Art that tells a story

by Sylvie Shaw

The exhibition of Danie Mellor's retrospective artwork (drawings, pastel design and sculpture) is as breathtaking as it is thought-provoking. Held at The University of Queensland's Art Museum, Mellor takes the visitor into his own internal journey as he traverses Aboriginal history and his own Aboriginality in the moving display he terms Exotic Lies, Sacred Ties. Mellor is descended from the Manu, Ngagen and Ngajan peoples from the Atherton Tablelands region in far north Queensland.

As a backdrop to his large and intricate pastel drawings, Mellor uses the text of blue and white 'willow pattern' pottery - at once evoking the colonial memory and the locus of struggle for Indigenous people. The pottery is a reminder of the most formal parlour etiquette of England in the18th and 19th centuries. The wealthy classes could afford the much desired and delicate translucent Chinese porcelain for their afternoon teas, and while the middle classes sought to emulate this lifestyle, expensive porcelain was beyond their reach. Instead, they were enticed by the cheaper blue and white decorated dining sets created by the English ceramic company Spode.

Mellor's evocative approach is reminiscent of the way English ceramic makers like Spode used the exotic imaginery and fascination of far off Asia to reproduce the story of European expansion, trade and conflict. This division between the different cultural and individual identities is clearly apparent in his graphic and storied artworks. It is an image of his and his ancestors' lived experience and lifeways. 

The works interweave this colonial history into a dynamic rendition of Australia's past. Through complex and layered drawings of lush 'blue and white' rainforest scenery, Mellor proffers an image fixed within Australia's contested heritage - of the Aboriginal and settler. Carefully merged into these large works are these two opposing frames. The appropriated bush and the appropriators of nature, the early settlers, are depicted within the imagined blue and white world of the past, while in contrast, the Aboriginal people, and the animals and birds from the forest, are brightly coloured and vibrant. The differences between the real and the imaginary is striking. The illusion of a fantasy-land tinged with desire to control the unknown is played out in the juxtaposition of colour and form. An almost ghostly blue and alien world shadows a forest brimming with life as Mellor celebrates the integrity of Aboriginal people and their sacred relationship to land and country.

The works are grand. Compelling. The artist takes the viewer right into the heart of the artwork and surprises her with his clever technique. Works are framed by beautiful and ornately carved gold borders surrounding forested and wild rainforests and de-forested - and tamed - colonial spaces. As if to reinforce this dualism between the wild and the tamed - who and what is wild and tame here? - Mellor has interspersed his highly crafted and stylised scenes with sparkling gold flecks and glowing Swarovski crystals - again reproducing (or glamourising) the European world of luxury, the fascination of the exotic other, and the idea of power and control. But these embellishments are absent from the confronting work pictured above.

This artwork is stark. Titled Bayi Minyjirral (2013), it shows a burial scene where the Aboriginal men and even the dingo look back at the spectator with a gaze of disquiet and disdain. 'You are not welcome here', they say. For the non-Indigenous outsider, there is no place to hide. 

Throughout the exhibition Mellor turns the tables. His works are confronting in their beauty, style and homage to European culturescapes as they expose the damage to Aboriginal people, culture and country. The exhibition is not at all optimistic. The images present a binary world where the promise of interconnection and dialogue is missing. Both ways working is still a long way off. 

This cultural split shows up again in two pieces that deeply affected me. A gloriously sketched Gould-like kangaroo lies sleeping; the beautiful image surrounded by the children's prayer, 'Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep', while the work, The Promised Land (2009) depicts a slumbering koala straddled over the willow patterned Chinois reproduction of bridge over (troubled?) water. This beautiful image is framed by the gentle words of Psalms 23, 'The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside quiet waters'. But the meaning of this most disarming work is far from gentle.

