37.2558, Confs: Digital Religion V: Interfaces of Discourse, Society, and Politics (Poland)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2558. Tue Aug 04 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2558, Confs: Digital Religion V: Interfaces of Discourse, Society, and Politics (Poland)

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Date: 03-Aug-2026
From: Monika Tosik (Kopytowska) [monika.tosik at uni.lodz.pl]
Subject: Digital Religion V: Interfaces of Discourse, Society, and Politics


Digital Religion V: Interfaces of Discourse, Society, and Politics

Date: 19-Nov-2026 - 21-Nov-2026
Location: Lodz, Poland
Meeting URL: https://www.ethicsinmedia.eu/digital-religion-2026

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Cognitive Science;
Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics

Submission Deadline: 30-Sep-2026

Positioned within contemporary struggles over public meaning, social
affiliation and political legitimacy, digital religion is articulated
through mediated practices in which claims about faith, community,
authority and truth become resources for negotiating belonging,
morality, identity and power.
Digital Religion V invites papers that examine these practices at the
interfaces of discourse, society and politics, with a focus on digital
religious discourse both as product and as practice: as a textual and
multimodal form, and as situated action involving the production,
distribution, and consumption of religious meanings across platforms,
publics and institutional contexts.
The interfaces are approached as sites of contact and tension, with
religious doctrine informing everyday moral judgement, ritual
participation intersecting with activism, institutional authority
being negotiated alongside influencer charisma, and private
spirituality assuming sociopolitical significance. Central to these
processes are conceptualization, representation, recontextualization
and affect: religious meanings are made cognitively accessible,
salient, and invested with the emotional force. Digital affordances,
in turn, enable their circulation across genres, platforms and
publics, attaching them to causes and conflicts and intensifying the
interplay between religious expression, social affiliation and
political positioning.
This conference is especially relevant to linguists because it
foregrounds digital religious discourse as a site for analyzing
language, meaning-making, metaphor, framing, recontextualization, and
multimodal communication across online platforms. It invites
linguistic approaches to how religious identities, authority, affect,
and social boundaries are constructed and negotiated through
discourse, while also encouraging interdisciplinary work that connects
discourse analysis with media, politics, cognition, and digital
communication.
We invite papers addressing, but not limited to, the following
questions and areas:
 - How does digital religious discourse shape public debates,
legitimise authority or mark the limits of belonging?
 - How do social and political conflicts become legible through
religion in platformed public communicative practice?
 - Under what conditions do digital religious practices sustain care,
solidarity, memory and participation, or produce antagonism, exclusion
and radicalisation?
 - What happens when politics borrows religious repertoires, when
religious actors adopt platform tactics, and when platforms order
religious visibility?
 - How are institutional religion, lived religion, spirituality,
atheism and anti-religious discourse brought into contact in digital
environments?
 - How are religious authority, expertise, authenticity, charisma and
credibility established, challenged or displaced under conditions of
platformed visibility?
 - How do religious symbols, narratives, values and moral vocabularies
enter nationalism, populism, conspiracy cultures, extremism and
culture-war discourse?
 - How do metaphors organise the affective and moral intelligibility
of digital religious discourse, shaping how publics recognise threat,
victimhood, duty, crisis, hope or belonging?
 - How are religious identities politicised, and how are social or
political conflicts religionised, across digital platforms?
 - How do digital religious discourses construct publics,
counter-publics, minorities, moral communities, dissent and exclusion?
 - How are gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, migration, diaspora,
class, generation and disability articulated through religious and
anti-religious discourse online?
 - How does digital religious communication respond to war,
displacement, ecological crisis, violence, inequality, insecurity and
social change?
 - How does affect shape the public force of digital religion, from
fear, hope and compassion to resentment, moral outrage, grief and
collective grievance?
 - How do digital affordances, algorithms, metrics, moderation,
recommendation systems and visibility regimes condition religious
discourse and participation?
We welcome theoretical, methodological and empirical papers from media
and communication studies, discourse studies, religious studies,
theology, sociology, anthropology, political science, linguistics,
cultural studies, digital humanities and related fields. Contributions
may focus on particular platforms, communities, traditions,
controversies or media genres, as well as on comparative,
transnational or historical perspectives.
The conference will be organised in a hybrid format, with the
possibility of both on-site and online participation. While the main
conference language is English, a limited number of papers in Polish
may also be accepted.
Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Elizabeth Poole, Keele University, UK
Dr. Stephen Pihlaja, Aston University UK
Conference Date:
November 19-21, 2026
Conference Venue:
Faculty of Philology
University of Lodz
Pomorska 171/173
90-236 Lodz, Poland
Conference Website:
https://www.ethicsinmedia.eu/digital-religion-2026
Conference Email:
digital.religion at uni.lodz.pl
Submissions and Deadlines:
Abstracts in English, along with a short bio including full name,
email address and affiliation, should be submitted by September 30th,
2026 via the conference submission form at:
https://www.ethicsinmedia.eu/digital-religion-2026
Notifications of acceptance will be sent to authors by October 7th,
2026.
Conference Fee:
The conference fee is EUR 80, and the payment deadline is November
3rd, 2026.
A reduced fee for PhD students and participants from low-income
countries is EUR 50.
Bank transfer and exchange costs are paid by participants.
Any inquiries and questions regarding the conference should be sent to
digital.religion at uni.lodz.pl
Proceedings:
Selected papers will be considered for publication in Lodz Papers in
Pragmatics (De Gruyter-Brill) and an edited volume with an
international publisher.
Organizing Committee:
Monika Tosik, Department of Pragmatics, University of Lodz, Poland
Jaroslav Franc, Department of Communication, Palacky University
Olomouc, Czech Republic
Renata Sedlakova, Department of Communication, Palacky University
Olomouc, Czech Republic
Damian Guzek, Center for the Study of the Digital Public Sphere,
University of Silesia in Katowice Department of Communication, Palacký
University Olomouc, Czech Republic
Veronika Müllerová, Department of Communication, Palacký University
Olomouc, Czech Republic



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