2015 | 1

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Approaching Religious Symbols in the Public Space: Contemporary Art and Museums as Places of Negotiation?
Pezzoli-Olgiati, Daria (2015)
This essay responds to Sigrid Schade’s contribution by outlining the multilayered meaning-making processes deployed by the use of religious symbolism in visual culture. Referring in a concise way to a selected example of contemporary art, it drafts possible methodological approaches to a challenging field of research.
Cross-media Transmission Processes: Marian Figures in Todo sobre mi madre (Pedro Almodóvar, ES 1999)
Fritz, Natalie (2015)
This paper builds on aspects of the cultural studies perspective that understands art itself as a method of cultural analysis. This will be exemplified by focusing on how film as a cultural technique for framing and reframing the world, using its different audio-visual devices of representation, is an important contemporary agens in the process of transmitting religious motifs and concepts. The paper highlights how Pedro Almodóvar skillfully stimulates the audience to reflect on the polysemy and polyvalence of motifs by not only referring explicitly to iconographic traditions, but also playing with aesthetic conventions.
Documentary Media and Religious Communities
Mäder, Marie-Therese (2015)
The article considers four spaces where media processes involve religious communities and agents: the spaces of production, of representation, of media communication, and of distribution network and institutional framework for circulation. These four spaces systematise the research question posed to the specific source. Furthermore the concept documentary media as viewed from a semio-pragmatic perspective is introduced. Discussion of the commercial series I’m a Mormon shows how different modes define documentary media according to the four spaces
Editorial
Mäder, Marie-Therese; Pezzoli-Olgiati, Daria (2015)
Mediality and Materiality in the History of Religions: A Medieval Case Study about Religion and Gender in In-Between Spaces
Beinhauer-Köhler, Bärbel (2015)
The article discusses possible terminologies for labelling historical materials. Drawing on the history of the city of cairo around the 12th century – to the Fatimid era and to later Ayyubid times – it looks at the documents of three religions on religious infrastructure donated by women. This reveals women’s ability to shape the public sphere. At least to a certain extent, the segregation of the sexes and the concept of the harem are questionable. This topic requires the reconstruction and re-reading of fragmental materials. Methodological reflections are helpful for dealing with different sources, mostly combinations of texts and archaeology, embedded in the current debate about material culture and media as well as materialization and mediation. It might seem anachronistic, but to specify these categories it is useful to compare this example with a contemporary study by Mia Lövheim on female Internet bloggers. In both cases we find women as self-confident agents in public spaces.
Methodological Challenges by (New) Media: An Essay on Perspectives and Possible Consequences
Wessely, Christian (2015)
The classical concept of media analysis depends to a large extent on linearity, but modern interactive media are mostly non-linear. Roger Odin has suggested a method for working with such interactive media; however, the approach he suggests creates a new problem. What would be an appropriate way to deal with the dilemma of balancing sufficient intersubjectivity and concessions to non-linearity?
(Re)Making a Difference: Religion, Mediatisation and Gender
Lövheim, Mia (2015)
This article presents and discusses how mediatisation as a theory can be used to analyse two commercial videos, one promoting the organisation catholics come Home and the other coca cola. A core question in the current debate on mediatisation and religion concerns if and how mediatisation changes not only the social forms of communication about religion but also the meaning of religion in society. the issue in focus for the analy-sis is whether these videos mirror attributes and roles traditionally associated with men and women within religious institutions or offer an alternative to these. By using gender as a lens, we can see that mediatisation challenges religious institutions to adapt their narratives and symbols to commercial media culture, but that also within this new set-ting some traditional female gender norms seem to remain or even become reinforce.
Religion and Communication Spaces: A Semio-pragmatic Approach
Odin, Roger (2015)
Following the reflection initiated in his book The Spaces of Communication, Roger Odin suggests a new distinction between physical communication spaces and mental com-munication spaces (spaces that we have inside us). The suggestion is exemplified by three film analyses dedicated to the relationships between religion and communication.
Religion, Belief and Medial Layering of Communication: Perspectives from Studies in Visual Culture and Artistic Productions
Schade, Sigrid (2015)
The paper analyses the relationship between religious practices, belief and the media based on the medial layering of communication. The arguments are situated within the fields of studies in visual culture and cultural studies, reflecting on the role of art as a specific medium in the Western religious tradition. Vera Frenkel’s video This Is Your Messiah Speaking (1990) is reviewed as a critical inquiry into religious practices and the media structures of communication.
Staging the Dead: The Material Body as a Medium for Gender and Religion
Höpflinger, Anna-Katharina (2015)
The body is one of the basic media that form and communicate gender. How important gender is for the perception of an individual becomes especially clear by looking at the exhibition of a dead body. Having nothing left other than the body, the deceased are reduced to characteristics that seem to be the basis of a specific culture. However, in religious contexts the exhibition of mortal remains can also be used to overcome gender differentiations. In this article, I will focus on Central Europe, and argue that material presentations are an authoritative means of forming concepts of gender and religion.

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