As if to reinforce this view of 'us and other' amidst cultural dislocation, Mellor's most recent sculpture sits in the gallery offering no way out. The sculpture is cast, a silver kangaroo staring out at the world with its large round eyes. Its skin burned, its ears gone, its features poignant, as its wide wide eyes confront us in their incomprehension. The exhibition does not allow us to turn away from the devastation of past and present, however prettily dressed up in a romanticised illusion of pristine arcadia.

While Mellor does not offer the hope of a phoenix rising from the ashes, there is, in some other of his sculptural works, a touch of whimsy and fun. Three kangaroos, nattily dressed with blue and white pottery shards embedded in their white ceramic bodies, are the three monkeys who see, hear and speak no evil. In the playfulness of the sculptural forms, there is a hint of a more positive future - we just have to open our eyes, ears and mouth - and speak - or speak out.

The other journey

To provide some context to the contemporary art produced so exquisitely by Danie Mellor, I turn to scholar Laura Fisher (2012)  to help me position the role of contemporary Aboriginal art and the critical stance taken by this artist. 

Fisher explores the place of disenchantment and hope in the spectrum of Aboriginal art-types and locations-specific stories. The stereotype of Aboriginal art belongs to the desert-centred dot paintings which visitors to an Aboriginal art exhibition expect to see. But Mellor's own European and Indigenous background, and his interest in issues of subjectivity and displacement, challenge the stereotyped vision of what Aboriginal art is deemed to be in the popular imaginary.

Fisher questions this arty stereotype for 'post-assimilation Australia' (2012:3). She charts the growth and development of the global Aboriginal art market which at one end of the spectrum commemorates Aboriginal heritage and venerates the Indigenous connection to country and place, while at the other, it acts to exoticise, even appropriate the fascinating and remote other. But there is a positive outcome too. Fisher argues it has the effect of countering the all too often negative depiction of Aboriginal people in media representations of violence, alcoholism, incarceration and suffering. 

She maintains that these representations - from pop culture and news broadcasts to academic research and government service - assert a imagined authentic identity of an Aboriginal person. She states that 'dark-skinned Aboriginal people from remote areas are strongly differentiated from light-skinned Aboriginal people from rural and urban areas, and the latter are often excluded from the kinds of attention that validate Aboriginality as an identity' (166). In the end both groups become marginal - remote artists as they remain in local communities without 'engagement with western art' (167), and urban artists as they remain outside the lucrative and global art market dominated by remote area artists.

But it's not only this binary perspective that divides Aboriginal art and Indigeneity. Fisher explores another dimension of difference, that between anthropology and art (and the expanding market place). She observes that: 'Urban Aboriginal artists continue to critique the ways in which ethnographic museology and anthropological scholarship have transmitted particular ideas about “authentic” Aboriginality to the public' (191), with its essentialising and universalising consequences. 

A further contested dimension is the naming of art and artists as Aboriginal. This sets the Indigenous art-genre apart from the broader artworld. Fisher asks what it would mean to lose the nomenclature of 'Aboriginal artist' and be viewed simply as 'artist'. Danie Mellor plays within this terrain straddling two cultures and two artwords, European and Aboriginal. When he won the prestigious National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 2009, the media columnist Andrew Bolt (2009) suggested disparagingly that he was not a worthy winner as he is '[y]et another white who chooses to be black'.

Mellor's art reaches across cultural difference through a deeply personalised journey which engages in questing for social, spiritual and environmental justice and awareness within a world which still seems to hesitate to step across the abyss towards intercultural understanding.

References
- Bolt A. 2009. The artist needs colouring in. Herald Sun Aug 16, 2009, http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_artist_needs_coloring_in/
 - Fisher L. 2012. Hope, ethics & disenchantment: a critical sociological inquiry into the Aboriginal art phenonomen. PhD thesis, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales. 

