughout the course of conducting fieldwork like this, drafting fieldnotes about seemingly ordinary things can often be a challenge. I have often asked myself whether something is or isn’t important to jot down. You have to constantly remind yourself that what might not seem significant could end up being very important, so it’s useful make a record of it.

The end result of all of this work, though, is pages and pages of field notes outlining what I saw or experienced at each event I attended, as well as interview recordings from the over twenty interviews conducted as part of my work on this project.

Now, with all this information compiled in some form, I have the task of making sense of it all. This work involves transcribing interviews and coding them for themes and subthemes, not only so that I can develop a coherent picture of my own research findings, but also so that I can share these findings with my colleagues who have been conducting similar research in their own countries.

All of which is to say, making sense of all this data is a time consuming but vitally important part of the research process.

Image credit – Ian Panelo – Pexels

Theorizing the Concept of Community

Posted on April 4, 2024 - 1:38 pm by Recovira

Anne Lundahl Mauritsen, Postdoctoral Researcher, Aarhus University

As the spring approaches, we in the Danish team are preparing for our upcoming writing retreat in Barcelona. Each national team in the RECOVIRA project must contribute with at least two articles and it is our ambition to dig deep into the writing of our two articles during our retreat. For now, we have planned that the first article will present analyses of the findings from the Danish fieldwork while the second article will compare results from the Danish fieldwork with the quantitative survey data formerly collected in Denmark as part of the “COVID-19: Religion and Existential Wellbeing” project [1]. While the articles are still being set up, we do have some specific ideas as to their content, especially the first article.

This first article – which will be in Danish – will dig into the theme of community and how it is conceptualized among the informants in the different religious groups. In our last blogpost, we described how the senses came into play, when the informants described how they had missed meeting physically with their group. Touching and hugging each other, having eye contact, smelling each other, and smiling to each other were described as key factors in constituting the feeling of connection and we will examine this more closely in the first article. However, while the article is based on empirical analyses, we have also been working on shaping a theoretical framework which can inform our analyses.

The concept of community is a category of practice used among folks in their everyday conversations, but it is also a category of analysis used among academics. Community has been defined and discussed by several academics, and we have chosen to focus specifically on the way sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and Axel Honneth examined the concept, since they are some of the most distinguished modern sociologists, but also because they approach community in quite different ways. Bauman, on the one hand, is rather pessimistic in how he views communities. While he acknowledges that community to many is a concept of positive connotations that symbolizes security and social coherency, he also argues that being part of a community is always in opposition to being a fully free individual, since being part of a community according to Bauman requires ‘absolute obedience’ and thus forces the individual to give up upon its freedom and trust in individuals outside said community. Honneth, on the other hand, underscores the liberating potential of communities. He argues that when the individual is part of a well-functioning, caring community, it enables the individual to express itself fully and safely, thus experiencing the community as a extending its freedom rather than limiting it.

Thus, there are quite different approaches to community, and we are inspired by this diversity in our empirical analyses. We look forward to engaging further with these perspectives as we continue with our writing and hope it will contribute with fruitful thinking to the overall RECOVIRA project.

[1] https://ccrs.ku.dk/research/centres-and-projects/covid-19–religion-and-existential-wellbeing/

Researchers of Religion, Digital Media, and Rituals Met in Helsinki

Posted on March 19, 2024 - 8:03 am by Recovira

Katriina Hulkkonen, Linda Annunen and Ruth Illman, Åbo Akademi University

An international group of researchers interested in religion, digital media, rituals, and death gathered at the University of Helsinki on 13–15 March 2024. The seminar was jointly organized by the research projects Recovira and Digital Death, DiDe.

The seminar was opened on Wednesday 13 March by a keynote lecture delivered by Professor Douglas Davies of Durham University. His theme was “Death rites online and absent. Death ritual through virtual presence and literal absence: the paradox of live-streaming funerals and the absence of ritual in ‘direct cremation”. Davies’ presentation highlighted a ludic, or playful, attention to death and funerals. Play bends the rules in order to create something new, which becomes apparent especially in two funeral trends: the “no-fuss-funerals”, which are stripped of typical funeral aesthetics and traditions, and funerals carried out as a celebration of life. In this sense, rituals in times of change might bring forth ludicity that in turn allows for changes in funeral rituals.

Prof. Douglas Davies opened the seminar with a keynote lecture on the theme of death rituals in digital age. Prof. Joshua Edelman, PI of the Recovira team, responded with reflections on performativity and play. Image credit – Ruth Illman

The following day was reserved for a roundtable seminar where the researchers of Recovira and DiDe discussed their preliminary results in-depth. In the first roundtable session “Religious communities in digital contexts: Trends and transformations”, Henrik Reintoft Christensen and Alana Vincent talked about the current state of our Recovira project as well as the benefits and challenges of using survey data and social media materials. The presentations sparked discussion on how technology shapes religion and religious communities and how a critical approach could be formed within the Recovira project. In other words, how could our research better consider and critically examine the negative aspects of digitalization and the power structures that relate to it? The participants asked very interesting questions, for example: What is the position of commercial technology companies in the field of religion? What opportunities do religious communities have to respond to or resist increasing digitalization?

