How sacred sites and their agents construct the mediatization of Mary?

This newly published article, which I co-authored with Nurit Stadler, of the department of sociology and social anthropology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, sheds light on the study of online religious worship and its mediatization, particularly regarding Marian veneration on social media platforms. It has just been added to the "online first" category in the top journal of New Media and Society and may be of interest to anyone curious about the study of Marian movements, visual social media, pilgrimage in the digital age and scholars of online mediatization. You can read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241265513 

The image below is taken from the Instagram feed of the Sanctuary of Fátima in Portugal. A central site of pilgrimage for Catholic believers and followers of the Marian movement. Similar postings, alongside ethnographic fieldwork, have fed the study's corpus. 

How do believers acquire religious knowledge online?

I am happy to share that last month (April 2024), I participated in the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference, which took place in Philadelphia. My presentation focused on the ways believers acquire religious knowledge online. This discussion revealed religious epistemology and sourcing practices in the Digital Age, with special attention to the Zionist-Religious variant in Israel’s Jewish population. The presentation was based on a paper I co-authored with my student (who I am delighted to say, officially received his PhD yesterday) , Dr. Akiva Berger. For more information on the paper, you can read the following link:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439884.2023.2169833