Danie Mellor's artworks
Bayi Minyjarra 2013. http://www.artmuseum.uq.edu.au/content/danie-mellor-exotic-lies-sacred-ties 
The Promised Land 2009. http://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2013/10/leading-contemporary-artist-danie-mellor-feature-uq-art-museum 

The charm is in the telling

by Sylvie Shaw

A story can lead anywhere. We tell it. Write it. Film it. Musicalise it. Consume it. We embed a story's narrative into our own narrative. We tell and retell ourselves to others, extending the narrative of self with other.

Walking to work today, something grey in the distance caught my eye. I got closer and my heart sank. Lying in the middle of the pavement was an owl, a tawny frogmouth to give the bird its proper name. It looked so peaceful. It was lying on its back, its feet in the air and not a feather out of place. It was dead - but there was no sign of what it had died from. Only one whitish eye gave any indication of what could have happened. 

Whenever I see a roadkill I take the animal off the road and place it under a tree, covering the body with leaves and reverence. I gently cradled the tawny owl, carried it to the nearest quiet place and covered the body with earth, sticks and leaves, said a silent prayer for the journey and continued walking, reflecting, saddened.

Possum, lizard or cockatoo, magpie, crow or snake, I lift the creature off the road so they can have some kind of dignity in death. But one day I made a mistake. A black snake lay in the middle of the road. Blood was oozing from a wound in its head. I decided to shift it to a safer place. In the middle of moving it, the snake woke up. Gingerly I moved it under a tree, and slowly backed away.

I would have liked to tell the story to you personally. it's not a written story but one that grows with the telling. I wanted to share this story face to face and watch and listen to the way you responded. Story telling is a two way process between teller and listener and that is its charm. The listener takes the threads of the story and reframes the telling internally. Then they spread the story to others, widening the narrative and embedding their own narrative within the original tale. 

Stories are about relationship. The relationship between teller and the imaginative creation of the listener in receiving that story. There are stories we remember as tender or as frightening. Then there are stories we choose to forget. Stories become experience, become memories, become our lives. Some we pave over.

Philosopher David Abram (2014) tells the story (in writing) of the way writing displaced the story of nature. We know we are part of nature but within a western or most-modern worldview, humans tend to see themselves as distant or apart from the natural world that sustains us. Perhaps one reason for this separation is in the telling. Abram writes that as writing became a mode of story transmission, stories became displaced, dislocated, 'stripped off of the particular sites where they are believed to have occurred, and...planted on the page of the book'. He writes:

'... the ink's traces made by the pen as it moves across the page begin to replace the tracks made by the animals and by one's animal ancestors as they moved across the land so that the page now becomes the primary mnemonic, or memory trigger for remembering the linguistic information. And, the land begins to seem superfluous. It's no longer necessary to the act of thinking. You no longer need to see those cliffs, and these mountainsides, and these kinds of trees, to remember clearly the stories that form the whole matrix of your thinking awareness. The stories now, in books, can be carried elsewhere. They can be read in distant cities, on distant continents, and they're read by people who read about these curious stories, these folk tales and fairy tales.... So, it's quite a dramatic change in our felt experience of the more than human natural landscape once we step into a regime of writing.' 

Noting this gap between orality and writing, Walter Ong (1984:2) points out (or warms?) that we [does he mean all humans?} are 'so literate [in the modern world] that it is difficult for us to conceive of an oral universe of communication or thought except as a variant of a literate universe'. What have we lost in the transformation of story to writing, print and electronic media or what Ong calls a 'second orality'?

Perhaps the loss is experienced in relationship to the sacred. Ong notes the 'interiorizing force of the oral world which relates in a special way to the sacral, to the ultimate concerns of existence' (72). The language of the sacred, of scriptures and other sacred texts are honoured and are powerful. Using oral modes of telling and honouring, they move whole populations, communities and individuals. Ong states that such texts 'authenticate the primacy of the oral in many ways' (73). Words, spoken words have power. We must take heed and take care.

