Panel 146: Muslim Media Practices in Translocal Perspective

This panel will provide critical insights into new media and how they are integrated and made sense of in diverse translocal Muslim contexts in Africa. Everyday practices surrounding media technologies – internet, satellite television, radio channels, or pamphlets - introduce changes, ruptures or enable continuities in Islamic practices, understandings, institutions, and traditions and are embedded in wider social settings. How are media appropriated by different groups of users to negotiate identities and belonging, initiate new religious debates or address challenges in diasporic everyday life?

The papers should address not only the availability of new media and resulting media practices as challenges for existing modes of governmental and religious authorities from an interdisciplinary perspective but also illuminate the creation of new discursive spaces, public spheres and religious identities. In addition, the papers may also wish to shed light on long-standing and more recent translocal relationships of African Muslims with their brethrens in other African as well as other non-African countries. How do new media create new opportunities of defining religion and orthopraxy and how do they establish new or strengthen old relationships and concomitant constraints?