Why We Come Together: Media, Religion and Community

The 2026 Media and Religion pre-conference workshop will reflect on the intersections of media, religion, and community—not as fixed categories, but as active and unstable formations through which people come to belong, to struggle, and to imagine otherwise. In keeping with this year’s presidential theme of “Future/s,” how might we think about what the study of religion and media can offer to the theoretical and practical work of community formation and vice-versa?  How are communities mediated, fragmented, destroyed, or newly constituted in our hypermediated moment, and what form(s) do they take? And how might these questions help us think about a range of possible futures: political, planetary, professional, intellectual?