Ong stresses that losing the sense of intimacy of face to face story telling and listening has not, diluted the strength of orality. In fact it continues to uphold the place of story and narrative, teller and receiver, within the wider realm of sacred scriptures. Referring to the biblical narrative, Ong cites Letters to the Romans (10:17): 'Faith comes through hearing', and a passage from Corinthians (2:3:6): The letter kills. The spirit [breath on which rides the spoken word] gives life'. How is that word played out in practice?

Indigenous people still know and tell the stories embedded in land and place. They sing, ritualise and dance these places, keeping the spirit of the land and the land-people-ancestor relationship alive. Western and other most-modern cultures pave over places, memories and dreams, often without realising, understanding or feeling the presence of place or being able to hear the stories framed by country and intimacy.

In the process, Indigenous people's voices and memories and their experiences over generations have been disavowed. But they still surface, are told and retold, sung and danced and sung and danced again. In the fading light, the dancers feet in the earth stir up a film of dust that spreads across the land - the spirit of the wind, breath and voice combine to spread the stories of nature and peoples like fertile seeds to be planted into a flourishing world.

References

Abram D. 2014. The spell of literacy. http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/abram.htm#Writing_Displaces_Nature:_

Ong W. 1984. Orality and literacy. London and New York: Routledge.

Image source

Fantasy, landscape, mountains, fields, road, clouds, http://pixabay.com/en/fantasy-landscape-mountains-fields-220092/

Fishing the net in the online net-work

by Sylvie Shaw

This image from the Australian Museum depicts an artwork created out of 'ghostnets', the huge spreading fish nets that commercial operations leave to wash up on beaches along Australia's shores and out at sea. So large are these nets, they can form a vertical underwater wall hundreds of meters long which continues to catch and entrap creatures such as turtles, dugong, shark and a host of other significant marine species. 

The idea for using the image of the enwrapped turtle is to link the transformation of the destructive ghostnet into a memorialisation and validation of the role of sea creatures within the global ecosystem or eco-network, currently under threat from multiple pressures. To highlight the devastating effects of discarded and abandoned fishnets, Indigenous women from northern Australia are re-creating or recycling the nets into beautiful artworks and other useful objects (Ryan 2008), as well as performing in community rituals such as the evocative ghostnet 'Puppet Show' devised by the community on Mua Island in the Torres Strait.

The ghostly or metaphorical meaning of the ghostnet transformation is intended firstly, to consider the role of the internet for bringing news of grassroots activities which do not gain parlance in mainline media but which are making inroads and raising awareness about the need for 'caring for country'. The image of the turtle enshrouded in net-work is part of a larger environmental cleanup project taking place around the north of Australia, among the Torres Strait islands and the Gulf of Carpentaria. The Gulf has become a repository for these nets which are swept into the area on currents and tides. They swirl and gather doing damage as they go. But once in, they don't often flow back out to the wider ocean and unless collected, will remain doing damage indefinitely.

The second reason for using the image of a ghostnet and its transformation for the spirit of creative community and environmental activism is its use as a metaphor for the creative transformation in web-based networks which promote religion and spirituality online. The image is designed to mirror the spread the virtual or 'ghostly' networks within the online world which gather religious and spiritual practitioners together in the promise of spiritual interconnectedness and renewal. It is this notion of change and reclaiming the network from the ghostly or virtual to the embodied, sensory and real, building relationship across interactive spaces, that underscores this short discussion.

One of the most interesting aspects of online religion or religion online is wondering whether practising faith, engaging in online rituals or sharing anecdotes of religious experiences is as real as the real itself. Current research is mixed, so I am wondering if there is an age or generational dimension that distinguishes those who find virtual worlds remain virtual, and those for whom virtual experiences are embodied and expressed in a similar way to offline world experiences. Certainly the filmed Puppet Show performance helps unravel the net-work into a startling reality of desecration and yet, at the same time, a reality of hopeful change.

