Enqi Weng
Dr Enqi Weng is a sociologist of religion and a Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University. She completed her PhD from the School of Media and Communications at RMIT University in 2018 and has since published her monograph Media Perceptions of Religious Changes in Australia: Of Dominance and Diversity (Routledge, 2020). Her doctoral thesis analysed media representation of religions in Australia, and revealed that public discussions about religion were not only primarily constructed and influenced by white male perspectives, British influences also problematically continued to shape these discussions in post-colonial Australia. Her research interests include: decolonial approaches to the study of religion; race and religion; media and religion; cultural/religious diversity; religious literacy in journalism. She has experience teaching media and religious studies units at Deakin and RMIT.
Supervisors: Peter Horsfield, Chris Hudson, and Alex Wake
Supervisors: Peter Horsfield, Chris Hudson, and Alex Wake
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Papers by Enqi Weng
media study found that diverse expressions of religion, spirituality and the secular
sacred were located across Australian political, public and sociocultural life in overt and
subtle ways. Christianity remains dominantly represented across different news genres,
while Aboriginal Spirituality had little mention despite its deep pre-colonial history.
Islam received the most, and largely negative, attention across geopolitical and national
issues. Findings from the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to
Child Sexual Abuse were also prominently featured focused on Christianity and Judaism.
Eastern religions and practices, such as Buddhism, Hinduism and yoga, received
comparatively less coverage, but were depicted mostly positively, as was spirituality.
Findings from Australia demonstrate that religion, spirituality and the secular sacred
are embedded in pervasive ways that more accurately reflect lived religious and spiritual
realities than census data and previous studies have documented.
precarious workplaces. In addition, some religious and spiritual individuals and groups did not comply and actively resisted restrictions at times. By contrast, the pandemic also resulted in a positive re-engagement with religion and spirituality, as lockdown measures served to accelerate a digital push with activities shifting to online platforms. Religious and spiritual efforts were initiated online and offline to promote wellbeing and to serve those most in need. This article presents an analysis of media representations of religious, spiritual and non-religious responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Melbourne, Australia, from January to August 2020, including two periods of lockdown.
It applies a mixed-method quantitative and qualitative thematic approach, using targeted keywords identified in previous international and Australian media research. In so doing, it provides insights into Melbourne’s worldview complexity, and also of the changing place of religion, spirituality and non-religion in the Australian public sphere in COVID times.
cultural perspectives of these religions. Current research findings show that religious literacy among media practitioners in Australia is not only limited to specific notions about a small number of religions, it is exacerbated by an Anglo-Celtic dominance in the media workforce. This article suggests that for news media to provide a more culturally and religiously inclusive public service to promote societal understanding,
current and emerging journalists require a more reflexive understanding of religions, through journalism studies and humanities more broadly, and how they have historically shaped the world, and continue to do so.
media study found that diverse expressions of religion, spirituality and the secular
sacred were located across Australian political, public and sociocultural life in overt and
subtle ways. Christianity remains dominantly represented across different news genres,
while Aboriginal Spirituality had little mention despite its deep pre-colonial history.
Islam received the most, and largely negative, attention across geopolitical and national
issues. Findings from the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to
Child Sexual Abuse were also prominently featured focused on Christianity and Judaism.
Eastern religions and practices, such as Buddhism, Hinduism and yoga, received
comparatively less coverage, but were depicted mostly positively, as was spirituality.
Findings from Australia demonstrate that religion, spirituality and the secular sacred
are embedded in pervasive ways that more accurately reflect lived religious and spiritual
realities than census data and previous studies have documented.
precarious workplaces. In addition, some religious and spiritual individuals and groups did not comply and actively resisted restrictions at times. By contrast, the pandemic also resulted in a positive re-engagement with religion and spirituality, as lockdown measures served to accelerate a digital push with activities shifting to online platforms. Religious and spiritual efforts were initiated online and offline to promote wellbeing and to serve those most in need. This article presents an analysis of media representations of religious, spiritual and non-religious responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Melbourne, Australia, from January to August 2020, including two periods of lockdown.
It applies a mixed-method quantitative and qualitative thematic approach, using targeted keywords identified in previous international and Australian media research. In so doing, it provides insights into Melbourne’s worldview complexity, and also of the changing place of religion, spirituality and non-religion in the Australian public sphere in COVID times.
cultural perspectives of these religions. Current research findings show that religious literacy among media practitioners in Australia is not only limited to specific notions about a small number of religions, it is exacerbated by an Anglo-Celtic dominance in the media workforce. This article suggests that for news media to provide a more culturally and religiously inclusive public service to promote societal understanding,
current and emerging journalists require a more reflexive understanding of religions, through journalism studies and humanities more broadly, and how they have historically shaped the world, and continue to do so.
This paper argues that the political turn in favour of PAP was partially contributed by the passing of Singapore’s founding father and founder of the PAP, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, earlier that year. It will draw upon earlier works on media rituals by Pantti and Sumiala (2009) and those on the death of Princess Diana (Kear and Steinberg, 1999; Walter, 1999) in studying the media rituals by Singapore’s national media that dominated and defined discourses about Lee’s life and achievements, and the ‘collective effervescence’ (Durkheim, 2001) it accomplished through media discourses. Through the application of discourse analysis on media discourses in the seven-day mourning period leading up to his memorial service on 29th March 2015, it will focus on presenting sacred discourses that transformed Mr Lee from a statesman into a ‘secular sacred’ figure who represented national identity and values for the young nation. The concept of the ‘secular sacred’ is drawn from a recent neo-Durkheimian approach towards an understanding of the sacred as a non-negotiable value that is not necessarily religious (Anttonen, 2007; Knott, 2013).
By examining media rituals surrounding Lee’s death, and how sacred discourses have positioned him as a ‘secular sacred’ figure and national symbol, this paper wishes to explore its immediate effects on Singapore’s national identity and its political future, and to consider its long-term implications.
Informed by current research in the sociology of religion, this paper approaches the definition of religion through a focus on the concept of the sacred as a non-negotiable, inviolable value (Anttonen, 2007).
Content analysis findings from this research has found a strong correlation between religion and politics. To further investigate, this paper will present a case study on the issue of same-sex marriage on ABC’s Q&A program. It will focus on the interaction between the public and key politicians Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd on the program pertaining to this issue.
Within the sociological study of religion, scholars have recently studied the ‘sacred’ as a common factor within religions and non-negotiable secular values (Lynch, 2012; Knott, 2013). From that, the concepts of the ‘religious sacred’ and the ‘secular sacred’ were viewed to have ‘potential mutualities’ and should be studied as separate categories (Knott, 2013). Similarly in Australia, sociological scholars of religion have suggested a possible commonality between the ‘secular’ and the ‘sacred’ (Frame, 2009; Seal, 2009; Tacey, 2009).
This paper reports on a project that aims to find out the ways in which religion, spirituality and the ‘secular sacred’ emerges in the Australian public sphere by observing how they are being discussed on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Q&A panel discussion program. It will adopt the theoretical framework of ‘conventional religion’, ‘common religion’ and ‘secular sacred’, which was applied in a recent research on British media’s representation of religion and spirituality (Knott et al., 2013).
This paper will present findings from a pilot study conducted on 10 Q&A episodes. Preliminary findings show that all episodes raised significant references to the categories of ‘conventional religion’ and ‘secular sacred’ even though eight of the programs were topically unreligious. Findings also show that the theoretical framework can be further enhanced through a study in the Australian context.
religious and secular form, Media Perceptions of Religious Changes in Australia calls for a broader sociological perspective on religion and will appeal to scholars of sociology and media studies with interests in religion and public life.