Lab Media and Religion

On May 28, 2025, ZeMKI member Dr. Dom Ford will give a talk titled “Player Democracy in Old School RuneScape” at the Nordic DiGRA Conference 2025.

Kerstin Radde-Antweiler and Amrei Sander presented their final findings at the conference for the funding line “Recovery, Renewal, and Resilience in a Post-Pandemic World.”

The research focus “Digital Gaming” is collecting abstracts for our special issue on “Beyond Play” until May 31!

Radde-Antweiler's contribution uses the example of mediatized self-crucifixions in the Philippines to show the added value of looking at religious phenomena through and with mediatization approaches.

On April 21, 2025, De Gruyter published ZeMKI member Dr. Dom Ford's new book "Mytholudics - Games and Myth".

ZeMKI member Prof. Dr. Kerstin Radde-Antweiler will hold a workshop at the working group “Geisteswissenschaften und Digitale Spiele” (Humanities and Digital Games) on April 17.

On April 9, 2025, ZeMKI member Dr. Dom Ford will hold a keynote presentation entitled “Mytholudics: Games and Myth” at the International Conference on Victorian and American Myths in Video Games at NOVA University Lisbon.

ZeMKI member Kerstin Radde-Antweiler speaks at the University of North Carolina on “Russian Invasion In Gamevironments And The Negotiation Of Values"

ZeMKI member Dr. Kathrin Trattner was part of the format “Couchwissen” of the twitch channel of arte_tv on the topic Civilization VII.

ZeMKI members Prof Dr Kerstin-Radde Antweiler, Prof Dr Karsten D. Wolf and Prof Dr Christian Schwarzenegger are guest editors for the currently advertised special issue “Beyond Play: The Transformative Power of Digital Gaming in a Deeply Meditized Society” of the journal gamevironments.

ZeMKI member Dr. Kathrin Trattner was interviewed by the Austrian public radio station FM4 on the topic of “Right-wing extremism and games culture”. The interview can be accessed here.

From over 150 applications, the steering committee of the Center for Media, Communication and Information Research at the University of Bremen selected five researchers who will work together with at least two ZeMKI labs in interdisciplinary research for four weeks each until the end of 2025.

At the ZeMKI General Assembly on January 24, 2025, Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp (right) and Prof. Dr. Kerstin Radde-Antweiler (left) were confirmed in office as ZeMKI spokespersons for a further two years. In addition, Sandra Kero (center) was elected as a new representative of the doctoral students for the ZeMKI Steering Committee. Kero has been (…)

A new chapter on the study of monsters in video games has been published by Joleen Blom and ZeMKI member Dr. Dom Ford in ‘Monstrosity in Games and Play’.

The ZeMKI Research Day will take place on January 24. At the internal event, current projects will be presented and discussed, overarching research perspectives will be developed at thematic tables and current questions from the ZeMKI doctoral program and from the group of postdocs will be discussed. The Research Day is taking place for the (…)

Our Fellowship Program invites international researchers to Bremen for four weeks to deepen and connect their research in the transformation of media, communication, and information. We are looking for established scholars who want to enjoy the thriving interdisciplinary research environment at ZeMKI.

The journal gamevironments celebrates its 10th anniversary with the publication of the 21st issue “Revisiting Gamevironments”.

The international anniversary conference of the ZeMKI in the 20th year of its existence examines the foundations of media and communication research: It is about exploring long-term trends resulting from today's media change and visions for the future.

Another year is coming to an end and we would like to say 'thank you'!

ZeMKI members Prof. Dr. Christian Schwarzenegger, Dr. Erik Koenen, Prof. Dr. Kerstin Radde-Antweiler and Prof. Dr. Karsten D. Wolf have published the article “Beyond Play: Researching the Transformative Power of Digital Gaming in Deeply Mediatized Societies” in the journal Media and Communication.

The monograph by ZeMKI member Samira Ghozzi-Ben Miled (M.A.) on "Tintin" - Western Constructions of the Middle East in Pop Cultural Media: A Discourse Analysis on the Construction of the Other" was recently published by VIRR.

On November 29, 2024, ZeMKI member Dr. Dom Ford will give a talk on "How players talk about disastrous game launches: What went wrong with Cities: Skylines II?" at the “Conference on Language, Norms and Digital Lives” at the University of Copenhagen.

ZeMKI member Prof. Dr. Kerstin Radde-Antweiler will give a lecture on November 16, 2014 on the topic “How to Deal with an Aggressor in Real Time? Digital Gaming as Part of Interpreting and Negotiating the Russian Invasion of 2022” at the University of Heidelberg. The workshop will analyze video games that reconstruct, model, or draw (…)

A new report from the Recov-19 project on the topic “Between faith and pandemic – How Corona has changed religious communities” was published in the online magazine “up2date”. Easter 2020: Instead of together with tens of thousands of believers, the Pope celebrated the Easter mass alone with a few other clergy. Elsewhere, digital offerings flourished, (…)