Nabil Echchaibi

Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder

Pre-Congress Seminar:

Global Media, Global Religion: Research on Popular Media and the Remaking of Religions

Dr. Nabil Echchaibi joined the faculty of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication in the fall of 2007. His teaching and research interests revolve around identity politics among young Muslims in diaspora and in the Arab world.

Originally from Morocco, he taught in Europe where he helped set up a department of international communication at an American college in Switzerland. His work on minority media among young North Africans in Berlin and Paris has been published in various international journals and his book on cultural identities and diasporic radio in Western Europe is forthcoming. He is currently co-editing a book on the popular embrace of political blogging outside the U.S.

He has been traveling to the Middle East and North Africa to conduct fieldwork on the proliferation of Islamic satellite television and the role of popular culture in challenging the old reign of clerical Islam. Echchaibi received his B.A. from Mohamed V University in Rabat and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Indiana University-Bloomington.

Global Media, Global Religion: Research on Popular Media and the Remaking of Religions

As we move further into the 21st Century, the media are playing an ever more important role in religion and spirituality. The issue is larger than how religion is covered by journalism, or how religions are represented in television and films, as important as those things are.

All over the world, and in nearly all religions and religious cultures, new ways of mediating, understanding, and experiencing religion and spirituality are emerging. Blogs, YouTube, discussion boards, Facebook and Twitter communities, digital publications of a variety of kinds, and the whole emerging world of the social media, are radically expanding the languages of religion and the contexts within which religion and spirituality are understood and experienced. The media, particularly in the digital age, are also breaking down barriers between religions, making it possible for religious “others” throughout the world to participate in global discourses about religious symbols, meanings, and values.

This seminar will be led by Stewart Hoover and Nabil Echchaibi, two of the world’s leading researchers and scholars of religion and the media. They have conducted research on the mediation of religion both in the U.S. and internationally and have looked in particular at the way the media are changing the religious cultures of Christianity and Islam in the West, in the Middle East, and in the developing world. The seminar will feature results of their research as well as their thoughts about future developments, trends, and implications. There will be ample time for interaction and discussion.