Marta Kołodziejska    

 

Religious Institutions and Deep Mediatization: Broadening the Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives

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The lecture will focus on how to approach studying religious institutions in the context of mediatization. While it may seem like this topic has little novel insights to offer, I will argue that it is in fact not the case when we try to answer the question of how religious organizations (churches in particular) adapt to the challenges of digital society. In the lecture, I will show how neither the institutional nor constructivist approaches fully do justice to the complexity of strategies that religious institutional actors undertake in order to participate in this media-related societal change. In doing so, I will revisit the notion of "innovation" and search for ways to detach it from technological advancement, in order to instead approach it from the angle of fulfilling goals and aims of religious institutions. Based on three case studies from two research projects (2018-2024) from the UK and Poland, I will put forward the concept of media settlers as one way to fill the research gap. The lecture ultimately argues for more sophisticated analytical approaches to religious institutional agency in the digital age, challenging assumptions about both religious conservatism and technological determinism.