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Abstract
The persistence of religion in the twenty-first century has renewed the importance of scholarships devoted to it. At the same time, the digital age has re-positioned and recentered the affordances of mediated circulations around "the religious." This increasing presence and significance of media and religion suggests that substantive scholarships of religion must necessarily articulate media as well. Religious controversies therefore present a special challenge and a special opportunity to scholarships of media and religion. New ways of doing scholarship, and doing so publicly, present themselves. All scholarships of mediated religion must necessarily be public, so scholarship is articulated into these circulations, and at the same time can build on and benefit from knowledge-building that occurs outside the formal boundaries of the academy. This paper explores emerging theories of digital mediation and proposes a circulation-focused understanding of the role, place, and potentials of scholarships today.
Abstract
Recent struggles over the implications of migration have fueled transformational politics on both sides of the Atlantic. At the center of this are questions of identity, value, long-standing standards of human rights and even enlightenment categories of modernity. Both religion and media play central – even determinative – roles in these debates. This article will argue that scholarships focused on identity “imaginaries” are critical to understanding these discourses and this politics. This scholarship must inquire into both “sides” of migration, both the conceptual worlds of those who wish to move, and the conceptual worlds of those who receive (or attempt to not receive) them. This article will look at the latter through a deep historicist inquiry into the mediation of Protestantism as a central determinative force in the establishment of contemporary conditions of politics in relation to migration in the North Atlantic West. Protestantism’s role in European modernity is well-known, as is its deep interconnection with evolving technologies and means of communication and practices of mediation. This article seeks to understand religion-inflected discourses of nationalism and identity as functions of Protestant social and media instrumentality.