Ritual such as the Torres Strait re-enactment of the ghostnet story, and religious and spiritual rituals online, are defined by Casey (2007:80) as 'acts of believing because they make references to, and preserve trust in, unseen realities'. Citing Goethals (2003), Casey offers an insight into the theory of ritual explaining that:

'First, it entails entry into specifically designated zones of time and space. Second, religious ritual requires the attentive, dynamic engagement of persons in a participatory event. Thirdly, community emerges from shared attentiveness and participation in these symbolic temporal and spatial zones. Finally, individuals taking part in the religious ritual experience a renewal of spirit.'

By taking part in live chat on religious questions, spirited playing in online gaming worlds, or participating in worship services and sacred rituals, participants move into an inbetween liminal space, setting aside time to seek insight and community. Casey considers these virtual spaces as, following Benedict Anderson, 'imagined communities' which join people together in fellowship. The network and net-work are relational and the goal, creating meaningful and communal relationships and bringing ideas and ideals to prominence.

To emphasise this citing of 'imagined community', Campbell (2010) states that religious communities and religious identities are affirmed by inter-web-connections. In these imagined yet felt 'otherrealms', religious practitioners can be located anywhere across the globe but are connected spatially through a communal religious adherence. Those engaging in these 'unseen realities' (Casey 2007:80) gain a shared sense of values and experiences, a sense of finding where they belong, an emotional connection with religiously-minded others, and a vibrancy usually associated in the offline world of ritual practice (Wagner 2012).

As an example of such practice, Wagner, in her insightful book Godwired: religion, ritual and virtual reality, refers to the 'e-vangelical' website 'fishthe.net', whose aim is to foster relationships and evangelical involvement. The website states that 'sharing the Gospel has never been easier'. 

Fishthe.net is quite an unattractive website, but dubbed as an 'evangelistic tacklebox', it presents a practical guide to individual salvation. It offers links to a range of possibilities for personal reflection and beliefs to share with others. While some religious adherents might argue that an online presence is not authentic, and for real religious engagement one needs to be face-to-face with others in ritual and reverence, fishthe.net takes a pragmatic tack and assumes that its virtual site can bring meaning and conviction to the practitioners' lives, despite its ungainly website approach.

But that's not the view of those who have fished the religious net widely. They regard their online religious immersions as being no different to their offline life and experiences (Helland 2005). Helland likens online religious practice and spiritual experience to the notion of 'lived religion', stating  that these everyday encounters with the sacred do not take place in 'some place 'other’' but become part of people's daily lived experience and veneration.

While Helland locates a vibrant lived religiosity online, Wagner is more playful, arguing that the sometimes 'ghostly' virtual realm can be a place of 'self-expression' where the real in the virtual 'unseen realities' are embraced and relished both online and off. Both are real.
  
References
Campbell H. 2010. When religion meets new media. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.
Casey C.A. 2006. Virtual ritual, real faith: the revitalization of religious ritual in cyberspace. Online-Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet 02.1.

Goethals G. 2003. Myth and ritual in Cyberspace. In J. Mitchell and S. Marriage, Eds., Mediating religion: conversations in media, religion and culture, 257-269, New York: T and T Clark.
Ghostnets.com.au. 2011. Mua Island (Torres Strait) puppet show from ghost net,

Helland C. 2005. Online religion as lived religion. Methodological issues in the study on religious participation on the internet. Online-Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet 1.1.
Ryan S. 2008. A ghost net story. Craft Australia.
Wagner R. 2012. Godwired: religion, ritual and virtual reality. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.

Image source
Ghost net art Turtle # 1, Rebecca Fisher, ©Australian Museum, http://australianmuseum.net.au/image/Turtle-1/

© Australian MuseumAustralian Museum

Rebecca Fisher © Australian Museum

Rebecca Fisher © Australian Museum

Religion, media and popular culture

by Sylvie Shaw

In his 2007 article, 'Studying religion and popular culture', scholar David Morgan points to an ever expanding interest in mediated processes and programs in scholarly circles. This growing interest links consumerism, mass culture, and community dispositions within the framework of religion. 

