Giulia Evolvi
Biographic Data
| ID | 573874 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Giulia Evolvi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Giulia |
| FAMILY NAME | Evolvi |
| SIGNATURE | EVOLVI G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Erasmus University Rotterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6928-5903 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 80 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Liberation through consumption? How vibrator brands construct female sexuality in a postfeminist framework
This article examines how vibrator brands use empowerment rhetoric to construct discourses on female masturbation. Through a discussion of 11 popular brand websites, it explores portrayals of the ‘ideal’ woman, positioning masturbation within neoliberal and postfeminist frameworks, and promoting consumerism as emancipation. It highlights exclusionary portrayals catering to young, able-bodied, white women, analysing commodified sexual liberation a…
How to be a woman (in politics): Constructions of gender in responses to Giorgia Meloni’s Instagram Posts
Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Italian far-right party Fratelli d’Italia, is the first female Presidente del Consiglio in the history of Italy and is known to be vocal against feminism and gender-related issues. This unique scenario calls for an examination of gender from several perspectives; this paper focuses on users’ responses to Giorgia Meloni’s gendered posts (LGBTQIA + families, patriarchy, abortion, mansplaining) during the general electi…
Secular Media, Religious Activists: The Role of Religion in Anti-Gender Mobilizations in Europe
Anti-gender groups, by promoting a Christian-inspired traditional view of family, challenge the idea that European society is becoming more secular. Given that previous literature has highlighted how these groups extensively use digital media and are connected to the Vatican, this article explores the following questions: How do anti-gender groups discuss religion on social media? What is the role of religion for anti-gender activists? By means o…
Digital Minority Religions: Introduction
Religion has always been, to a certain extent, mediated. Communication practices are at the core of religious communities, but it is in recent decades that the rapid developments of media technologies have created new possibilities for interactions about religion. In this context, a focus on religious minorities represents a unique opportunity for scholars to analyze the internet in nuanced ways within the framework of digital religion. Through t…
Emoji and Religion in the Twitter Discourses on the Notre Dame Cathedral Fire
The fire that destroyed a large part of the world-famous Notre Dame Cathedral in France in April 2019 shocked the world. A lively expression of thoughts and feelings during and after the fire arose on Twitter. In this article, we will analyze the discourses about the Notre Dame fire on Twitter, with a specific focus on emoji, focusing on the thoughts and feelings emoji express and how they convey the meanings religious buildings have for people. …
Comment by Evolvi to Singler
Comentário De Evolvi a Singler
Comentário ao texto do debate
Pushing Intersectionality, Hybridity, and (Inter)Disciplinary Research on Digitality to Its Limits: A Conversation Among Scholars of Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment
During the past two decades or so, the emergence and ever-accelerating development of digital media have sparked scholarly interest, debates, and complex challenges across many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. Within this diverse scholarship, the research on digitality, gender, sexuality, and embodiment has contributed substantially to many academic fields, such as media studies, sociology, religion, philosophy, and educatio…
Victims of feminism”: Exploring networked misogyny and #MeToo in the manosphere
The manosphere is a detached set of websites and social media groups united by the belief that men are oppressed victims of feminism. Even though the manosphere has existed since the early 2000s, its activities have been arguably influenced and increased by the perceived need for counterbalancing the growth of online feminist discourses, such as those conveyed by #MeToo. By applying the theoretical lens of networked misogyny, this article explore…
Introduction: Islam, Space, and the Internet
This special issue comes from a panel we organized at the conference of the European Association for the Study of Religion (easr) held in Bern in June 2018.1 The panel, titled "Space, Religion, and the Internet," aimed at exploring the relationship between religion and new media by considering the spatial turn in Religious Studies. We launched an open call for the panel and, while it was not restricted to a specific religion, it mostly attracted …
Likes, Comments, and Follow Requests: The Instagram User Experiences of Young Muslim Women in the Netherlands
Young Dutch Muslim women often lead complex existences: on the one hand, they may be considered “other” to European culture and expected to conform to so-called Western values; on the other hand, they can be subject to scrutiny within their cultural and religious communities. This article explores young Dutch Muslim women’s online practices by focusing on Instagram. By discussing the theories of third spaces (Bhabha, 1994; Pennington, 2018b) and …
Proselytism and Ostentation: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the European Court of Human Rights’ Case Law on Religious Symbols
