Religion, Media and Crime

The project explores the complex and complicated relationship between religion, media, and crime. In addition to studies of the representations of crime and religion in various media and beyond the topics so far explored, we also encourage analyses of the various processes through which issues related to crime are created and made into public issues through the particular logic of media and the use of religious language, and how media discourses about crime use religious motifs and thus shape understandings of aspects such as guilt, punishment or redemption. We are also interested in exploring how various stakeholders in the religion-media-crime triangle communicate with each other and with the broader public about issues that touch on vertices of the triangle or the connections between the vertices, e.g. how media are used in prison ministry, how the police or the criminal justice system use religious motifs or practices in a media context to establish their own authority, etc.