Religion, cultural studies and New Age sacralization of everyday life

2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 649-663 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Redden
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
New Age ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Spiritual Power ◽  
Secularization Theory ◽  
New Age Spirituality

Through an interpretation of New Age spirituality, this article is concerned with how cultural studies – as a discipline that emerged in the shadow of secularization theory – can be involved in the reappraisal of religion. At once part consumer culture and part counterculture, the New Age is something of a conundrum that raises alluring questions about social and cultural change. In the name of re-enchantment and taking back control of one’s life through inner spiritual power, it appears to be aimed precisely at those forces of social rationalization that are seen to engender secularization. The piece suggests that such emergent religious movements not only challenge us to rethink the frameworks through which religion has been conceptualized, but that they provide multiple possibilities for the examination of the sacred in light of cultural studies’ disciplinary concerns with contemporary sociocultural dynamics, in particular as they are experienced within the ambit of everyday life.

scholarly journals "EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED": NETWORKED CONSPIRITUALITY IN NEW AGE MEDIA

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleena Chia ◽  
Jonathan Corpus Ong ◽  
Hugh Davies ◽  
Mack Hagood
Keyword(s):  
New Age ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Internet Studies ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Formal Quality ◽  
Inner Self ◽  
Power And Powerlessness ◽  
New Age Spirituality

Conspirituality refers to the confluence of New Age spirituality and conspiracism that frame reality through holistic thinking—connecting events and energies, the inner self to the outer world in unseen ways. Conspirituality has thrived online: between the pleasure of the weekly horoscope and the obsession with the QAnon drop is a mode of causal promiscuity in which, as Q puts it, “future proves past.” This panel traces forms of conspirituality from MAGA mystics to New Age influencers, from technolibertarian imageboards to Silicon Valley vision quests. While conspirituality marks an online psychographic segmentation, it also traces a formal quality that organizes ways of navigating, knowing, and critiquing the internet, which is undergirded by New Age spirituality’s perennialism: a belief that different spiritual traditions are equally valid, because they all essentially worship the same divine source that emanates throughout the cosmos and the human body. The internet supercharges perennialism, providing a connective medium for New Age ideology of manifesting: the belief that we create our own reality. As users trawl the internet for snippets and statistics to feed their confirmation bias and populate their vision boards, the connective medium of the internet manifests toxicity and misinformation at scale. The papers in this panel develop a line of research on the coevolution of spirituality and technology from organized to new religious movements. Instead of demystification, we use ethnographic, textual, and hermeneutic approaches—examining internet users, governance, genealogies, and internet studies itself—to politicize networked conspirituality as vernacular theories of power and powerlessness.

Populäre Medienkulturen. Programmatische Positionen : Popular media cultures. Programmatic positions

SPIEL ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-185
Author(s):  
Marcus S. Kleiner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Media Literacy ◽  
Focus Of Attention ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Media Education ◽  
Cultural Formations ◽  
The Relationship

The article discusses the relationship between popular cultures, pop cultures and popular media cultures as transformative educational cultures. For this purpose, these three cultural formations are related to the themes of culture, everyday life, society, education, narration, experience and present. Apart from a few exceptions, such as in youth sociological works on cinema and education, in the context of media literacy discussions or in dealing with media education, educational dimensions of popular cultures and pop cultures have generally not been the focus of attention in media and cultural studies.

scholarly journals The politics of a ‘Poncy Pillowcase’: Migration and borders in Coronation Street’

Politics ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandria J Innes ◽  
Robert J Topinka
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
And Gender

This article examines the ways in which popular culture stages and supplies resources for agency in everyday life, with particular attention to migration and borders. Drawing upon cultural studies, and specific insights originating from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, we explore how intersectional identities such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender are experienced in relation to the globalisation of culture and identity in a 2007 Coronation Street storyline. The soap opera genre offers particular insights into how agency emerges in everyday life as migrants and locals navigate the forces of globalisation. We argue that a focus on popular culture can mitigate the problem of isolating migrant experiences from local experiences in migrant-receiving areas.

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