MMCCRITDM - Religious minorities and the media: The communicative construction of religious identity in times of deep mediatisation.

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The extensive media coverage of the European refugee crisis has reinforced the tendency of media marginalisation of Christian minorities. This has affected in particular small Christian communities by forcing them to rethink their self-concept in identity-building discourses. Questions like who are we? and what is our role in the society? have come back to the agenda. We argue that media play a crucial role in these identity-building discourses of religious minorities. The main research question of the project is how Christian minorities construct their identity through religious media use. We argue that the representatives of minority Christian Churches use religious media (both intentionally and unintentionally) to construct the religious identity of their communities, and that this process is reflected in media use by religious actors, who create particular identity discourses by means of different outlets. The Orthodox and the 7th Day Adventist Church in Poland and the United Kingdom were selected as case studies by way of purposeful sampling within the most different system design (Otner 2010). The choice is justified by the differing religious structure and demographics, as well as varying media ensembles. Neither of the Churches has been analysed with a similar comparative perspective to date. Deploying a combination of qualitative research tools and methods of data collection (media content analysis, episodic interviews) and data analysis (critical discourse analysis) will show what aspects of religious identity are crucial in the process of its construction, to what degree religious identities are related to the national religious milieu and the dominant religious identity narratives, and what power relations behind religious identity construction can be identified. This project will fill an existing void within religious studies, as it will investigate the relationship between media narratives and Christian minorities identity construction. Furthermore, the project will offer a comparative perspective, showing differences and similarities between the two countries, Christian minority Churches and religious milieus alike.