Minorities and the Media

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Latest news and updates

Smartphone mit Piktogramm eines Fisches und "Christ" im Absendertext einer Nachricht

Conference ?Religious Identity and the Media”. Methods, concepts, and new research avenues”

March 25-27, 2021


Team des Projekts (vier Personen) auf einer Treppe in der Sonne sitzend.

Meeting of the research team in Warsaw

Sep. 7th – 9th, 2020


Laptop, Notizbuch und Rosenkranz

Conference “Religious Identity and the Media. Methods, concepts, and new research avenues”

March 25-27, 2021 – Warsaw, Poland


"diskussion" als Bild stilisiert

Second round of interviews finished

The research team has finished the second round of interviews with media experts from the analyzed Churches.


[Translate to English:]

Second round of interviews

Our research team has started to conduct the second round of interviews with the representatives of analysed Churches.


plakat des 5. Kongress Polenforschung zum Thema "Gerechtigkeit", Abbildung eines geteilten Kuchens

Dr. ?ukasz Fajfer held a paper at Fifth Congress for Polish Studies.

dr ?ukasz Fajfer wyg?osi? referat na pi?tym kongresie badań polonistycznych.


Seminarraum, Workshopszene

Dec. 18th – 20th, 2019. Team meeting and workshop with external experts took place at the University of Bremen.

Between 18th and 20th of December 2019, the project team met at the University of Bremen to take part in a team meeting and a workshop with experts.


Dr. ?ukasz Fajfer will hold a lecture at Martin Luther University in Halle (Saale) on December 10th.

The lecture’s title is: “Orthodox Christians in Poland in context of the migration from the Ukraine”


Dr. Marta Ko?odziejska

Participation of the polish project team at the 17th Sociology Congress in Wroc?aw from 11 to 13 September.

On September 11-13, the Polish team members, prof. Dorota Hall and dr. Marta Ko?odziejska, will take part in the 17th Polish Sociological Congress in Wroc?aw, Poland.


Adventist_church_inside

About the project

Media have always played a crucial role for religious communities. Christianity could spread i.a. due to duplicating of the Bible just like Islam could, thanks to copying of the Quran. Furthermore, the influence of the printing press on the Reformation movement is undisputed.

In our project we research the role of the contemporary media for modern religious communities. We concentrate on the digital (webpages) and on the printed media (journals, newspapers). We aim to answer the following questions: Who is responsible for the media in particular churches? How is the media content prepared? How do the churches understand their identity nowadays?

We are not only interested in the media use of the churches, but we also ask for the role of the different cultural and religious contexts in the process of media use. That is the reason why we conduct a comparative study. We analyse the churches in Poland – a country with a homogenous religious structure – and in Great Britain with a heterogeneous religious landscape. Moreover, our study concerns two different communities: the Orthodox Churches and the Seventh-Day Adventist Churches. We hope that this approach will make it possible to answer the question of how the religious identity is influenced by the media and by the religious landscape in a country.

The analysed churches

  • The Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church
  • Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain
  • Russian Orthodox Diocese of Sourozh
  • Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Poland
  • Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Great Britain
Arbeitstreffen 澳门皇冠_皇冠足球比分-劲爆体育erer Menschen mit Laptops, Klemmbrettern und Kaffee

How we work

During the first phase of our project, we analyse the printed and digital media of the selected churches. In the second phase, we conduct interviews with media representatives of the particular churches.

It is crucial for our project that besides the official representatives of the churches (priests, bishops) we also want to talk to media representatives, editors and spokespersons. This way, we are able to get to know the individual opinions on religious identity and to gather information on the media work in particular churches. The interviews will be anonymised and used in this form for our publications.

About us

The project is conducted by two research teams: one at the University of Bremen and one at the Polish Academy of Sciences. The study is financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and by the National Science Centre (NCN) from the German-Polish Beethoven 2 program. The financial support was granted for three years until March 2021.

In Germany the research team is based at the University of Bremen (Institute of Religion and Religious Education) and it consists of Prof. Kerstin Radde-Antweiler (head of the project) and Dr. ?ukasz Fajfer (research associate). The Polish team works at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The team members are: Prof. Dorota Hall (head of the project) and Dr. Marta Ko?odziejska (research associate).

Contact persons

Prof Dr. Kerstin Radde-Antweiler
University Bremen
Department of Religious Studies
Universit?tsboulevard 18 / SP T
D-28359 Bremen
T. +49 (0)421 218 67911

 

Dr. hab. Dorota Hall
Polish Academy of Sciences
Institute of Philosophy and Sociology
Nowy ?wiat 72, room 236
00-330 Warsaw
phone: +48 22 657 28 57

 

News Archiv

Konferenz der European Association for the Study of Religions -Tartu

Dr ?ukasz Fajfer presented a paper in Tartu, June 27th, 2019

Dr ?ukasz Fajfer took part at the conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions that took place June 25th to 29th, 2019 in Tartu, Estonia. He presented a paper entitled “Discourse Analysis as a method for analyzing webpages of religious organizations. A Case Study of the Polish Orthodox Church.” In this paper he discussed the methodological issues while dealing with the media material analysed within the project Minorities and the Media. He argued that the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse analysis – although having some limitations – may be used as a tool of analysis for the Church websites. The strength of this method lies particularly in its usefulness for unpacking of interpretative schemes and narrative structure of the discourse constructed at the webpages.

Smartphone pen and paper

First round of interviews completed!

26.03.2018


Our team have already conducted a number of interviews with the representatives of the analyzed Churches. We have conducted 16 interviews with people engaged with the media of Seventh Day Adventist Church in Great Britain and Poland. We have also conducted 12 interviews with priests and lay people from the Orthodox Churches in these countries. Our work concentrates now on the analysis of the gathered material.


Forschungsgruppe Religi?se Minorit?ten und Medien

"Methods of Collecting Data and Media in Religious Minority Groups"

On november 29th and 30th the first team workshop of the research project "Religious Minorities and Media" took place at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of Polish Academy of Sciences. During the very productive meeting, the project team discussed methodological approaches to the collected material, debated key theoretical perspectives, and analysed the samples material in the context of religious organizations and minority status in Poland and in the UK.

The next workshop will take place at ZeMKI Bremen in 2019.