The project has advanced the state of the art through its focus on race and class within digital religion studies. As well as contributing to gendered analysis of user interaction, of which there is currently little research, this project’s unique and novel aspect is its focus on class and race and the racial analysis of Pentecostal media output and user interaction.
Moreover, in her first article the researcher used post-feminism as an analytical framework in order to explore the behaviours, ideals and biopolitical technologies that underpin a religious celebrity couple’s use of social media. As post-feminism is rarely used as a theoretical concept in the Sociology of Religion and has not been used so far in the field of Digital Religion, and because post-feminism is rarely discussed in terms of its impact on men and is much less commonly looked out outside of the Global North, this makes the academic contribution a highly novel one. The researcher also pointed to the white, racialised overtones and ‘whiteness’ of the images promoted towards the followers who are mainly black and mixed race, arguing that the church promotes a form of ‘whitening’ among its followers.
In her second article, the researcher uses an intersectional perspective to focus in particular on religion and race as intersecting forms of oppression and to examine how digital media provides flexible spaces in which to insert critiques of religion from marginalised perspectives.This novel research therefore contributes to a small but growing field of literature on the sociology of religion and race, and in particular digital religion and race, also bringing to the fore research on such issues from the Global South, of which there is very little.
The expected results of the project were therefore met, both theoretically in extending the state of the art, and practically in the completion of two articles sent for peer-review at the end of the project.
The impact of this research is located at the intersections of Sociology of Religion and Media Studies. Specifically, the project has contributed new knowledge in the field of Digital Religion. The aim of the project is also to start a conversation on the role of religion in the ’whitening’ of religious identity. This project has ramifications around the world, considering the explosive growth of Pentecostalism in regions such as Africa and the Americas. Project results have been presented through conferences (national and international) and seminars. Users of the results are primarily the researcher’s academic peers, who will be able to interact with and build on her research. The aim is for new knowledge generated by the project to be published in high quality, peer-reviewed journals, and in keeping with the H2020 aims and Article 29.2 of the Model Grant Agreement, these will be open-access journals, in order to allow greater impact and access to a wider audience. The project will also make use of EU research repositories such as openaire.eu. Open access also allows other users of the results such as citizens and society to interact with the information. Civil society organisations interested in such research on religion are, e.g. Pew Forum, one of the biggest organisations in the US on religious research, who disseminate widely online.
