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The Tehran International Conference on Religion and Media

Tehran, Iran, November 8-10, 2005

Co-sponsored by Tehran University and the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB)

Conference Venues: University of Tehran and IRIB University

Fifty international and Iranian presenters participated in this ground-breaking event.  Public and student interest in this conference was quite high, with over three hundred attending the major sessions.  The conference concluded with a formal ceremony including cultural presentations and formal remarks from Iranian hosts and foreign guests.

Publication venues are being sought for some papers from the conference.

To read the abstracts of all conference papers, please click here.

Conference website: www.religion-media.ir

For further contact information, contact:

Hamid Abdollahyan, Associate Professor
Department of Communication
Faculty of Social Sciences
The University of Tehran
Nasr Bridge, Ale Ahmad Avenue
P.O. Box 14395 / 773
Postal Code 14137
Tehran, IRAN

Journalism Through the Eyes of Faith:
Negotiating Values, Fairness, and Accuracy

A conference for journalists, educators, and students
on the role of religious commitments in the work of professional journalists

What challenges does the business of news making present for journalists of faith? How does a journalist writing for a pluralistic audience balance personal values and beliefs with the call for objectivity and fairness?

September 20-22, 2006
Bethel University
3900 Bethel Drive
St. Paul, MN 55112
For more information contact:
Dr. Phyllis Alsdurf
651-638-6149
mailto:palsdurf@bethel.edu

Fundamentalism and the Media

The Center for Media, Religion, and Culture
University of Colorado at Boulder, USA
October 10-12, 2006

New Submission Deadline
July 1, 2006

Conference Information

Co-Sponsors: World Association
for Christian Communication/North American Region and
World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), London

The media today are the primary location of local, national, and global discourse. Social, religious, cultural, and political symbols and ideas are shaped and shared through media words and pictures. It seems that the religion we see in media is increasingly polarized, with emerging fronts of conflict and struggle represented there. It is often thought that the religious impulse most responsible is the impulse to Fundamentalism. While there is great debate about the meaning and applicability of this term, in popular and public discourse it remains the commonplace way to think about these issues.

This conference will focus on the central questions of Fundamentalism and the Media. It is intended to be a starting point of a global conversation about how best to address religious misunderstanding and conflict in the media sphere, and how the media sphere itself might be used to more positive ends of peace and understanding. The media clearly have the capacity to divide and to unite, to feed ignorance and to feed understanding. This conference will open a dialogue between academics, practitioners, and members of the religious community on how to move forward.

5th International Conference on Media, Religion, and Culture
July 6-9, 2006, Stockholm, Sweden

Submission Deadlines

Panel Proposals: January 16, 2006
Paper Proposals: February 13, 2006

From the Conference Website:

The religious significance of the media in contemporary culture calls for further exploration, and we are looking forward to the 2006 conference as an important venue for presentations and dialogue. The purpose of the conference is to share developments in and research on media, religion, and culture. Papers and panels are welcome in all areas of this multifaceted field, but we also encourage contributors to address the role of media and religion in the context of cultural tension and conflict."

For more information and details:

http://www.sigtunastiftelsen.se/cmrc

4th International Conference on Media, Religion, and Culture
September 1-4, 2004, Louisville, Kentucky USA

Call for Proposals:
All submissions must be received by November 7, 2003.

The 4th International Conference on Media, Religion, and Culture invites proposals for papers, panels, and creative showcases.

The conference will focus on five themes:

1. Production: how and why diverse print and electronic media have acted as bearers of social, cultural, and religious meaning;
2. Community: ways that media have been used in temples, synagogues, mosques, and churches to enrich worship and enhance dialogue and a sense of belonging;
3. Audience: how audiences have interpreted or used particular media for both implicit and explicit religious ends;
4. Ethics: religious responses to issues of media literacy or media justice;
5. Globalization: worldwide issues, including virtual religion in which a sense of place doesn't seem to matter.

The purpose of the conference is to share the latest developments in and research on religion, media, and culture. Each of the preceding three international conferences generated continuing conversations as well as a published book. Rethinking Media, Religion, and Culture (Sage, 1997),
edited by Stewart Hoover and Knut Lunby, followed the first meeting in Uppsala, Sweden; Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media (Columbia University Press, 2002), edited by Stewart Hoover and Lynn Schofield Clark, followed the second meeting in Boulder, Colorado; and Mediating Media: Studies in Media, Religion, and Culture (T&T Clark, 2003), edited by Jolyon
Mitchell and Sophia Marriage, followed the third meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland. A selective anthology of quality original work will likely emerge from this conference, too.

Proposals should be no longer than 500 words. They must include:

- Title of proposed presentation
- Name(s) and title(s) of author(s)
- Institutional affiliation(s) and address(es) of author(s)
- Category (paper, panel, or creative showcase)
- Description of presentation

An international panel will evaluate proposals on the basis of originality and significance. Applicants will be notified of their status in February, giving those chosen to present six months to prepare. All presenters must preregister.

