Contemporary Considerations
Confucianism, Daoism, and Chinese Society Today: Max Weber Revisit View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Xun Wang
Needless to say, that The Religions of China is such an important book on China that brought significant attention from scholars of China Studies. In 2013, a group of well-known social scientists from China and around the world held an international conference titled as “Max Weber and China: Culture, Law and Capitalism”. In 2016, for the centennial celebration of the book publication, a group of top social scientists in China also held a special forum in Beijing to reexamine Weber’s work. Ironically, the conference was organized by a very small non-profit organization “Hong Dao Shu Yuan” (Academy of Promoting Dao) consists of a very small group of scholars specialized in Confucianism. Thus, it is not surprise that the title of the forum was “Out of Weber’s Myth.” Apparently, scholars from these two conferences represent two different perspectives on Weber’s book. Nevertheless, both of them recognized the importance of the book. My paper is divided into two parts. First, I provide a brief review of Weber’s book with a table that best illustrates Weber’s view than the previous studies. Second, I address status of Confucianism and Daoism in China today and how they affect recent changes in China.
The Racial Politics of Conversion: Whiteness and Strategic Identity Performances of Polish White Female Converts to Islam View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anna Piela, Joanna Krotofil
A growing body of research acknowledges and investigates the salience of Whiteness as a dominant, yet unmarked racial identity in Eastern Europe (Imre 2005; Turda and Quine 2018). Scholars have analyzed imbrications of Whiteness with nationality (Balogun 2020; Jaskulowski 2020), Catholic religion (Balogun 2016; Fiałkowska 2020), migration (Botterill and Burrell 2019) and historically, positionality at the edges of colonial empires (Skulimowska 2019; Grzechnik 2020). To build on these foci, we “flip the script” and extend our analysis to strategic identity performances of Polish White female converts to Islam. By embracing a religion historically racialized as a non-White (Chan-Malik 2018), they must negotiate “non-normative Whiteness” and “non-normative White femininity” in the new religious field, and cope with shifts in social positioning. Additionally, those living outside Poland must wrestle with perceptions of their “non-normative Whiteness” as Eastern Europeans. Therefore, we argue that conversion to Islam, often intersecting with experiences of migration, illuminates racially framed intersectional identities in Eastern Europe. As theoretical lens, we use the concept of the White habitus (Bonilla-Silva ([2003] 2010, 104), that is ‘‘a racialized, uninterrupted socialization process that conditions and creates whites’ racial taste, perceptions, feelings, and emotions and their views on racial matters.” We focus on the question: how PWFCs deploy their White habitus to negotiate their racial-gender identities in Muslim- and non-Muslim-majority settings, within and outside Poland. We apply this analysis to a corpus of 35 qualitative interviews with PWFCs in Poland and the UK.
Exploring the Nexus between Islam, Social Media and Youth : A Study of the Tripartite Connection View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Iman Ismail, Bayan Khaled
The genesis of social media ushered in a new paradigm of collaboration and communication across the developed world and is gradually traversing the developing world. This paradigm shift transformed the exchange of information, altering the ways communities are socialized. The way that social media has aided in the socialization of religious communities is particularly interesting because of the complex influence of religion on one’s upbringing, outlook, and social interactions. This research paper seeks to understand this interplay, presenting an exploratory study on the nexus between Islam, social media, and Muslim youth. This tripartite system is of growing interest because, while a substantial amount of literature has been published on one or two of these topics together, little is known about the relationship between all three. This paper is meant to address this literature gap by posing the question: “How do Muslim youth interact with social media for religious reasons, and does social media affect their perception of Islam?” This question establishes two basic assumptions: 1) that youth who are Muslims are indeed using social media and 2) that these Muslim youth are using social media for religious reasons. These religious reasons include sharing information about Islam online, spreading the message that Islam is peaceful, and engaging in community-building and activism. To investigate these findings, this exploratory study combines a review of existing literature and the findings of a survey conducted in Summer 2021 to discuss the main aspects of the nexus between Islam, social media, and youth.
