12/07/2025 08:30 - 10:45

HALL: Personalentwicklung Seminar Room

Chair: Nord I.

Speaker: Nord I., Radde-Antweiler K.

Intensified datafication transforms contemporary societies. Research groups on Digital Religion and Digital Theology discuss already important markers of the process of transformation which takes place in cultural and religious contexts. Indicator of the change process can be seen e. g. in the understandings of identity, authority, the ways of community-building, the communication of the gospel including the understanding of its truth. They are changing, partly because in a datafied society the human possibilities for action are rapidly expanding and more and more transitions between human and non-human action are occurring in everyday life. This forces the questions of the panel: to what extent can agency be attributed to non-human entities (e.g., algorithms, AIs, etc.) - and thereby what roles they play in the agency of human actors (individual, collective or institutional). It discusses the relationship between human and non-human agency, between the capacity to act and the actors of agency, including questions about the of forms of collective, shared or relational interactions. These issues have been long explored and conceptually developed in disciplines such as communication and media studies; but such development and exploration are lacking in connection with religion and agency in a datafied society. Instead, agency, religion, and digitalization are discussed in specific disciplines largely independently of one another. Indeed, there is evidence of an increasing fragmentation in the research areas of religion and agency as well as agency and digitalization. These two research fields have yet to be brought together in any significant way. The speakers present and discuss study results from four European and one non-European country. The panel aims to contribute to the understanding of agency in religious contexts of datafication. The panelist's target groups are not only church groups, but also non-church groups in the Christian spectrum.