Morgan stresses that the study of religion, media and popular culture intersects across disciplines and engages with the everyday, in a way reminiscent of the concept of everyday lived religion (Ammerman 2006; McGuire 2008). But he sees the trend towards interdisciplinarity may clash with the current silo-ised structure of academia and professional associations. These narrow confines limit a stronger and essential engagement across disciplines that may either eschew religion in the academy in the belief that universities are and should remain secular, or see no relationship between their field of endeavour and aspects of religion, the sacred and the divine. (There are however changes afoot in various academic arenas including ecology, geography and science).

Morgan validates the extension of disciplinary borders, adding that transdisciplinary approaches to religion and media understanding are 'better able to respond to the fluidity and transcience of popular culture, which is driven by markets, consumption, daily ritual, and all manner of human exchange' (2007:26). 

Religion and religious organisations are also playing in this mediated commoditised world as they produce, package and disseminate their message via the spectrum of pop culture processes. 

However, Elaine Graham (2007) views these changes though a sceptical lens, surmising that the spread of studies in religion, media and pop culture may be related to the 'search for 'relevance' on the part of academics and churches alike' (66). While students (in Australia perhaps) may be less religion literate these days, she suggests that the inclusion of pop culture into academic courses and religious organisations themselves (specifically referencing Christianity), adds a seductive edge to studies in religion and theology. In particular, it can spur the youth audience and their interest.

Broadening the discussion is Jeremy Stolow's (2005) significant piece, 'Religion and/as media'. Stolow perceives that the overlapping descriptor 'religion and media' is less relevant than the expression of 'religion as media', arguing that ''religion' can only be manifested through some process of mediation' (125, author italics). He stresses that religious institutions have 'always' done this. He points out that 'communities of faith' have consistently enacted 'the sacred' though mediated formats and structures, whether written text, material culture, ritual practice, architecture, music and stimuli to engage the senses and emotions. These procedures and cross culture-media spaces and forms have in the past, and are still continuing to be adopted by the spectrum of religions, now on a global scale.

Going forward, Morgan (2013) updates perspectives from Graham and others, also highlighting the longevity of religions' connections with, and transmissions of mediated products, both oral and written. As a scholar who often focuses on the artistic, aesthetic and visual, Morgan enlarges this recent 'turn' to studies within the intersection of religion and media by elevating the sensory and embodied practice of religious enagement. In the process of advancing embodiment, he redefines the core of religion as shifting from the realm of beliefs to which adherents aspire, to a more practical and interlaced definition  involving relationality - the connection between, and influence of, the spiritual, the sensual and the community in relationship with the sacred. He states:

'Religion has come to be widely understood as embodied practices that cultivate relations among people, places, and non-human forces-nature, spirits, ancestors, saints, gods -- resulting in communities and sensibilities that shape those who participate (Morgan 2013:247).

Morgan's focus is the body and its relationship in religion to the body politic and the public sphere, a point reminding us of the foundational work of Foucault and Habermas. In a somewhat complex argument, he observes that the relationship between media and religion may not only have aided the promotion and spread of religious ideas and ideals, it has also promoted religious violence and the role of religion in 'social unrest' (352). In this case, the body can be displaced (through ethnic cleansing and the impact of conflict) and dismembered by the adversity of the body politic. 

But often the media fails to analyse the complexity of religious violence, its history, politics and rationale, preferring instead to gloss over the background with images of drama and destruction. In other words', Morgan says (reviewing the commentary of Nick Couldrey, 2003) 'we stand to learn more about how people actually map their worlds by means of media practices than we do from their emotional evocation of a mythic social center' (353).

This view extends the often upbeat emphasis in religion and pop culture analyes to the critical role of the way the mainline media frames its coverage of religion-related stories, including its effect on religious violence, and in Australia at the moment, on the plight of refugees.

