Religion in Emergent Media Spaces

“Why We Come Together”: Media, Religion, and Community

Nathan Schneider — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:17:45 +0000

“Why We Come Together”: Media, Religion, and Community Nathan Schneider Thu, 03/26/2026 - 11:17

The Center for Media, Religion, and Culture
University of Colorado Boulder

October 21-23, 2026

In a sermon he delivered at the Trinity Church in New York City, Fred Moten (2020) reminded congregants of the meaning of fellowship and “why we come together.” In recounting a personal story of how a community in his native Arkansas gathered one day to the surprise of his mother to complete the work on his deceased grandfather’s garden, Moten emphasized the true value of collecting and responding to the call as communities working together not only to overturn the soil and help a family cope with its grief, but to overturn the order of a turbulent world. He says: “…maybe we can begin again deeply to consider what it is to have been called, what it is to have been or be collected, gathered… [we come together] to take note of that and not only to wonder at it and be thankful for it, but also to consider what form call and response must take for us now that the world is drowning and burning, freezing and melting, starving and engorging itself all at once.”

Moten’s sermon was entitled “This Is How We Fellowship,” and we want to extend his provocation about what it means to “be in community” in our fractured world today. To take a term from bell hooks, we wonder where “homeplace” is in the midst of social fragmentation, genocide, and networked substitutes for belonging. At a time when communities continue to assemble along hardened lines of ethnicity, racial supremacy, religious nationalism, and other forms of bordered belonging, have we betrayed the meaning of community? At a time when social solidarities are impaired by crises of public welfare and logics of disposability and market dominance, what is the call of community? And at a time when our media ecosystems heighten both our connectivity and isolation, is there hope in a shared community?

In this world of dazzling acceleration and manufactured spectacles, where do we turn to imagine and build other bonds and beats of solidarity? In The Earthly Community (2023), Achille Mbembe argues that the world is facing a crisis of breathability—ecological, political, and spiritual. He warns against an anemic existence bent on enclosure, separation, and extraction. The Earth, he writes, is becoming “a universal necropolis”: a space organized around death, exclusion, and the commodification of life itself. Mbembe’s intervention is not merely ecological, but ontological and spiritual. He calls for the cultivation of what he terms an “earthly community” or “an assembly of the living,” grounded in life-sustaining practices of interdependence, repair, and mutual care. Community for him is not a reaffirmation of sameness or sovereign autonomy, but a disposition toward radical relation—a mode of being-together that foregrounds porousness, reciprocity, and shared vulnerability through difference. The call to community is primarily a refusal of enclosure—an insistence on fellowship as a collective and life-affirming response to our planetary exhaustion. To take a term from bell hooks, we wonder where “homeplace” is in the midst of social fragmentation.

We invite scholars, artists, activists, and media practitioners to reflect on the intersections of media, religion, and community—not as fixed categories, but as active and unstable formations through which people come together to struggle and to imagine otherwise. We are especially interested in work that explores how communities are mediated, fragmented, or newly constituted in our hypermediated moment.

We welcome proposals in a range of formats: individual papers, panels, roundtables, and experimental sessions. We are open to work that is conceptual, historical, ethnographic, or artistic in orientation, and encourage submissions from across disciplines, theoretical and empirical traditions, and geographic locations that engage with these questions and beyond.

Possible topics could include but are not limited to the following:

Digital infrastructures and formations of religious publics and communities
Community formation and the discourse of spirituality
Religion, community formation and fragmentation
Alternative forms of community outside of organized religion
Community organizing/activism, media, and religion
Secularism, religion and the negotiation of community spaces
Media, algorithms, and rituals of community
Feminist and LGBTQIA+ configurations of religious community
Race, technology, spirituality and experiments of liberation
Decolonial epistemologies and spiritual imaginaries of relation
Archives and mediated practices of historical repair
Mediated ecologies of community and care in the context of planetary crisis
Speculative media and pluriversal visions of community

This will be the twelfth in a series of successful international conferences held by the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture in Boulder. The previous meetings have brought together an interdisciplinary community of scholars for focused conversations on emerging issues in media and religion. Each has proven to be an important landmark in the development of theory and method in its respective area and has resulted in important collaborations, publications, and resources for further research and dialogue.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words, along with a short bio (100 words), by May 30, 2026. Panel proposals (3–4 presenters) should include a 250-word overview and individual abstracts for each paper. Roundtable and non-traditional session formats (e.g., workshops, performances, screenings) are welcome and should include a 300–500-word proposal outlining the session’s aims, format, and participants.

Send all submissions and inquiries to: cmrc@colorado.edu

Featured speakers

Fred Moten is professor of performance studies and comparative literature at New York University. His teaching and writing focus on poetics, aesthetics, Black studies, and critical theory. He is the author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003); Black and Blur (2017); Stolen Life (2018); The Universal Machine (2018); The Undercommons and All Incomplete co-authored with Stefano Harney. Moten is a 2020 MacArthur Fellow, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, and a critically-acclaimed poet and jazz musician. His scholarly and creative practice deeply engages with Black life through its music, rituals, forms of gathering, and sociality. He has worked with many artist collectives and study groups, including the Anti-Colonial Machine, the Black Arts Movement School Modality, the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy, the Jazz Study Group, and Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective.

