CFP for special issue on Media, Religion & Culture

The Journal of Communication Inquiry has announced a call for papers for a special issue on Religion, Media, and Culture. Communication Inquiry invites submissions for the 2015 special issue on topics that incorporate critical cultural approaches to the intersection of religion, media and culture.

Recent media and communication scholarship has initiated analysis into the multiple and complex avenues of interaction between media, religion and culture in order to highlight the impact of cultural products on everyday lived religion, while also acknowledging that religious beliefs, practices, and communities are rarely personal or private. Our cultural landscape repeatedly demonstrates the vitality of religious ways of thinking and living in a mediated world and, likewise, the ways that media shape and inform religion. Media and religion promote and constrain each other, undermining longstanding cultural narratives of a clear separation between public and private, the personal and the social, the national and the global.

The new horizon of scholarship looks to the complex and diverse relationships of religion and media foundational to the very acts of communication that constitute private, public, science, technology and the secular. A critical cultural approach to media and religion is particularly suited to this form of inquiry and may emphasize emergent notions of meaning, authority and representation across transnational communities or in the context of globalization. JCI welcomes submissions that engage these intersections of religion, media, and culture within theoretical and methodological approaches utilizing critical, cultural, and historical perspectives. Possible topics of inquiry are vast but could include: the relationship between religion and technology; religion and media in the constitution of publics; religion and consumer culture; the role of religion and media in global cultural movements; and many more. Studies of any religious tradition, denomination or group are welcomed, especially those historically underrepresented.

The deadline for submitting manuscripts is 11:59 p.m. CST on February 16th, 2015. Please contact JCI Managing Editor John Haman (john-haman@uiowa.edu) for more information