[Commlist] CFP: Digital Religion V: Interfaces of Discourse, Society, and Politics

Conference

Pomorska 171/173
University of Lodz, Faculty of Philology, Department of Pragmatics
90-236 Lodz, Poland

https://www.ethicsinmedia.eu/digital-religion-2026

Date: 19/11/2026 - 21/11/2026
Registration deadline: 3/11/2026
Call for papers ending on: 30/09/2026

Positioned within contemporary struggles over public meaning, social
affiliation and political legitimacy, digital religion is articulated 
through
mediated practices in which claims about faith, community, authority and
truth become resources for negotiating belonging, morality, identity and
power.

Digital Religion V invites papers that examine these practices at the
interfaces of discourse, society and politics, with a focus on digital
religious discourse both as product and as practice: as a textual and
multimodal form, and as situated action involving the production,
distribution, and consumption of religious meanings across platforms, 
publics
and institutional contexts.

The interfaces are approached as sites of contact and tension, with 
religious
doctrine informing everyday moral judgement, ritual participation
intersecting with activism, institutional authority being negotiated
alongside influencer charisma, and private spirituality assuming
sociopolitical significance. Central to these processes are
conceptualization, representation, recontextualization and affect: religious
meanings are made cognitively accessible, salient, and invested with the
emotional force. Digital affordances, in turn, enable their circulation
across genres, platforms and publics, attaching them to causes and conflicts
and intensifying the interplay between religious expression, social
affiliation and political positioning.

We invite papers addressing, but not limited to, the following questions and
areas:

• How does digital religious discourse shape public debates, legitimise
authority or mark the limits of belonging?

• How do social and political conflicts become legible through religion in
platformed public communicative practice?

• Under what conditions do digital religious practices sustain care,
solidarity, memory and participation, or produce antagonism, exclusion and
radicalisation?

• What happens when politics borrows religious repertoires, when religious
actors adopt platform tactics, and when platforms order religious 
visibility?

• How are institutional religion, lived religion, spirituality, atheism and
anti-religious discourse brought into contact in digital environments?

• How are religious authority, expertise, authenticity, charisma and
credibility established, challenged or displaced under conditions of
platformed visibility?

• How do religious symbols, narratives, values and moral vocabularies enter
nationalism, populism, conspiracy cultures, extremism and culture-war
discourse?

• How do metaphors organise the affective and moral intelligibility of
digital religious discourse, shaping how publics recognise threat,
victimhood, duty, crisis, hope or belonging?

• How are religious identities politicised, and how are social orpolitical
conflicts religionised, across digital platforms?

• How do digital religious discourses construct publics, counter-publics,
minorities, moral communities, dissent and exclusion?

• How are gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, migration, diaspora,class,
generation and disability articulated through religious and anti-religious
discourse online?

• How does digital religious communication respond to war, displacement,
ecological crisis, violence, inequality, insecurity and social change?

• How does affect shape the public force of digital religion, from fear,
hope and compassion to resentment, moral outrage, grief and collective
grievance?

• How do digital affordances, algorithms, metrics, moderation,
recommendation systems and visibility regimes condition religious discourse
and participation?



We welcome theoretical, methodological and empirical papers from media and
communication studies, discourse studies, religious studies, theology,
sociology, anthropology, political science, linguistics, cultural studies,
digital humanities and related fields. Contributions may focus on particular
platforms, communities, traditions, controversies or media genres, as 
well as
on comparative, transnational or historical perspectives.



Organizer
Department of Pragmatics
University of Lodz
Poland

in collaboration with

Department of Communication
Palacky University Olomouc
Czech Republic

and

Center for the Study of the Digital Public Sphere
University of Silesia in Katowice
Poland
Institution
University of Lodz, Department of Pragmatics
Kontakperson
Monika Tosik (Kopytowska)
Kontakperson E-Mail Addresse
(digital.religion /at/ uni.lodz.pl)

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