Center for Global Islamic Studies

This workshop attends to the processes by which religion is made public by/through media in Africa. In Africa certain “old” media (e.g., print and radio) remain very important for religious expression. However, the recent media revolution and technological advancement in the wake of media deregulation with a broadened range of media forms, including new media has opened up unprecedented opportunities for religious publicity. At the same time, it has also created spaces where new actors – preachers, activists, ordinary Muslims – engage and experiment with and consume various “old” and “new” religious and non-religious media. Such media can quite often be sites of public debate, contestation, and transformation. While different religious actors and movements use media to mobilize and promote diverse modes of religious publicness that form boundaries and encourage strict adherence to a particular tradition, the same media can also provide opportunities for publics to continue to interact across or outside those boundaries. In this way, religious publicity not only helps to draw boundaries but can also shift or even collapse them. This happens across different religious traditions. Considering the complexity of systems of media and religious publicity, scholars from the social sciences and humanities will focus on the ways in which religious actors and Muslims in particular are using media in public life. We will focus on cases about media and public Islam in Africa, as well as other traditions for comparative reflection.

This workshop has been made possible through a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation Initiative on Religion and International Affairs. It has been cosponsored by UF’s Center for African Studies and the Department of Religion.