This article provides a focused review of researches undertaken within Digital religion studies in the last three decades, specifically highlighting how religious communities have been studied and approached within this area. It highlights the dominant theoretical and methodological approaches employed by scholars during what is being described as the four stages of research on religious communities emerging over this period of time. Thus, this article presents the findings of key studies emerging during these stages to illuminate how the study of religious communities online has evolved over time. It also offers insights into how this evolution specifically relates to the study of Catholic community online. Finally, a theoretical analysis is given, assessing current research on religious communities within Digital Religion studies, and approaches for future research are proposed.
ARTICLE HISTORY
This article reviews digital methodologies in the context of digital religion. We offer a tripod model for approaching digital methods: (a) defining research within digital environments, (b) the utilization of digital tools, and (c) applying unique digital frames. Through a critical review of multiple research projects, we explore three dominant research methods employed within the study of digital religion, namely, the use of textual analysis, interviews, and ethnography. Thus, we highlight the opportunities and challenges of using digital methods.
Online radical Islam is a topic widely studied by scholars and notoriously discussed among non- experts as well (Awan, 2007; Von Behr et al. 2013; Gray & Head 2009). Because of its intrinsic characteristics (i.e. accessibility, anonymity, or users’ identity dissimulation), the internet has always been a useful tool for propagandists of Islamic fundamentalism (Fighel, 2007; Stenersen, 2008; Koehler, 2014). However, in the last decade, studies have questioned the real importance and magnitude of Islamic radicalization online (Gill et al., 2017). In fact, while scholars were focused on observing digital Islamic radicalization, a galaxy of new forms of extremism was growing online (Silva et al., 2017; Roversi, 2008) that no longer made Islam an exceptional case study. Today, Muslim people are one of the groups most aggressively targeted by extremist, intolerant, violent, and radical discourses (Elahi & Khan, 2017; Amnesty International, 2019). Anti-Muslim hate speech has spread online throughout Europe and the United States, reinforced by the propaganda and political discourse of populist right-wing parties (Hafez, 2014; Bakali 2016). This paper introduces some large-scale action-research projects developed in Europe and Italy in the last three years (2016–2019) and aims to reconstruct the most updated Islamophobia state of the art in terms of numbers, characteristics, and phenomenology from the offline to the online context.
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