Panel: PHD RESEARCH IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION



86_2.5 - RELIGION, DIGITAL COMMUNICATION, AND URBAN INEQUALITIES IN THE TWIN TRANSITION: AN ETHICAL-SOCIAL ANALYSIS

AUTHORS:
Iapaolo M. (Niccolò Cusano University ~ Rome ~ Italy)
Text:
The twin transition is reshaping European cities while intensifying digital, urban, and environmental inequalities (Beck 1992). Unequal access to infrastructures, green innovation, and digital capital reinforces territorial and social disparities, while platform-mediated sustainability narratives often reproduce hierarchies of visibility and exclusion (Kitchin 2014; Vanolo 2014). This paper examines, from an interdisciplinary perspective, how religious traditions may help rebalance these asymmetries. The principles of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Francis 2015) together with religious environmental ethics (Grim & Tucker 2014) offer ethical criteria and counter-narratives capable of challenging dominant digital rhetorics of transition. Combining a qualitative analysis of digital sustainability narratives with a comparative reinterpretation of ethical-religious principles, the paper argues that integral ecology can function as a cultural and normative corrective. In this perspective, the twin transition can be reframed as a more inclusive process grounded in equity, care, and shared responsibility (Carvalho 2010; Núñez 2018)