Arts Faculty Events

• Thursday, November 26th, 8:30am - Friday, November 27th, 4:50pm

Monash University Conference Centre
Level 7, 30 Collins Street
Melbourne, Victoria

Keynote Speakers:

• Professor Massimo Leone
  Australian Endeavour Award Fellow in English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University, and Research Professor of Cultural Semiotics at the Department of Philosophy, University of Torino, Italy
• Professor Lori Beaman
  Canadian Research Chair in the Contextualisation of Religion in a Diverse Canada, and Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Classics, University of Ottawa, Canada

Registration now open.

The conference will focus on religious communication and religious aesthetic forms. The underlying impulse is to bring into dialogue scholarly work undertaken in religious studies and theology with debates and research in the fields of communications and cultural studies, including performance, literary, visual and aesthetic analyses. The premise of the conference is that communication and aesthetic forms play an active role in shaping a religious culture’s sensibility rather than merely reflecting that religious community’s ideology, logic or worldview. In short, religious communication makes religious experience meaningful, possible and effective.

The conference is particularly interested in exploring:

• religious affect and its relationship to different media (e.g., song, prayer, architecture, film, performance, images in general)
• religious interpretation and textual hermeneutics (e.g., literalism versus symbolism)
• the use of communication media and art forms by religious groups to create a sense of community
• communication as a ‘portal’ or window to the ‘divine’ and/or the ‘sacred’
• cross-cultural adaptation and the creolisation of religious forms
• teligion and the sacred in popular culture
• modernity, post-modernity and religious communication.

This conference will be held immediately prior to the World Parliament of Religions, providing an opportunity for reflection on religious practice and the relationship between religious identity and the aesthetic forms of religious communication, and cross cultural communication.

Further information and registration at the Religious Communication Conference site.