This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
There is an increasing recognition within the study of religion that understanding social and cultural forms of religion necessarily involves paying attention to the media through which people engage with religion or perform their religious lives. Growing out of early work on religion and film, and new forms of religious media (e.g. televangelism), academic work in this field have broadened out from studying the representation of religion in media texts to thinking more broadly about the significance of media in relation to religion. This has opened up discussions about the ways in which religion is always mediated as well as the implications of different media forms for this process. Whilst still maintaining an interest in the context of media 'texts', this work is therefore opening up questions about the role of practice, aesthetics and the senses in media use as well as broadening what we might think of as 'media' in religious contexts.
Total contact hours: 20
Essay (5000 words) - 100%
Campbell, H.A. (2010). When Religion Meets New Media, Abingdon: Routledge;
Deacy, C. and Elisabeth Arweck, (2009). Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age, Farnham: Ashgate;
Lynch, G. and Jolyon Mitchell, with Anna Strhan (eds.), (2012). Religion, Media and Culture: A Reader, Abingdon: Routledge;
Mazur, E. Michael Mazur and Kate McCarthy (eds.), (2001). God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture, 2nd edition, Abingdon: Routledge;
Morgan, D. (ed.), (2008). Key Words in Religion, Media and Culture, Abingdon and New York: Routledge;
Wagner, R. (2012). Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality, Abingdon: Routledge.
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
Students will be able to demonstrate an advanced and systematic understanding of key debates in the field of media, religion and culture (for example, the way in which the experience of religion is shaped by modern media);
Students will be able to display critical awareness of how to situate a discussion of a specific issue in this field in the context of those wider debates in the field of media, religion and culture (for example, the rise of spiritualism in the context of the invention of the telegraph);
Students will be able to demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of key concepts within this field (e.g. mediation, mediatisation) and use this understanding to critically evaluate a specific case or issue concerning the role of media in relation to religion;
Students will be able to give a critical, systematic and original analysis of the ways in which the use of media in a particular religious context is shaped by factors such as the nature of media technologies, religious traditions, religious aesthetics and embodied practice and social, cultural and political context.
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