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Call for Papers: MESA 2013Religion, Media and Politics in the Middle East: Anthropological&#160;Perspectives&#160;The intersection of religion and media is a vibrant area of inquiry within&#160;anthropology. This literature understands religion as a form of mediation&#160;in addition to exploring how media are mobilized in religious contexts. Driving&#160;this scholarship is a key concern with the technological mediation of the&#160;sacred: with how media, in a very real sense, “make” religion, or at least&#160;make it possible in new ways.This panel seeks to bring together contributions that move beyond an&#160;analysis of on-screen media content to ask about what it means to&#160;see/listen/feel “religiously” by exploring the intersections of media&#160;technologies, religion, and politics in the Middle East. At stake here is&#160;not just the creation of new forms of religious media, but also new ways of&#160;imagining what religiosity is, how it should be cultivated, and to what&#160;ends.How does the location of religious media within regimes of entertainment,&#160;neo-liberalism, revolutionary nationalism, or ethical self-discipline&#160;rearrange the conditions of possibility for religious discourse, power,&#160;and authority? In what ways do the uprisings across the region articulate&#160;with the changing terrain of religious media, whether televisual, print or&#160;aural? How do the political economies of media technologies and&#160;infrastructures in the region map out and interact with religious media? In&#160;what ways do religious media travel across borders and within specific&#160;transnational religious communities in the Middle East? What strategies do&#160;media-makers imagine as effective in producing certain forms of subjects&#160;and not others? How do viewers/listeners/readers ignore, appropriate,&#160;resist or re-signify the intended effects of religious media in their&#160;everyday lives?&#160;Other themes of interest include the intersections of religious media with&#160;sectarian tensions, human rights paradigms, class, gender, protest&#160;movements, competing notions of secularity and wider geo-political forces.&#160;We invite ethnographically-grounded papers addressing these themes and&#160;questions within the wide variety of religious traditions in the Middle&#160;East.&#160;Please send a CV, proposed paper title, and an abstract of no more than 250&#160;words to Yasmin Moll (yasmin.moll@nyu.edu) and Narges Bajoghli (narges.bajoghli@nyu.edu) by Jan. 31st 2013. Successful panelists will be&#160;notified by Feb. 5 2013.