This panel explores the reshaping of religion across diverse media environments to illustrate how communities experience and represent traditional beliefs. By highlighting how religion plays a key role in creative movements, mediatization, migration, and ritual, the presentations collectively demonstrate the reshaping of religious identity, expression, authority, authenticity, and commodification. Each of the papers explores traditional practices and sacred forms that contribute to the intersections of power, authenticity, and creativity that enable meaning-making in different religious communities such as Islam, Hinduism, and folk religion.
Muslim Futurism has emerged as a creative movement through which artists reimagine Muslim identities beyond dominant narratives shaped by Islamophobia, surveillance, and cultural stereotyping. This paper examines how contemporary Muslim artists utilize fashion and photography as visual and material practices to imagine alternative futures. Through stylized clothing, and staged imagery, artists create speculative representations that foreground dignity, creativity, and agency in Muslim life. Rather than positioning Muslims within static representations of tradition, these works engage aesthetic experimentation to articulate forward-looking visions of identity and belonging. This paper argues that fashion and photography function not only as artistic mediums but also as tools for speculative world-building within Muslim visual culture. Building on my doctoral research, which examines how Muslim Futurism operates as a form of everyday activism, the paper situates these artistic practices within broader sociological discussions of lived religion, visual culture, and everyday resistance (Scott 1985; Johansson and Vinthagen 2016).
Field observations and digital ethnography reveal a comprehensive use of popular media in representing goddess Mazu and The Mazu Ancestral Temple in Meizhou Island. This paper analyzes new mediated elements added to the temple's physical and online presence, focusing on how digitalization strategies create a curated and controlled visitor experience for worshipers and tourists under an atheist regime. The central argument is that the mediatization of Mazu worship is shaped by the Chinese communist party’s Sinicization of religion—where religion is formed within a cultural framework—and by recent state policies promoting the digitalization of Chinese culture. These trends are situated within broader developments in religious tourism and heritage management. The study highlights the strategic use of cultural soft power and the tightening of Communist Party control over religion, especially in a digital future context.
Why does Korean popular culture resonate so powerfully with global audiences? This paper argues that the global appeal of K-culture can be understood through narratives of migration, trauma, and resilience shaped by Korea’s collective historical experience. Examining four films – Secret Sunshine (2007), Parasite (2019), Minari (2020), and the recent global hit KPop Demon Hunters (2025) – the paper traces how Korean cinema increasingly engages themes of displacement, suffering, and survival. Placed in chronological conversation with the rise of the Korean Wave, these films reveal how collective trauma rooted in Japanese colonial rule, the Korean War, and rapid modernization is transformed into narratives of endurance and hope. Drawing on trauma theory (Bessel van der Kolk, Dominick LaCapra) and postcolonial trauma studies, the paper suggests that K-culture’s global resonance lies in its portrayal of “sacred resilience” – a culturally inflected vision of surviving hardship through relational endurance, moral imagination, and spiritual sensibility.
This paper examines how devotional apps curate Hindu religious experience and reshape everyday religiosity amid the expansion of digital infrastructure. Using qualitative analysis of app content using the walkthrough method, interactions with app co-founders and app users, as well as field-based observations of pilgrimage in Gaya, Bihar, India, including the state-recognised Pitripaksha Mela alongside accounts from priests and pilgrims, the research explores how market-oriented platforms complement portions of domestic and pilgrimage ritual work into on-demand services (guided pujas, mantra chanting, darshan, chadhava, and outsourced rituals executed by local priests).This research finds that the key ethical and analytical problem of the digital devotion is not access but governance of authenticity. Popularity, ratings, and download matrices can oversimplify the complex, sensory, communal processes of meaning-making. This highlights the need to examine bias, power dynamics and the “onlife” liminality through which digital sacred forms circulate and become accepted as the norm.
| Sana Patel | sp227@rice.edu | View |