21/05/2024 14:15 - 16:30

HALL: FATESI - D'ACQUISTO

Proponent: Bor H., Epsen E.

Chair: Epsen E.

Speaker: Baron G., Bor H., Epsen E., Wiseman H.

Disruptive innovation can be helpful in analyzing patterns of activity among religious communities. Technologies can disrupt interpersonal relations, rituals, institutions, religious values, concepts, and experiences. Socially disruptive innovation is characteristically deep, wide-ranging, rapid, and not easily reversed. At the same time, such innovation often affects religious communities in distinct ways. Consider technologies such as automated decision-making, machine learning, robotics, generative AI, surveillance, digital finance, blockchain, CRISPR and genomic editing, the artificial womb and others. These technologies intensify uncertainties, confusion, conflict and ethical quandaries. Do religious communities, among other diverse publics, stand to be disproportionately affected by emerging innovation? And if so, is this sensitivity ambivalent, so that it may be both for the better and for the worse, presenting opportunities as well as threats? The study of 'digital religion' has contributed to reflection on the way digital media catalyzes changes in the way traditional religions perform and understand themselves. This panel seeks to contribute to knowledge and reflection on the way religious communities stand to be disruptively shaped by emerging technologies. We invite papers that share this goal, especially those that present case studies or motivate their analysis through concrete examples of technologies and communities.