Upcoming thematic issues for 2025

Ethnic and Religious Identities in Virtual Space

This thematic issue addresses the problem of ethnic and religious identity in the virtual environment based on new methods of field ethnography and analytical ethnology. Cyberspace has become an integral part of everyday life, recasting social relationships and transforming cultural practices. It has also become vital to maintaining and constructing ethnic and religious identities. The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the significance of virtual worlds for ethnic and religious communities, which aim to discover new expressions of their identity in the digital form. Digitally mediated activities, on par with offline reality (and sometimes successfully replacing it), have brought the so-called cyber-ethnicity and web-religiosity to light.

This thematic issue aims to conceptualize the phenomenon of online identity within the methodology of cyberethnography, seeking to illuminate several issues, including, but not limited to, the following:

How does cyberreality merge with reality, and how does cyber-ethnicity become an integral part of contemporary ethnicity?
How do habitual patterns of behavior and activity change in the face of the global proliferation of local content?
How do new leaders emerge in online ethnic communities, and how do they interact with traditional authority figures?

Possible thematic areas include: