Short Abstract

How are digital platforms refracting religious authority, knowledge and ethical life across Africa? This panel examines how Muslims, Christians and other religious actors negotiate learning, gender, expertise, belonging and power in increasingly platformed publics.

Long Abstract

Digital media have become central arenas in which religious knowledge, authority and ethical life are produced, contested and circulated across Africa. Yet “digital religion” is not a single process. Platforms refract religious life differently across gender, generation, class, language, denomination, region and relations between African societies and their diasporas. Taking ECAS2027’s theme of “African Prisms” seriously, this panel asks what becomes visible when platformed religion is approached through multiple African-centred lenses rather than through universalising narratives of technological change. We invite theoretically informed and empirically grounded papers on Islam, Christianity, African indigenous religions and other religious formations. Contributions may examine social media preaching, digital Islamic or Christian learning, women’s religious knowledge, online ritual and spirituality, religious influencers, AI-mediated religious advice, platform governance, misinformation, digital archives, diasporic religious networks, or struggles over expertise and authenticity. Particular attention is encouraged to the ways digital infrastructures redistribute visibility, reshape authority, create new exclusions and enable actors historically marginal to formal religious institutions to speak, teach and organise. The panel brings African Studies, religion and media studies into conversation by treating platforms not simply as neutral channels but as social, political and ethical environments. It seeks comparative insight into how African religious actors appropriate, resist and transform digital technologies, and how these practices complicate established distinctions between online and offline religion, centre and periphery, tradition and innovation, and local and transnational religious publics.

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