Short Abstract

How is AI reshaping religious authority across Africa? This panel centres African religious worlds, examining how algorithms transform belief, ritual, care and knowledge, while communities contest whose languages, values and power define technological futures.

Long Abstract

Artificial intelligence is often presented as universal, but its meaning and impact depend on particular religious traditions, worldviews, institutions, and histories. Using “African Prisms” as an analytical frame, this panel examines how AI is understood, adapted, contested, and integrated within African religious settings. It approaches religion as lived, mediated, and material practice, asking how platforms, institutions, rituals, and unequal infrastructures reshape authority, authenticity, agency, and the sacred.

We invite theoretically clear, empirically grounded papers using ethnography, interviews, digital ethnography, platform and discourse analysis, or comparative case studies. Topics may include AI-assisted preaching and interpretation, prayer and counselling chatbots, algorithmic prophecy and divination, automated translation, religious education, content moderation, and digitally mediated rituals or care. Papers can show how African religious actors negotiate authority and trust; how gender, age, class, language, denomination, and location shape access, and how AI connects online practice with embodied, institutional, and everyday religious life.

The panel connects African cases to debates on lived and material religion, religious authority, and digital mediation. We ask when algorithms become accepted religious mediators, how their outputs are authorised, contested, or ritualised, and whose languages, histories, and values shape their knowledge. Rather than assuming AI disrupts tradition, the panel examines how African religious communities fit AI into their long histories of media, mobility, expertise, and power. By comparing different regions and traditions, we aim to highlight African perspectives on religion and technological change and challenge the idea that Africa is only a place where technology is adopted and data is extracted.

Propose paper