An overview of the methods, aims, and preliminary findings of the project Religious Communities in the Virtual Age (Recovira).
Paper long abstract:
This paper provides an overview of the methods, aims, and preliminary findings of a seven-country research project entitled Religious Communities in the Virtual Age. In each country, research teams are conducting research with three religious communities that fall into the following categories: 1) mainstream/established, 2) established minority, and 3) new/unestablished. For each community, we are interested in understanding what happened during the pandemic, and what survived after the pandemic. More specifically, guiding questions for the project as a whole relate concepts of community, authority, place-making, and the relationship between religious communities and public life, with particular focus on the changes that have happened in these areas. In addition to ethnographic fieldwork, the project is engaged aesthetic analysis, and social media analysis via the social listening platform, PULSAR. The use of Pulsar is particularly novel for this field, and our aim is to use the social media data in conjunction with the on-the-ground ethnography to help us understand not only what people are saying about certain topics, but also why they are saying what they are saying, and how these topics of discussion were shaped and influenced by conversations that extend beyond their specific geographic locations.