A collection of essays examining secular discourse in contemporary media spheres.

Diverse media ranging from print publications and TV series to social media platforms are crucial for producing and participating in the secular public sphere, setting the stage for debates, controversies, and activism related both specifically and non-specifically to atheistic discourse. Global Sceptical Publics brings together contributions that analyze the diverse ways in which a variety of religious skeptics, doubters, and atheists engage with different forms of media as the framework for understanding contemporary communication and the formation of nonreligious publics. With authors from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, the book contributes new insights to the growing field of nonreligion studies, in particular, by demonstrating how skeptical groups can unsettle preconceived expectations of the public sphere.

The first book dedicated to media and mediation in domains of public guruship and devotion.

Illuminating the mediatization of guruship and the guruization of media, this book bridges the gap between scholarship on gurus and the disciplines of media and visual culture studies. It investigates guru iconographies in and across various time periods and also the distinctive ways in which diverse gurus engage with and inhabit different forms of media: statuary, games, print publications, photographs, portraiture, films, machines, social media, bodies, words, graffiti, dolls, sound, verse, tombs, and more.

The book’s interdisciplinary chapters advance, both conceptually and ethnographically, our understanding of the function of media in the dramatic production of guruship and reflect on the corporate branding of gurus and on mediated guruship as a series of aesthetic traps for the captivation of devotees and others. They show how different media can further enliven the complex plurality of guruship, for instance in instantiating notions of “absent-present” guruship and demonstrating the mutual mediation of gurus, caste, and Hindutva.

Gurus and Media foregrounds contested visions of the guru in the development of devotional publics and pluriform guruship across time and space. Thinking through the guru’s many media entanglements in a single place, this book contributes new insights to the study of South Asian religions and to the study of mediation more broadly.