Stefano Harney is a teacher and writer who works collaboratively and collectively in the classroom, in research, and in social practice. He is a black studies scholar who has taught in the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, art criticism, American Studies, and business & management. Stefano has held appointments at Pace University and at CUNY in the US, at the University of Leicester and Queen Mary University of London in the UK, at Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia, at Ton Duc Thang University in Vietnam, and at Singapore Management University in Singapore. He is co-author with Fred Moten of The Undercommons: fugitive planning and black study (2013) and of All Incomplete (2021) both from Minor Compositions/Autonomedia Press.

Nichole M. Flores is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia where she is also the Director of the Catholic Studies Initiative, Co-Director of the Forum on Religion and Democracy, and Director of the Health, Ethics, and Society Program. She researches the relationship between religion, aesthetics, and democracy with emphasis on the Catholic and Latine theological and ethical traditions. Dr. Flores is author of The Aesthetics of Solidarity: Our Lady of Guadalupe and American Democracy (Georgetown University Press, 2021). Her research on La Virgen de Guadalupe and democracy has been profiled on the popular podcasts Things Not Seen and Know Your Enemy and featured on CBS Saturday Morning.

Jen Deerinwater is a bisexual, Two-Spirit, multiply-disabled, citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and an award-winning journalist and organizer who covers the myriad of issues their communities face with an intersectional lens. Jen is the founding executive director of Crushing Colonialism, an Indigenous storytelling, arts, and media non-profit organization in the so-called US. Jen has been awarded several fellowships, including the 2019 New Economies Reporting Project Fellowship, 2020 Disability Futures Fellowship, and the 2024 Disability Visibility fellowship at the Unexpected Shape Writing Academy.

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Counter-Media - Spring 2025 Syllabus

Nathan Schneider — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 18:21:24 +0000

Counter-Media - Spring 2025 Syllabus Nathan Schneider Thu, 01/30/2025 - 11:21

As we gather, we honor and acknowledge that the University of Colorado’s four campuses are on the traditional territories and ancestral homelands of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ute, Apache, Comanche, Kiowa, Lakota, Pueblo and Shoshone Nations. Further, we acknowledge the 48 contemporary tribal nations historically tied to the lands that comprise what is now called Colorado.

This is not a statement of property. Land is no property. Land is no territory. Land was meant to be free.

The CMRC Seminar

There are many seminars at the university. Why add one more? What is the point of yet another research gathering? At the dawn of a new academic year, we wonder under what skies we have been called to meet now? Through the years we have come to understand our fellowship beyond the conventional modes of academic assembly. What began as a mere reading group has matured into a community of deep sharing and listening, a forum where we don’t horde knowledge and confer degrees. Our Center has achieved a lot in its short history and we will persist in our commitment to lead research in the study of media and religion, but we wish to deepen the radicalism we have been long cultivating in our praxis, and to explore in new ways how the understanding of global religious and mediatic imaginaries can open doors to liberation, in our community and far beyond.

In this space, we have developed an intimate intellectual community and an approach to academic fellowship with multiple tasks, goals, and styles. Over the years, we have supported each other through personal and political crises, read and edited each other’s work, studied authors that deeply challenged the canons in our fields, and rehearsed work before publications and conference presentations. In fact, we believe now more than ever that before the research grants, the polished publications, and the conference talks, there is first the small, slow, and nonetheless audacious incubation of the seminar space.

Moving forward, we wish to double down on the audacity of our space. We ask you to consider with us a simple yet profound question: what does it mean to hold a seminar in the tumult of our times? What should it mean to think in times of live genocide, of climate catastrophe, and the whatever-it-takes doctrine of a rabid capitalism?

There is no better time to read, think, and write than when things seem to fray at the edges, when exhaustion overwhelms our resolve, and when cynicism cripples our imagination. Our project, if we have one, is to smuggle will in an age of catastrophism. Yes, Trump won, fascism is on the rise everywhere, wars are fought by arsonists disguised as prophets of peace, climate destruction is unstoppable, racism and misogyny are as rampant as ever, democracy is a farcical battlefield of so-called divine injunctions, our curricula still feel like we are trespassing into the master’s mansion, and our universities teach social justice in classrooms only to repress students when they take the lessons outdoors.

Yet, we have a duty to begin again and stay the course no matter what. We don’t think and write when it is sunny outside. We are the lucky ones because our battle toolbox has words and ideas and because the chairs we sit on are little thrones we must exorcize to shake off prize and privilege. We must savor our intellectual encounter and greet it with urgency as if it were to disappear the day after.