Send proposals as email messages or .rtf attachments to
ferre@louisville.edu.

Conference Organizer:

John P. Ferré, Ph.D.
Department of Communication
University of Louisville
Louisville, KY 40292 USA
ferre@louisville.edu
phone: (Int+1) 502-852-6976

Supported by the Louisville Institute and the International Study Commission on Media, Religion, and Culture.

Media, Religion and Culture Working Group (IAMCR, July 2004)

The Media, Religion and Culture Working Group (a.k.a. Grupo de trabalho Mídia, religião e cultura) invites proposals for papers to be presented at the IAMCR Conference
Comunicação e Democracia Perspectivas para um novo Mundo in Porto Alegre 25-30th of July 2004. Religion, Power Relations, and the Media could specify the Conference theme to our field of interest. Not only is it a very wide area, but there is undoubtedly a context of actuality, which solicits scholarly interest. Many and different religious groups are either motor or victim (or both) of renegotiations of power relations in many societies, use the media to their ideological advantage, or have to undergo harassment, or even defy pubic opinion in the vest of 'fundamentalists' or terrorists.

This working group invites proposals for papers dealing with the complexities of religious agencies in the magnet field of media and power; it has many thinkable, interesting constellations, and there are a number of different scientific approaches to this interrelation, theoretical, semiotic, empirical (or a combination). All approaches are welcome for proposed papers, provided they offer good quality and interesting, novel perspectives in their respective
methodological nature. Over and above scholarly concerns in the context of the Conference
theme, this working group continues to be interested in quality papers treating media in central religious communication processes, from community building to proclamation, art to expression of faith, apologetic and propagandistic media usage and reception.

Send your 500 words abstract by 14. February 2004 to ehrat@unigre.it and an identical copy to iamcr-ctp@encip.org. Presenters will be advised by 12. April 2004 of the acceptance of their paper proposals. The full text of accepted papers must be submitted no later than 13. July 2004.

Convenor:
Johannes Ehrat S.J., PhD
Adj. Prof. communication sciences, film theory & semiotic
Pontificia Universitas Gregoriana
Piazza della Pilotta 4
I-00187 Roma
ehrat@unigre.it

Media and Religion Workshop, American Academy of Religion Pre-Conference Session.

Theme of 2003: "Representations of Muslims and Islam in the Media."

For more information on this pre-conference workshop:

The international Sacred Media Conference, July 10-13, 2003 - Jyväskylä, Finland.

The topics of the conference were:

- Religion and terrorism
- Western media facing otherness
- Sacred technology
- Global media ethics

The topics of the sessions were:

- religion as news
- visual truth and reality
- myths, icons and narratives in media contents
- western media facing otherness
- religion and technology
- global media ethics
- theoretical and methodological challenges of research on media and religion

For further information, please go to this site: www.sacredmedia.jyu.fi

Programme -->

Thursday, 10 July

16:00 - Arrival and registration
19:00 Reception hosted by the City of Jyväskylä

Friday 11 July

8:00 Registration
9:00 Coffee
10:00 Opening Ceremony: Minister of Culture, Archbishop Jukka Paarma, Director General of Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) Arne Wessberg
11:15 Plenary I: Western Media facing Otherness. Robert Dannin, giving lecture on "Islamophobia: made in the USA" and Mihály Hoppál
12:30 Lunch
14:00 Sessions
15:15 Coffee Break
15:45-17:15 Sessions
19:00 Reception by the University of Jyväskylä

Saturday 12 July

9:00 Plenary II: Sacred Technology. Anne Foerst, Michael Pye, Stewart Hoover
10:45 Coffee Break
11:15 Plenary continues
13:00 Lunch
14:30 Sessions
15:45 Coffee Break
16:15-17:30 Sessions
19:00 Panel discussion: Religion and Terrorism with a special programme by Wimme Saari ("joiku" - a special traditional unison Lappish chant)

Sunday 13 July

9:00 Sessions
10:45 Coffee Break
11:15 Plenary III: Global Media Ethics. Robert White, Zygmunt Bauman, Janina Bauman, giving lecture on "The Memory of Holocaust: The Sources"
13:00 Closing of the conference: Rector Aino Sallinen, The University of Jyväskylä, Archbishop Leo
14:00 Lunch

Third Public Conference on Media, Religion, and Culture at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, July 1999.

http://www.div.ed.ac.uk/extra/mrcconf/

Includes the conference program. Information about a book to be published, which draws upon several papers delivered at this conference, will be available soon.

Second Public Conference on Media, Religion, and Culture at the University of Colorado, January 1996.

A book highlighting some of the papers delivered at this conference is available:

Stewart M. Hoover and Lynn Schofield Clark (Eds.), Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

For ordering information: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/