What role might digital media play in reshaping the way that knowledge is produced, distributed, circulated, consumed, and refashioned? In this discussion, we will explore the possibilities associated with digital media through a series of reflections on the work of The Immanent Frame and related digital projects, exploring the dynamic relationship between these projects and the fields of religious and secularism studies. We will focus in particular on the role of digital projects in crafting and stimulating work within the scholarly borderlands, exploring a set of theses about the possibly distinctive qualities of these sorts of spaces, and investigating the forms of intellectual work, creative engagement, and critical reflection such spaces might enable. While questions of readership, circulation, attention, and consumption are of particular importance, our discussion will focus largely on modes intellectual production and exchange, taking as its starting point a form of “field” analysis, associated with Pierre Bourdieu and others, while improvising somewhat on Bourdieu’s approach in order to extend its analytical reach to the consideration of “interstitial” spaces—or what sociologist Gil Eyal has called “spaces between fields.”

Wednesday 30 April
2.30-4.30pm

La Trobe University, Bundoora Campus, Melbourne
Martin Building 488

Please register your attendance with the RSVP form below before 28 April

Readings:
Gil Eyal – Spaces between fields
The Immanent Frame

Jonathan VanAntwerpen is director of the Digital Culture program at the Social Science Research Council in New York City, where he is also founder and director of the Religion and the Public Sphere program, and editor-in-chief of The Immanent Frame. Originally trained as a philosopher, he received his doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. VanAntwerpen is coeditor of a series of edited volumes on secularism, religion, and public life, including Habermas and Religion (Polity, 2013), Rethinking Secularism (Oxford University Press, 2011), The Post-Secular in Question (NYU Press, 2012), The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (Columbia University Press, 2011), and Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2010). He has also written on secularism and transitional justice, philanthropy and the politics of reconciliation, American higher education, and the history of sociology. He tweets at: @jonathandirk.

Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
La Trobe University

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