Monday, January 8, 4-6pm, Hagerty Hall [Rm. 186], 1775 College Rd.

How do devoutly religious women cope with the media and its apparent incompatibility with their values and practices? This lecture researches Old Order Amish and Lithuanian and Hassidic Jewish ultra-Orthodox communities, between 2012 and 2015. Both communities are generally familiar with the media but limit their use of it. The two groups manifested different patterns of media use or nonuse but had similar framings of danger and threat from the media. Rigorous adherence to religious dictates is greatly admired in these communities, and the women in both take considerable pride in manipulating their status in them. Their agency is reflected in how they negotiate the tension inherent in their contradictory roles as both gatekeepers and agents-of-change, which are analyzed in the lecture as valuable currencies in the cultural and religious markets these women negotiate.

Dr. Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar is a senior lecturer at Sapir Academic College in Sderot, Israel, teaching courses in research methods, communication, religion, and gender. Her doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was entitled “Ultra-Orthodox Women and Mass Media in Israel: Exposure Patterns and Reading Strategies.” She was a Fulbright post-doctoral fellow and a Scholar in Residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University. She worked on a study that analyzes women’s cultural-religious praxes. Dr. Neriya Ben-Shahar researches the mass media from the perspectives of religion and gender. Her most recent research project addresses the tension between religious values and new technologies among Old Order Amish women and Jewish ultra-Orthodox women.

Hosted by OSU Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures.