I am a doctoral student in the study of religions focusing on Shinto in a global and digital context.
My doctoral project “Shaping Shinto: A Multimethod Study in the Digital Aesthetics of Religion” explores the production, reproduction, remediation, and dissemination of Shinto on YouTube in the context of global digitalization. The study is designed around a three-step methodological study, using methods from digital humanities, multimodality, and intermediality studies and aesthetics of religion as a theoretical framework to map Shinto representation on YouTube, study aesthetic trends, and finally examine the media-specific impact on Shinto representation online.
Besides Shinto, aesthetics of religion, and digital religion, I am also interested in religion in Japan in general and religion in East Asia, mediation of issues of religion and ecology, multimodal and intermedial relations, media theory, the relationship between religion and popular culture, and semiotics of religion.
I am part of the doctoral research training program in Global Humanities at Linnaeus University and I am a member of the Linnæus University Center for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS).