Nabil Echchaibi: From the margins of visibility

Nabil Echchaibi is Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture at the University of Colorado Boulder. His work engages the intersections of media, religion, and public life across transnational contexts. In this interview, he turns a critical lens on the very form of podcasting, asking what it means […]

Nathan Schneider: From journalism to cooperative futures

Nathan Schneider is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on cooperatives, digital economies, and democratic alternatives to platform capitalism. He approaches these concerns less as abstract problems than as ongoing experiments in governance and collective life. Drawing on his engagement with cooperative movements and community-based initiatives, he […]

Jenna Supp-Montgomerie: The hidden labor of voice

Jenna Supp-Montgomerie is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Religious Studies at the University of Iowa. Her work examines the historical and theological underpinnings of modern communication systems, often through attention to infrastructure and material conditions. In this interview, she draws on her research into the Atlantic telegraph to show how religious imaginaries shaped early […]

Christopher Helland: Virtual worlds as religious space

Christopher Helland is Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University. His research focuses on religion in digital environments, from early online forums to contemporary social platforms. Here he revisits foundational distinctions—such as “religion online” versus “online religion”—while showing how they have blurred over time. Digital media are no longer supplementary spaces but integral […]

Anthea Butler: Confronting white evangelical power

Anthea Butler is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work examines American religion through the lenses of race, politics, and media. She situates her scholarship within a broader effort to confront how religious narratives shape and legitimize systems of inequality. Drawing on her work on evangelicalism and Black religious life, she […]

Sarah McFarland Taylor: Moral tensions in environmental media

Sarah McFarland Taylor is Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University, with affiliations in Environmental Policy, American Studies, and Communication. Her work links religion, media, and environmental ethics. She traces how ecological concern circulates through consumer culture and mediated storytelling, often taking on moral or even spiritual dimensions. Rather than dismissing these forms as superficial, […]

Mirca Madianou: Witnessing care across distance

Mirca Madianou is Professor in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co‑director of the Migrant Futures Institute. Her research examines digital technologies in contexts of migration, crisis, and humanitarianism. In this interview, she explores how communication infrastructures reorder relationships of care and obligation across distance, particularly among […]

Stewart M. Hoover: Tracing a life with religion and media

Stewart M. Hoover is Professor Emeritus of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and founder of the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture. A central figure in the study of media and religion, he reflects on decades of work that helped establish the field. His remarks move between intellectual history and present concerns, […]

Sarah Banet-Weiser: Coming into feminism

Sarah Banet-Weiser is Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and Professor of Communication. Her work centers on gender, media, and the ambivalent dynamics of contemporary popular culture. She reflects here on how feminist commitments, personal experience, and theoretical inquiry intersect in her scholarship. A central thread […]

Marwan M. Kraidy: Living and theorizing revolution

Marwan M. Kraidy is Dean and CEO of Northwestern University in Qatar and Professor of Communication, holding the Anthony Shadid Chair in Global Media, Politics, and Culture. His scholarship has long traced the entanglement of media systems with geopolitics, especially in the Arab world. Here he reflects on media not simply as channels of communication […]