Religious life today is increasingly shaped by movement: of people, institutions, ritual forms, media, and technologies across translocal worlds. This workshop explores how mobility transforms religious experience and experimentation in contemporary contexts. Bringing together ethnographic perspectives on migration, translocality, spirituality, and techno-mediated forms of belief and practice, we ask how religious worlds are produced, sustained, and reconfigured through circulation. 

Rather than treating religion as territorially bounded or institutionally fixed, recent scholarship has highlighted the emergence of mobile and experimental forms of religiosity unfolding across diasporic networks and translocal infrastructures. Mobility not only reshapes religious identities and communities, but also transforms practices of ritual, healing, authority, belonging, and transcendence. 

This workshop expands on these themes, focusing on how religious experimentation emerges under conditions of movement, displacement, and connectivity. Topics of discussion include translocal ritual worlds, digital and mediated forms of spirituality, entanglements of cosmological worlds and security mechanisms, religious infrastructures of mobility, pilgrimage and circulation, diasporic religious formations, and new configurations of sacred authority and belonging. 

By foregrounding mobility, the workshop seeks to rethink religion not as a stable system of belief, but as an ongoing and distributed process of negotiation, mediation, and experimentation.

Event Organisers:

Antonio Montañés Jiménez, Postdoctoral Research, University of Oxford 

Angelo Vasco, DPhil in Anthropology, University of Oxford 

Danchen Xu, DPhil in International Development, University of Oxford

Speakers:

Arpan Roy, University of Granada 

Angelo Vasco, University of Oxford 

Antonio Montañés Jiménez, University of Oxford and Complutense University of Madrid 

Caroline Wanjiku Kihato, University of Oxford 

Danchen Xu, University of Oxford 

Emily Pierini, Sapienza University of Rome 

Leslie Fesenmyer, University of Birmingham 

Loren Landau, University of Oxford