Call for Papers
Islam and the Media
January 7-10, 2010
The Center for Media, Religion and Culture
School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Colorado, Boulder
www.colorado.edu/journalism/cmrc
The events of September 11, 2001 have unleashed an unprecedented period of
global re-thinking of issues in media and religion. Islam has emerged as a
major focus of inquiry and debate, but the interaction between contemporary
Islam and the media has rarely been addressed. This conference will thus
engage a set of questions on the place of Islam within global, regional,
national and local media.
If we believe the torrent of popular headlines on Islam today, it seems that
only Muslim extremists are talking about their religion, pursuing a project
that claims to defend it from ?secularized? Western culture. From Bin
Laden?s call to jihad to the angry reaction of Muslims to the Danish
cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, Muslims are portrayed in the media as
irrational followers of a religion adamantly out of step with modernity. In
the face of this, and perhaps in order to balance their coverage of Islam,
Western journalists, pundits, and others have been asking ?where are the
moderate Muslims?? But few true moderates have emerged. Instead, some
Western media have turned to another extreme: Muslim secularists or ?Muslim
non-believers?--voices which deserve media attention, but which arguably
stand at the opposite fringe, rather than nearer the center of how Islam is
lived and understood today.
Muslims, both in the Muslim world and in the diaspora, have found themselves
compelled to speak for the ?real? Islam and explain its relevance in
modernity both to themselves and to non-Muslims. This process is at the same
time generating divergent discourses that arguably are already coming to
challenge the religious authority of clerical Islam. Today, Muslim men and
women, young and old, secularists and Islamists, Westerners and Easterners,
gay and straight, rappers and comedians, journalists and scholars, bloggers
and televangelists, are changing the conventional pathways of religious
discourse and disintegrating the old centers of knowledge production within
Islam. In fact, Muslims around the world are taking advantage of new media
platforms like the Internet and other forms of conventional media like
satellite television, music and film to articulate an arguably ?pure? or
?modern? Islam. These media have become prime discursive spaces in which
Islamic knowledge is contested, reinterpreted, and popularly re-mediated.
Given the unprecedented amplification of this inner struggle within Islam,
it is imperative to ask questions such as: who speaks for Islam today using
what original platforms? Does the pluralization of Muslim voices lead
necessarily to innovations in the core of Islamic teachings or is it merely
a shift in method to reaffirm a message of orthodoxy? Are these new voices
accessible to large numbers of Muslims? And how are contemporary media
deployed to facilitate this shift in Islamic knowledge production? Thus, a
range of questions dealing with the mediation of Islam and other religions
are also coming to the fore.
This international conference will bring together scholars on Islam and
contemporary media, media professionals, activists and NGOs to reflect on
the implications of these developments. Papers and panels may address, but
should not be limited to, the following topics:
? The representation of Islam in global media
? Journalism and Islam
? Images of Islam in Western entertainment media
? Muslim voices in Western media
? Media and the ?clash of civilizations?
? Contemporary Islamic media and the transformation of religious knowledge
? The impact of new Muslim media on patterns of religious learning and
practice
? The proliferation of Islamic websites and Islamic discourse on the
Internet
? The weakening of traditional Islamic institutions
? Articulations of Islam in popular culture
? The intersections of Islam and consumer culture
? The impact of mediated transnational Islam on the Ummah and nation
? The role of Muslim diasporas in the new Islam
? The role of women in shaping the teachings of new Islam
? Muslim minorities? use of media globally, regionally, and locally
? The impact of new media on social and cultural patterns in Muslim
societies
? Representations of contemporary Islam in Muslim and Western media
? New Muslim media, public sphere and democracy
? Islam, globalization, and religious identity
? Contemporary Islamic thought and new mediations of Islamic heritage
? Methodologies: how to study Islam in the media age
? Methodologies: social-scientific, humanistic, and ?theological? analyses
? Media and the making of Islamic religious ?celebrity?
*Confirmed Keynote Speakers*
Charles Hirschkind: University of California, Berkeley- author of *The
Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics.
*
Zarqa Nawaz: filmmaker and writer of the critically-acclaimed TV series *A
Little Mosque in the Prairie.*
*Deadline*
Please send a *300-word abstract by May 15, 2009* to Nabil Echchaibi at
(nabil.echchaibi /at/ colorado.edu)
A detailed conference Website will be available shortly.
For further information and questions please contact Nabil Echchaibi at
(nabil.echchaibi /at/ colorado.edu) or Stewart Hoover at (hoover /at/ colorado.edu)