Another scholar engaged in the field of religion and media is Matthew Engelke (2010). His article, 'Religion and the media turn' reviews a series of current texts directed to further explaining the intersection between the two monoliths, religion and media. Filled with a bulk of references and an array of discourses, Engelke takes the notion of a rise in privatised religion to task. He maintains that the interconnection of religion with media has been and is definitely public. 

Similar to Morgan, Engelke suggests a revised definition of religion as a result of the religion and media 'turn'. He states that in much of the discussion on religion as mediation, the term '“religion” is often understood as the set of practices, objects, and ideas that manifest the relationship between the known and visible world of humans and the unknown and invisible world of spirits and the divine' (374). 

While this definition tends towards anthropocentrism (ignoring the ecocentric reconstruction of religious parameters), he illustrates how it overlooks the role of material culture and mediated channels of distribution. For Engelke, McLuhan's 'the medium is the message' is enlarged to include material and embodied processes, as well as the power and ideological relations that surround both mediums and messages, and the audience who receives and engages with 'the stuff of religion'. 

To ground this perspective, Engelke turns to Klassen (in Morgan 2008) who states:

'In the case of religion and media, the concept of practice has facilitated a shift from focusing purely on the message of a text, image, or sound to considering the medium in its many dimensions: how it works and who controls it, to what range of human senses a particular medium appeals, what people do with both messages and the media that transmit them, and how ritual, theologies, and religious dispositions are constituted and transformed by different kinds of media. [p. 138]'

Let's go back to the academy and to the conception that its narrow discipline structure limits the transdisciplinarity necessary to engage effectively with the religion and media turn. Engelke seems to suggest a deeper scrutiny of media and other discourses is needed to avoid, what I consider to be, an over-emphasis of optimism and descriptive elements during the birth of the field. This stresses the macro dimension - society, culture, community, and to a lesser extent, the subculture (especially in online research), whereas more recent research has incorporated the relationship between religion, media and popular culture, and the individual (who is actively involved in reception of and engagement with a variety of media and mediated religious forms and spaces).

The religion and media turn needs interdisciplined approaches by researchers, where, to cite Birgit Meyer (in Morgan 2013:353), 'religious mediation' should not exist 'as a discrete field of inquiry, but as a fundamental aspect of the religious worlds they study.'

Sources:
Ammerman N. 2006. Everyday religion. Observing modern religious lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Graham E. 2007. "What we make of the world". The turn to 'culture' in theology and the study of religion. In G. Lynch, ed., Between the sacred and profane: researching religion and popular culture, 64-81, London: I.B. Taurus. 
Klassen P. 2008. Practice. In D. Morgan, ed., Key words in religion, media, and culture. London: Routledge.
McGuire M. 2008. Lived religion: faith and practice in everyday life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Meyer B. 2012. Mediation and the genesis of presence: towards a material approach to religion. Utrecht: Universiteit Utrecht. 
Morgan D. 2007. Studying religion and popular culture. Prospects, presuppositions and procedures. In G. Lynch, ed., Between the sacred and profane: researching religion and popular culture. London: I.B. Taurus.
Morgan D. 2013. Religion and media: A critical review of recent developments. Critical Research on Religion 1: 347-356.
Stolow J. 2005. Religion and/as media. Theory, Culture & Society 22: 119-143.

Image:
Chihuly, Chihuly glass: http://pixabay.com/en/chihuly-chihuly-glass-sculpture-art-223256/

Welcome back, Class of 2014

by Sylvie Shaw

Welcome to the Writing Religion and Spirituality class at The University of Queensland, 2014. The course presents a marvellous array of the dimensions of media and religion discourse. We explore theories of mediatization, discuss and create online religions, write blogs, design websites, get inspired by poetry, nature, music, critically reflect on issues surrounding representation, globalisation, and religious change. In the process we aim to really enjoy our interactions with others, in class and online.