30/06/2026 14:30
- 17:30
HALL: Pola - A107
Contact:
Tricou J.
Chair:
Tricou J.
This panel follows the seminar "Religious Influencers", organised within Work Package 4.2 (Axis 1) of the Religis project (https://www.misha.fr/recherche/religis/).
In the age of digital platforms, algorithms do not merely disseminate religious content; they produce hierarchies of visibility that redefine religious authority, legitimacy, and public recognition. This panel starts from the assumption that digital infrastructures operate as dispositifs of religious governmentality, generating forms of (in)equalities that are largely invisible yet structural.
By regulating access to attention, algorithms shape what can be perceived as "(il)legitimate" religion. They contribute to defining who is entitled to speak in the name of "good religion"—moderate, acceptable, and compatible with dominant norms of the digital public sphere—and, conversely, who comes to embody "bad religion", selectively over-exposed as a figure of threat, radicalism, or irreducible otherness. Some minority voices are thus marginalised through invisibilisation, while others are strategically over-visibility as symbolic foils, objects of controversy, or targets of stigmatisation.
These dynamics generate not only inequalities of visibility, but also epistemic and political inequalities, by redefining the boundaries of legitimate religious speech and the frameworks within which religion becomes audible, tolerable, or condemnable.
The panel invites empirical and theoretical contributions analysing digital platforms as new sites of power, classification, and religious visibility. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, it examines the contemporary conditions under which religious authority is produced, circulated, and contested within the algorithmic economy of attention.
