ECREA16-Abstract

623

Thursday, November 10

1 4 : 3 0 – 1 6 : 0 0

MER01

Changing Religion in a ChangingMedia Environment

K. Lundby

University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

This panel illuminates interrelations between changes in religion and changes in the media environment with cases from across Europe. All five papers

concern religion in public life. The contexts vary from television news and documentary as part of a wider public sphere, to small arenas in digital games.

Thus, the papers cover a span of media environments from mass media to personal media. On subject matter, the papers cover a range from terrorism and

scandals related to religion, via a “frozen conflict”, to religious dialogue with media. In the panel, first, there is a long-term cross-national analysis of reli‑

gious coverage in main evening news comparing Europe with other continents.The“frozen conflict”comes up with a controversial television series featuring

ethnic minority youth. A third paper analyses the reactions in the press over the introduction of Islamic Studies in a traditional Orthodox country. A fourth

paper discusses digital media as tools for inter-religious dialogue among young people. Finally, there is a paper on the influence of religion on digital games

and vice versa. The title of this last paper illustrates the idea behind the panel: that the media environment may contribute to the formatting of religion

and, on the contrary, that changes in religion play back into the media environment. Such interplay between media change and changes in religion as part

of culture and society can be understood with mediatization theory. Mediatization implies long-term transformations that may also be observed during

significant moments of change. The contributors to this panel relate more or less directly to specific conceptions of mediatization of religion.

PN 114

Challenging a Frozen Conflict: Planning Public Debate on Controversial Issues

M. Pape Rosenfeldt

, S. Hjarvard

University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

This paper is concerned with the Danish public service broadcaster DR’s TV-documentary series Oprør fra Ghettoen (Rebellion from the Ghetto, 2015), and

its influence on public discussions concerning religion. The documentary tells the stories of four ethnic minority youth and their relation to the cultural

and religious norms of their parent generation. The documentary generated public debate across various media platforms, focusing on controversial topics

raised in the documentary, such as concealed love affairs and homosexuality, as well as broader, generic debates concerning the role of minorities and

minority religion in Danish society. The aim of the empirical case study is twofold: Through interviews with key personal involved in the production and

marketing of the documentary series we examine the intention and strategies of the public service broadcaster and the commissioned production company

Plus Pictures to generate and moderate public debates about religious and cultural problems. Secondly, we analyze the actual online and offline debates in

order to shed light on the potential transformative character of the debate and how generic and ad-hoc framings of religion enter and influence the discus‑

sion. The analysis demonstrates the important role of forward planning of the debate if the intention is to move beyond existing framings of controversial

issues and give voice to experiences of immigrants who usually do not play a prominent part in public discussions on these issues. Existing public debates

concerning Islam have been highly contentious and may to some extent be characterized as a frozen conflict upheld by stereotypical framings and fixed

political positions. By consciously downplaying the role of ‘religion’ and framing conflicts in terms of personal experiences and cultural conflicts the docu‑

mentary series managed to set the scene for a debate in which second generation immigrants’experiences were given authority to engage with contentious

issues and thereby transgressing the usual ‘us-them’, ‘majority-minority’ framing of these issues. Methodologically, the study is based on qualitative and

semi-structured research interviews (Kvale, 1996) and textual framing analysis (Entman, 1993) of the debate in public accessible media. Theoretically,

the analysis builds on a typology of mediatized conflicts (Hjarvard et al., 2015) that highlights the role of media for framing and co-structuring conflicts.

In the case of Oprør fra Ghettoen, the mediated debate did not only involve particular framings of religious and cultural conflicts, but conscious efforts by

the producers to take into account already existing public framings of contentious issues enabled them to co-structure the debate in ways that potentially

broke the ice in a frozen conflict.

PN 115

Islamic Studies in a Traditional Orthodox Country: The Press Towards the Establishment of Islamic Studies Division in the School

of Theology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

S. Karekla

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

Islam is more than ever deep into the mass media context. The deadly terrorist attacks in Paris last November and the latest in Brussels by the Islamic State

(DAISH, ISIS), but also the continuous flow of migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan – predominantly Muslim states – to Europe have put

Islam into the everyday mass media agenda. Though a creed with more than one and a half billion believers worldwide, Islam does not include a (global)

hierarchy in antithesis with Christianity. In many cases this makes it difficult for journalists since they cannot find official sources and voices so as to derive

valid information concerning the Islamic positions. In other cases Journalists representations about Islam are tied and depending by the national and reli‑

gious identities of their own countries. In Greece, where the vast majority of the population is Orthodox Christian, exists also a Muslim minority located in

the region of western Thrace, fully recognized by the Greek state. Τhe legal status and the rights of the minority are defined by international conventions,

based mainly on the Lausanne Treaty (1923) when the population exchange of Muslims and Christians was agreed between Greece and Turkey. On January

2014 the Greek Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs and the faculty of Theology of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki started negotiating

about the establishment of an Islamic Studies Division within the School of Theology. This Department is to offer those Greek Muslim citizens who wish to

TWG –Media and Religion

(MER01–MER02)