BSA Socrel Study Group

This year’s conference was on the theme of “Communicating Religion” and commenced with a keynote from Uppsala University’s Mia Lövheim on the theme of “Communicating Religion in Mediatised Society”. Drawing on Stig Hjarvard’s work in mediatisation theory — how religion is mediated through secular media institutions — Lövheim contended that this theory can be a useful framework for addressing the complexity of communicating religion, for example by asking what kind of religion is communicated and what religion becomes when it is communicated. Drawing on her reflections in interdisciplinary research, Lövheim urged scholars to engage with the theoretical issues of definitions and to be knowledgeable about the various forms of mediatisation of religion. A number of parallel sessions follows throughout the first day. In “Religion and the Secular: Institutions” Alp Arat communicated the findings of the Leverhulme Trust-funded mappingmindfulness.net project, the first “large-scale social