Spring Seminar Focus

This spring we will devote the seminar to the new project “Religion In Emergent Media Spaces”, a three-year research and outreach initiative funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and designed to build infrastructure for media experimentation at the intersection of religion and liberatory social change.

In this project, we will cultivate the practice of what we call “counter-media”—an approach to the making and study of mediated communication that is centered in relationship and community rather than in the demands of particular media forms or their dominant business models. We are interested in what media forms, spaces, aesthetics, and artifice are possible when the task is not restricted to critically assessing the flaws in our media systems. Our thinking about the “counter” seeks to locate and explore imaginaries of communication and participation that open up liberatory futures. Counter-media is not anti-media, nor is it an invitation to non-communication or non-participation in media. We turn to the prefix of the “counter” to locate alternative media practices and pedagogies that resist the dominant logics of technologists and the exclusionary politics of knowledge production—particularly in the contexts of ongoing shifts in the location of mediated religious authority.

The concept of counter-media emerges from many years of rethinking our Center's academic seminar as a space of collective study and insurgent learning. Usually, a seminar functions largely within an institutional setting regulated by credit, grades, degrees, disciplinary training, and conventions of publishing and presenting. We have challenged ourselves to expand the idea of what a graduate seminar could be outside, or in excess, of these overly fluent logistics and orientations. For a world profoundly in need of critical, practical reorientations to religion and media, what purpose should a seminar serve in and outside the university? How helpful is it to think through the idea of the “counter” as in counter-media or counter-publics? What makes something “counter”, in relation to what, and for whom? Historically, there have been many counter movements and oppositional currents representing the full political and cultural spectrum. What can be different about a set of practices and protocols we might want to call, counter-media? Do counter-media exist independently from dominant media, or do they also deliberately engage and challenge those media? What constitutes counter-media? Are they the same as alternative media or is there something unique about our conception of “the counter” that defies other definitions?

The heart of this project is also an investment in the weekly CMRC seminar, already a flourishing convergence of scholars, students, and media practitioners. By opening the door of the seminar to an expanded community, the project will advance it from an eminent academic space to a convergence point for a wider range of participants. These will include prominent thinkers joining us as visiting fellows and media practitioners who will develop innovative media interventions in collaboration with our Center’s early-career researchers. Along the way, the Center will experiment with its own practices of media-making. Taken together, the elements of this project will establish the Center as a site for both incubating impactful media practices around religion and rethinking the basic premises of the academic seminar.

Unlike other semesters, our seminar will rely less on readings and be more hands on this spring. We will discuss the concept of the “Counter” as it relates to publics, media, religion, communication, and community. We will also work together to identify examples of counter-media and present them to the group. We will devote a special issue of the center’s publication Rhythms to write articles on these examples.

This weekly Seminar is a major component of the research and teaching mission of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture. It brings together faculty, graduate students, and visiting fellows from a variety of academic fields with an interest in media and religion. Center fellows explore leading literature in a variety of academic fields, including media studies, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, social theory, and philosophy. �鶹��Ժ also receive concrete training in research development, methodology, and analysis, and are mentored through the development of conference presentations and publications.

CMRC Publication

RHYTHMS: The first issue Rhythms was published in December 2022 and focused on the theme of “writing in times of urgency.” The second issue on "Concepts Under Repair” came out in December 2023. The prompt for that issue was: what is a concept you are interested in repairing, maintaining, resuscitating, or abolishing for the sake of repairing something else? This spring, we will work on the third issue related to the counter-media project.

Expectations

Fellows are encouraged to get involved in center projects over the course of each semester. Please consult with the faculty of the center on how you can best use your time and expertise in these projects or if you have other ideas for collaboration and outreach.

Tentative schedule and readings

Week 1: 1/23 Introductions of Faculty and Fellows; Discussion of the “Religion In

Emergent Media Spaces” project

Week 2: 1/30 On Publicity, Publicness, Publics and Counterpublics.

Readings: Michael Warner, (2002) “Publics and Counterpublics” Public Culture 14(1): 49–90

Week 3: 2/6 On the concept of the Counter, the popular, and lived religion.

Readings: Introduction to the Second Edition of Orsi’s The Madonna of 115^th Street

Week 4: 2/13 Examples of Counter-Media Presentations and Discussion

Week 5: 2/20 Examples of Counter-Media Presentations and Discussion

Week 6: 2/27 Examples of Counter-Media Presentations and Discussion

Week 7: 3/6 Examples of Counter-Media Presentations and Discussion

Week 8: 3/13 Examples of Counter-Media Presentations and Discussion

Week 9: 3/20 Examples of Counter-Media Presentations and Discussion

Week 10: 3/27 SPRING BREAK; NO MEETING

Week 11: 4/3 Examples of Counter-Media Presentations and Discussion

Week 12: 4/10 Examples of Counter-Media Presentations and Discussion

Week 13: 4/17 Religion and the Therapeutic

Week 14: 4/24 What is the counter in counter-media? Discussion

CMRC End of Semester Lunch: May 1

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