The second roundtable session of the afternoon focused on ritual changes, death, and grief. First, Dorthe Christensen discussed the perspective offered by the autoethnographic method to study digital death practices and grief. Terhi Utriainen then talked about various perspectives for examining death rituals. At the same time, she presented the forthcoming Handbook on Contemporary Death Rituals in Europe. The presentations gave rise to a lively discussion, where for example the definition and use of the concept of ritual was scrutinized. Is there an end to a ritual? Are classics, like the ritual theories of Victor Turner or Catherine Bell, still relevant today? Moreover, what kind of new theoretical tools do we need to study death rituals?

The day continued with an open panel discussion led by Professor Johanna Sumiala, PI of the DiDe team. The speakers were the author, columnist and pastor Hilkka Olkinuora, the funeral home entrepreneur Kyllikki Forsius, the director Hannu Mäkelä from the Digital and Population Data Services Agency, the researcher Maija Butters from the University of Helsinkiand the Vantaa-based Imam Sharmarke Said Aw-Musse.

Death in Finland Today: the public panel discussion at the Think Corner drew a large audience both on-site and online. From left: Johanna Sumiala, Hilkka Olkinuora, Kyllikki Forsius, Hannu Mäkelä, Maija Butters and Sharmarke Said Aw-Musse.

During the conversation, the panelists offered different viewpoints on practices and attitudes toward death. They largely agreed that nowadays, the silent and natural death of an individual is hidden while the violence of death has received a lot of attention in the media, especially due to wars. The discussion highlighted the importance of funeral homes, bureaucracy, and the role of relatives in practical matters related to death. The panelists presented their views on the change in funeral customs in Finland. Based on the discussion, funerals have become more individual. The panelists’ views also resonate with our Finnish Recovira data, according to which in the case of the Lutheran Church, people want to arrange smaller funerals than before. However, the discussion also revealed that funerals are often large in the Muslim community. For example, community members not close to the deceased may also come to pray at the funeral. In addition, the panelists pondered, what kind of a place social media is for dealing with grief, how the fear of death is visible today’s Finland, and whether there should be more education related to death. Based on the discussion, death rituals are still important for communities, relatives and loved ones, as well as for the dying person her- or himself in dealing with death and grief. The panel discussion ended with the wish that people would be present for the dying person and talk more about mortality in general.

On Friday, both projects continued with internal project meetings. For the Recovira-team, this included planning a book that will focus on overlappings and differences expressed in the research data from all project countries. In addition to these more concrete plans for the Recovira project, for us members of the Finnish team, this three-day seminar offered interesting and different topics for reflection concerning, among other things, creativity, critical research on digitalisation and religion, the limits of the use of the concept of ritual, and people’s somewhat changed relationship with death.

Diving into the data and sensing the importance of senses

Posted on February 27, 2024 - 1:57 pm by Recovira

Anne Lundahl Mauritsen, Postdoctoral Researcher, Aarhus University

As the RECOVIRA project proceeds, we are still in the process of analyzing the data in both Denmark and in the other participating countries. In our former Danish blogpost, we emphasized to clear trends in the data: First, that all the Danish religious communities we have visited have returned to meeting physically and second, that resources are highly conditional for how the groups adapt digitally. As we plan the articles we will write this spring, out interest in understanding the community aspect has only increased. What is it about community which is so hard to replicate online and which makes people go back to meeting face to face rather than digitally? To near an answer to this question, we will present just a few quotes from informants in the study. Interestingly, both informants in their quotes mention the importance of the senses:

“I mean, the many, many smells are an important element. I have – on a regular Sunday – counted the many, between 8-12 nationalities at a regular Sunday service (…) The sensual, the sensual means something, I mean in my lecture this Sunday I will touch upon Grundtvig’s thesis of how we’re human first and then Christians, there is something about how being human opens for the sensual which then becomes an opening towards the divine”

“Well, if I should tie this up, then I would say that what is essential to me is the community where we look each other in the eyes and sense each other, it has been the smells, it can be different things, and that can never be replaced by digital, by a digital presence”

Clearly, to both informants the senses which come into play in the presence of other community members are an important part of feeling connected and clearly this is lacking in a digital service. It seems as if smelling each other and gaining eye contact are key factors in feeling part of the group, which could potentially have interesting explanations founded in theories from the fields of psychology and evolutionary biology as well as aesthetic studies. There is much more to unpack in terms of what constitutes community, but we have a strong feeling of this being an important starting point, which we will pursue over the next few months of analysis.

Older posts