CFP for International Society for Media, Religion and Culture Conference

The deadline for the Call For Papers for the 2014 International Society for Media, Religion and Culture conference is coming up soon. The conference will take place 4-6 August 2014 at the University iof Kent, Canterbury, UK. Keynote speakers include Professor Jonathan Walton (Harvard), author of Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism, Assistant Professor Katie Lofton (Yale), author of Oprah: Gospel of an Icon, and an address given by the inaugural President of the society, Professor Stewart Hoover (Colorado).

Over the past decade the study of media, religion and culture has broadened out from interests in media representation to the religious uses and aesthetics of media, the significance of media for religion in public life, and the role of media technologies for new forms of religious life and practice. The Canterbury conference will explore what happens as public encounters with religion are increasingly mediated, and as religious life takes place through a multiplicity of mediated practices and networks. The deadline for paper and panel abstracts is 3 December 2013.

They are accepting paper proposals of up to 350 words; panel proposals (which must include paper titles, 150 word abstracts for each paper, and names and titles of four participants plus a moderator/respondent); and proposals for exhibitions and/or workshops of up to 350 words. Sessions will be 1½ hours in length.

Some of the questions that may be addressed in paper, panel, workshop, or exhibition proposals include:
• The role of media in shaping religious and cultural understandings
• Emergent networks of meaning, religion, and power
• Theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of religion and media
• The role of religious and humanitarian organizations in cross-national justice and media initiatives
• Media and human rights
• Media, religion, and authority
• Religious conflict and media representation
• Religion and film
• Growing up multi-cultural and multi-religious in a mediated world
• Religion, globalization and cosmopolitanism
• The role of media in the emergence of global religious and cultural movements
• Diasporic media and transnational religious communities
• Media, religion and global politics
• The mediatization of religion
• Religion, media, and the global marketplace

Proposals should be sent to Prof. Lynn Schofield Clark, University of Denver (Lynn.Clark@du.edu) by 3 December 2013. Notification of acceptances will be sent out from 15th January 2014.

Conference website is: http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/thrs/events/event2014-08-06.html
You can als follow conference details on Facebook at the International Society of Media, Religion, and Culture page.