Programme

Call for papers 2026

From Disciples to Followers: Questioning the Digital Experience of Religions Online

The 2026 UCSIA Summer School draws attention to the ambivalence and enthusiasm brought forth by religion going digital, both locally and globally. Recognizing the increasing importance of digital ways of experiencing and communicating about faith, religious practice and identity, this year’s summer school focuses on the ways in which religious publics and religious forms of publicity are being reshaped by digital technologies, platforms and political economies. The online mediation of religion – whether in terms of theology, ritual, ethics, or politics – raises new questions about power, knowledge and ignorance. These questions emerge when long-standing religious traditions and their communities intersect with new industries and technologies.

The content of the summer school will be guided on the one hand by questions regarding the internal dynamics of religious traditions, such as:

• In what way are religious traditions impacted by online publics and practices? In what way are religious traditions, beliefs and practices impacted by religious publics online?
• How do religious traditions shape the formation of online publics?
• How does the online sphere transform authoritative notions of what constitutes a ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic’ individual or collective religious experience?
• Can the online sphere suffice for forming religious communities and cultivating religious selves, or does it merely serve as a tool or stepping stone to ‘analogue’ religion?
• How do the new religious publics created by digital technologies interact with the ‘traditional’ ones?
• Which role do online practices play in processes of globalization, uniformization or ‘deculturation’ of religious traditions?

On the other hand, questions of representation and (theo)politics will come to the fore, such as:

• What do concepts such as scale, context and authority mean when it comes to religion and the online sphere? How can we better understand the more implicit presence of religion in social practices and politics, both on- and offline?
• Which historical comparisons can be drawn between former and current media trends with regard to religious traditions and their influence on the social and political level?
• How are debates on the racialization of religion, theological and religious nationalism, and moral vocabularies (re)shaped through digital media?
• How do social media influence the relationship between religion, culture and the (democratic) state?

The UCSIA Summer School is a one-week mentoring programme that encourages junior scholars to explore the interdisciplinary ways of analysing the relationship between religion, culture and society. Key elements of the programme are expert lectures on theory-building and methodology, paper presentations by participants and individual mentoring by the faculty. For this interdisciplinary summer school on online publics and the digital experiences of religion, we welcome research projects from junior scholars (PhD or postdoctoral level) working in humanities, social sciences and law.

The UCSIA Summer School 2026, titled From Disciples to Followers: Questioning the Digital Experience of Religions Online, marks the end of a three-year cycle of summer schools, focused on the entanglements of religion and politics, the communities in which they take shape and function, and the injustices they entail or critique.

Faculty

Yasmin Moll

Based on fieldwork in the Cairo branch of the world’s first Islamic television channel, it traces the ways in which pious struggles over the forms and ends of Islamic media articulated with broader struggles over the forms and ends of a “New Egypt,” radically reconfiguring both the religious and the revolutionary for millions of ordinary people. Taking seriously the internal fractures of Egypt’s Islamic Revival offers new insight on the intersections of religion and politics in the region beyond the conventional “Islamist versus secularist” frameworks that dominate analysis of authoritarianism in the Arab world.

Dr. Moll has published widely on the intersections of religion, media and politics in Muslim societies. This includes on subtitling on Islamic television as a form of critique (Public Culture), on what debates over new forms of Islamic media reveal about shifting theological evaluations of the religious and the secular (Cultural Anthropology), on how the conceptual history of Islamic media provincializes Euro-American decolonizing projects (International Journal of Middle East Studies) and on the changing criteria of ritual aptness in Islamic preaching in a digital media age (Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East) .

Her most recent journal article asks how the idea of a “Godly ethnography” might unsettle in generative ways the taken-for-granted secular horizon of calls to decolonize anthropology (American Anthropologist).

Latest research

Dr. Moll’s newest research examines interactional ethics and theological debates as an overlooked aspect of intangible heritage for marginalized and racialized groups grappling with competing universalisms, with a focus on Nubians in Egypt.

Filmmaking

Dr. Moll trained in ethnographic filmmaking in NYU’s renowned Culture and Media Program. Her most recent film, Hanina/Homesick, screened at Annecy, Margaret Mead, and the Society for Visual Anthropology Film Festival, where it won honorable mention for best short.

Alessandra Vitullo

Publications

Among her most prominent publications is the book I Religionauti. Studiare l’homo religiosus al tempo del web (The Religionauts: Studying the Homo Religiosus in the Age of the Web), published by Morcelliana in 2021.

The last UCSIA Summer School tutor will be added soon!

Do you want to stay tuned? Sign up for our newsletter or follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Bluesky or Instagram.

Assignments

Classes

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday