No. 40 - Kerstin Radde-Antweiler, Marta Kołodziejska, Łukasz Fajfer, Dorota Hall: Religious Organizations as Media Settlers. Strategies towards the Trends of Deep Mediatization

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown-type control measures, both collective and individual actors, including religious ones (Campbell, 2020; Hall and Kołodziejska, 2021), have been forced to move their practice to online spaces. However, the digitalization of all areas of human life, although of increased intensity nowadays, is hardly a new phenomenon, nor is the social research on this process and its effects. Already before the pandemic, studies of mediatization had grown into an established academic field. Hepp (2016) coined the term ‘deep mediatization’ that invites the analysis of how the media, especially digital ones, saturate the everyday experience of individuals, collectivities and organizations. Specific concepts and research approaches have also been developed in the area of studies of mediatization and religion, the examples being ‘religious-social shaping of technology’ (RSST) (Campbell, 2010) and later ‘religious digital creatives’ (Campbell, 2021). Studies of how religious actors use the digital media and shape them have added to a broader current of actor-centered mediatization research (Krotz, 2009; Hepp et al., 2017) that proposes an alternative to the media-centered approach drawing on Hjarvard’s (2011, 2014) institutional mediatization theory. Still, there is space for further conceptualizations of the religious actors’ engagement with the digital media.

About the authors

Marta Kołodziejska
Marta Kołodziejska, is a sociologist of religion, currently working at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her main research focus is on the relationship between the media and religious community, identity, authority, as well as spirituality. Her most recent publications include Online Catholic Communities: community, authority and religious individualization (Routledge, 2018), and COVID-19 Pandemic, Mediatization and the Polish Sociology of Religion, with prof. Dorota Hall (Polish Sociological Review 2021). She is the post-doc in the Polish-German project Minorities and the Media.

Łukasz Fajfer 
Łukasz Fajfer is a research associate at the University of Bremen. He studied European social communication in Poland and Germany. He was granted an award of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in 2010. In 2012 he received his PhD in religious studies from the University of Erfurt. He worked as a lecturer at the University of Bremen and as a research associate at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg. He is interested in the topics of mediatization of religion, Orthodox Churches and the contemporary situation of religions. He is the post-doc in the Polish-German project Minorities and the Media.

Dorota Hall 
Dorota Hall is a cultural anthropologist and sociologist, Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and President of the International Study of Religion in Eastern and Central Europe Association (ISORECEA). Her research interests focus on the entanglement of religion in a variety of power relations, involving in particular gender and sexualities regimes. She has published articles in international journals and authored a book Searching for a Place: LGBT Christians in Poland (2016, in Polish). She is the co-PI for the Polish-German project Minorities and the Media.

Kerstin Radde-Antweiler
Kerstin Radde-Antweiler is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany. Her research focuses on mediatized religion, mediatization theory, video gaming, and ritual studies. She authored several articles and co-edited several volumes and special journal issues, including Methods for Researching Video Games and Religion (Routledge 2018), Mediatized Religion in Asia (Routledge 2019), and the Handbook of Religion and Journalism (Routledge 2020). She is co-editor-in-chief of gamevironments, the first academic journal with a specific focus on video gaming and religion. She is the co-PI for the Polish-German project Minorities and the Media.