Digital Spiritualities: How Do Digital and Spiritual Practices Interact and Transform Each Other?

RC22 Sociology of Religion (host committee) WG10 Digital Sociology Language: English Session Type: Oral Religious phenomena adapt, transform, and sometimes intensify through digital technology (Campbell & Tsuria, 2021). This session invites the participants to analyse the digital realm as a unique space of mediation, integrating both the Internet as a medium which is the concrete result of an infrastructure-driven logic, and the everyday, embodied practices that are reconfigured within it (Hine, 2015). When mediated by digital technologies, religious practice unfolds through a set of technical objects, interfaces, and algorithms, from which the religious sphere can draw new objects, new tools, and new practices. Vice versa, digital practices may be influenced by spiritual practices of their developers in the situations when professionals working with the digital, in particular with AI, bring their world image into their technology-creating process. Building on the work of Bruno Latour (1994), we propose to examine how digital technologies transform the ordinary modes of religious action, but also how they, in turn, become mediators of the action whose meaning they create and materialize. In particular, we seek to understand how, through these technologies, new forms of ontologies and regimes of truth emerge. We welcome research presentations looking at concrete use-cases where digital innovation is explicitly framed in spiritual or religious terms (Singler, 2020), or even informed and shaped by spiritual or religious ontologies (Geraci, 2010). We are interested in analyzing how the translation is operating between technological design, deployment and religious values (Akrich, 1992). Session Organizers: Kristina KOVALSKAYA, EPHE-PSL, France Ksenia ERMOSHINA, CNRS, France