26 -27 November 2009
Monash University Conference Centre
Level 7, 30 Collins Street
Melbourne

Registration (includes lunches and morning and afternoon tea):
$ 160 wage earners
$ 100 students and non-wage earners* *

*CALL FOR PAPERS *

This conference will focus on religious communication and religious aesthetic forms. The underlying impulse is to bring into dialogue scholarly work undertaken in religious studies and theology with debates and research in the fields of communications and cultural studies, including performance, literary, visual and aesthetic analyses. The premise of the conference is that communication and aesthetic forms play an active role in shaping a religious culture’s sensibility rather than merely reflecting that religious community’s ideology, logic or worldview. In short, religious communication makes religious experience meaningful, possible and effective.

The conference will have a wide interpretation of ‘religious communication’, including, but extending religious communication beyond ‘communication studies’ understood as ‘mass media’, to include religious modes of communication such as prayer, sermons, revelation, art, theatre and ritual, as well as religious uses of mass media. We invite papers from the perspectives across the humanities and social sciences, including literature, music, performance, film and television, anthropology, sociology and history, as well as religious studies and theology. We also invite papers from all religious perspectives.

The conference is particularly interested in exploring:
* Religious affect and its relationship to different media (e.g. song, prayer, architecture, film, performance, images in general)
* Religious interpretation and textual hermeneutics (e.g. literalism versus symbolism)
* The use of communication media and art forms by religious groups to create a sense of community
* Communication as a ‘portal’ or window to the ‘divine’ and/or the ‘sacred’
* Cross-cultural adaptation and the creolisation of religious forms
* Religion and the sacred in popular culture
* Modernity, post-modernity and religious communication.

This conference will be held immediately prior to the World Parliament of Religions, providing an opportunity for reflection on religious practice and the relationship between religious identity and the aesthetic forms of religious communication, and cross cultural communication.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 22 June 2009
Please email an abstract of 200-250 words, and a short biographical note to:
Elizabeth.Coleman <at> arts.monash.edu.au

Conveners:

Dr Elizabeth Burns Coleman
Associate Professor Gil-Soo Han
Communications and Media Studies, ECPS, Monash University

Supported by:
English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University Performance and Social Aesthetics Research Unit, Monash University

http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/conferences/religious-communication/