REDiCON: Religion – Digitality – Confessionality

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Anna Neumaier; Professorin Dr. Viera Pirker; Professor Dr. Manuel Stetter
• Subject Area: Roman Catholic Theology ; Protestant Theology ; Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 495966065

Founded in 2005, YouTube has become one of the major informational, educational, entertainment, and cultural platforms on the internet. It has expanded the moving image into a socially embedded video culture. In the site’s capacity as a social network, its users also interact on religious and related topics. Users position themselves on religious questions and articulate their religious self-image; they assign themselves to religious communities and draw boundaries between them; they interpret reality in religious terms and make judgments on the views and actions of others, marking normative and descriptive validity claims. Both growing fundamentalist religiousness and diversity as well as heterogenous approaches to religious visibility online happen on YouTube in public view, but almost unnoticed by research. In order to explore these forms of religious communication on YouTube, the REDiCON project takes an innovative approach: Drawing on the concept of confessionality, religious communication on YouTube is analyzed as a confessional practice. Allowing for platform-specific affordances, the practices associated with the production and reception of videos on the part of Christian YouTube users and their audiences will be examined and interpreted theologically as well as from a religious studies perspective. Practices of confessionality are understood as an expression of a late modern culture of confession and elaborated into a theory of religious confession in the context of digital media. We assume that practices of confessionality on YouTube are newly emerging and transcending existing cultural repertoires of religious confessional practices as well as tying in with them, adapting them and thereby developing them further. It is the aim of the project to elaborate these dynamics of doing, shaping, and undoing confessionality in detail. REDiCON examines confessional practices on YouTube on three levels of analysis which are addressed by three sub-projects working closely together from the outset: (a) production, (b) work / content, (c) reception. By exploring confessional practices on these three levels, the project promises not only instructive insights into religious practices on YouTube and thus in a field that has hardly been explored in theological terms so far. It also contributes to an understanding of late modern religious speech culture and religious practices of confession under the conditions of digital communication. The project thus poses the classic question of “the confessional” in a new way, and we expect it to provide important new directions and innovative stimuli for theological and religious studies research on confessionality, religion, and digital media.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria
• Partner Organisation: Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF)
• Cooperation Partner: Dr. Bernhard Lauxmann