Digital British Islam: Experiences, Responses and Impact from Britain and Beyond
5th and 6th February 2025, Coventry University
About the Conference
Digital British Islam: Experiences, Responses and Impact, from Britain and Beyond is the primary conference event for the Digital British Islam project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), UK. The team has pushed the boundaries of existing research on digital religion and CIEs and mobilised a variety of methods – archival, qualitative and quantitative – to map and interrogate the exponential growth and impact of CIE exchanges on everyday life. Situated within multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches towards the study of online religion, this research unravels and demystifies the layered and multifaceted reciprocal impact of CIEs on Muslim communities and Islam in the UK. Focusing on changing narratives and experiences of religious authority, gender and political agency, Digital British Islam has developed a platform for mapping, interpreting and understanding the diversity, interlinkages and influence of CIEs – examining reciprocal interactions between the ‘digital’ and the ‘real’. Understanding digital influences on Muslim communities in the UK is imperative for diverse organisations, service providers and policy makers who work within, and digitally engage with complex British Muslim communities. Our findings offer new and paradigm-changing insights across these areas (which we will present at the conference).
In the final year of the project, we are keen to engage with cutting-edge research that explores the lived experiences of diverse religious and non-religious identities within cyber spaces. By bringing together distinctive expertise and approaches to the study of online religion, this conference will examine how Islamic digital spaces are changing in response to, and interacting with different stimuli, discourses and interlocutors. We seek to explore how conceptions of lived reality are evolving in response to the profusion of cyber environments where individuals and groups express and live their religious worldviews.
This two-day international conference will explore the diversity of ways in which diverse Muslim identities are experienced, encountered and catered for within digital spaces. While our research focused on ‘British’ experiences, the conference will engage with perspectives globally. Over the two days of the conference, there will be panels exploring multiple dimensions of online Islam, through a range of epistemological positions and disciplinary standpoints. There will be discussion panels with significant online figures (to be confirmed). The Digital British Islam team will also present their initial findings. The event will appeal to community representatives, academics, and those engaged with Muslim communities and issues in the UK. Whatever your interest in digital Islam in the UK (and beyond), the conference promises to be an engaging and dynamic event.
Return to this webpage for information on the programme, registration, and associated logistics. Updates will also be posted on X (digibritislam). The project cannot fund participant costs, but registration and attendance is free of charge. The event will not be streamed, but recordings of some sections of the conference will be made available after the event. The original call for papers has now passed.
Conference Organisers
Professor Gary R. Bunt, Professor Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor, Professor Frederic Volpi, Dr Sadek Hamid, Dr Khadijah Elshayyal, Dr Alamgir Ahmed and Dr Laura Jones