Minorities and the Media. The Construction of religious Identity in Times of profound Mediatization

• Duration: 2018 – 2021
• Project lead: Prof. Dr. Kerstin Radde-Antweiler

Head: Prof. Dr. Kerstin Radde-Antweiler in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Dorota Hall, Polish Academy of Sciences

Funding: German Research Foundation (DFG)

Media coverage of the refugee crisis has reinforced the tendency of media marginalization of the Christian minority. This has affected smaller Christian communities in particular, forcing them to rethink their self-perception in identity-forming discourses. Questions such as “Who are we?” and “What role do we play in society? “2 have once again gained in importance. The media play a decisive role in these identity-forming discourses. The main question of the project is: How do Christian minorities construct their identity communicatively in and through religious media? It is assumed that the responsible members of the Christian minority churches use the media (consciously and unconsciously) to construct the identity of their communities. This construction process can be traced in the media use of the religious actors together with certain identity-forming discourses in different media.
In the project, the Ortodox churches and the Seventh-day Adventist churches in Poland and Great Britain are used as case studies, as they each have a different religious structure and demography and a different media ensemble in both countries. The triangulation of qualitative research instruments and data collection methods (media content analysis, episodic interviews) with data analysis techniques (critical discourse analysis) is intended to clarify which aspects are fundamental to the communicative construction processes of religious identity. Thanks to the multi-method approach, it will be possible to analyze the dependence of religious identities on religious landscapes as well as on religious discourses in the respective countries. It will also be possible to show which power constellations play a role in the communicative construction processes of religious identities in the respective groups. The project can thus close a research gap in religious studies, sociology and communication and media studies by investigating the connections between media discourses and the construction processes of Christian minorities. Furthermore, the project integrates a comparative perspective in order to analyze the differences and similarities between two countries, two Christian denominations and two religious landscapes