Mormon Media Studies Symposium

Session 1

            I attended “Founding a New Discipline: 10^th Anniversary of the Journal of Media and Religion” which was taught by Daniel Stout, an editor of the journal. I have to admit that going into it, I thought it would be a pretty boring session to attend, but I actually learned a lot more about the connection between media and religion and their role in academic research than I thought I would.  Dr. Stout co-founded the academic journal 10 years ago, and he presented a list of the journal’s 10 best articles.

Because we were attending a conference for Mormon media studies, I assumed the articles would be related to our religion, but they actually were more diverse. Dr. Stout talked about things like China’s relationship with religion, how religious advertising sells, perceptions of Barack Obama’s religion in the 2008 election, how martial arts can be seen as a religion, how Mitt Romney’s religion represents Mormon identity, and the LDS church’s effective use of social media. Each of the articles he discussed were interesting to me, but I particularly found the articles relating to Mitt Romney and Barack Obama’s religions very interesting. He said that after Obama was elected in the 2008 election, 20% of Americans continued to believe that he was Muslim. He also talked about how Mitt Romney is viewed as a model to Americans of what a Mormon is like. All in all, the session was interesting and it peaked my interest in media studies in a number of ways.

Session 2

            I also attended “Publishing Trends in Mormon Media Scholarship”, presented by Julie Williamsen and Trevor Alvord. They talked about the “Mormon Moment” that begun with the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake and ended with Mitt Romney’s defeat just a few days ago. They specifically looked at the publishing trends in regards to Mormonism—the amount of publications, and whether those publications were favorable, neutral, or negative toward Mormons. Despite the extra attention Mormons received during the last 10 years, their data didn’t actually show that there was a “Mormon Moment” in academia. There weren’t any significant jumps in the amount of research being done on Mormons. They ended their presentation with a video produced by BYU Magazine that talked about the “Mormon Moment” and Mitt Romney.