This article focuses on the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR) case law about religious symbols (N=27) from 2001 to 2018, exploring the following questions: What discourses does the ECtHR employ in cases about religious symbols? How do ECtHR’s discourses about religious symbols evolve in time? The data is innovatively analyzed through critical discourse analysis and leads to two findings: first, the ECtHR tends to endorse ‘Christian seculari…
Religion and the internet: Digital religion, (hyper)mediated spaces, and materiality
This article offers theoretical reflections on the study of religion and the Internet by critically discussing the notion of "digital religion" (Campbell 2012). In particular, it stresses the importance of integrating material and spatial approaches to the study of digital religion. In doing so, it proposes the theory of "hypermediated religious spaces" to describe processes of religious mediation between online and offline environments by taking…
Contextualizing current digital religion research on emerging technologies
This article provides an overview of contemporary research within the interdisciplinary arc of scholarship known as digital religion studies, in which scholars explore the intersection between emerging digital technologies, lived and material religious practices in contemporary culture, and the impact the structures of the network society have on understandings of spirituality and religiosity. Digital religion studies specifically investigates ho…
Global Perspectives on Religion, Media and Public Scholarship
This article encourages researchers of religion, media and culture to develop new, global, comparative conversations about the meaning and purpose of public scholarship. Key terms like “religion”, “media”, “publicness” and “scholarship” can be understood and articulated differently in different social, cultural and geographical locations, and dialogue across our academic contexts is needed to help explore these parallels and divergences. This art…
Materiality, Authority, and Digital Religion: The Case of a Neo-Pagan Forum
The study of material culture increasingly pays attention to digital religion, but there are certain aspects, such as religious authority, that remain under-researched. Some questions are still open for inquiry: What can a material approach contribute to the understanding of religious authority in digital venues? How can authority be materially displayed on the Internet? This article shows how religious authority is affected by material practices…
Online Catholic Communities: Community, Authority, and Religious Individualization, written by Marta Kolodziejska
The veil and its materiality: Muslim women’s digital narratives about the burkini ban
In the summer of 2016, around 30 French cities banned the burkini—swimwear used by Muslim women that covers the entire body and head—from public beaches. French authorities supported the ban by claiming that the burkini was unhygienic, a uniform of Islamic extremism, and a symbol of women’s oppression. Muslim head-coverings, including the burkini, are religious objects whose materiality points to complex semantic meanings often mediated in Intern…
Hate in a Tweet: Exploring Internet-Based Islamophobic Discourses
Islamophobia is the unfounded hostility against Muslims. While anti-Muslim feelings have been explored from many perspectives and in different settings, Internet-based Islamophobia remains under-researched. What are the characteristics of online Islamophobia? What are the differences (if any) between online and offline anti-Muslim narratives? This article seeks to answer these questions through a qualitative analysis of tweets written in the afte…
Hybrid Muslim identities in digital space: The Italian blog Yalla
Islam is often regarded as being incompatible with European values. In Italy, for example, anti-Islamic points of view reiterate the religion’s alleged inconsistency with Catholicism and secularism. This article argues that narrative practices can challenge this idea by articulating Muslim hybrid identities that are compatible with Italian culture and society. The second-generation blog Yalla Italia represents a ‘third space’ where young Italian …
Islamexit: Inter-group antagonism on Twitter
While analyses of Twitter have shown that it holds democratic potential, it can also provide a venue for hate speech against minorities. The articulation of opinion-based identities, the tendency to homophily, and the use of emotional discourses can indeed help spread verbal violence on Twitter. This paper discusses group polarization on Twitter through Mouffe's distinction of agonistic and antagonistic politics, as elaborated in the 2013 book "A…
The Myth of Catholic Italy in Post-Fascist Newsreels
This article analyzes how Catholicism had a central role in the identity-creation process after the War. The study employs the online archive of the national agency ‘Istituto Luce’ to analyze 261 newsreels about religion released between 1946 and 1965. The article uses (i) Benedict Anderson’s work on imagined communities and (ii) Roland Barthes’ concept of mythology as theoretical frameworks. This study indicates that the majority of newsreels pr…
Islamexit: Inter-group antagonism on Twitter
While analyses of Twitter have shown that it holds democratic potential, it can also provide a venue for hate speech against minorities. The articulation of opinion-based identities, the tendency to homophily, and the use of emotional discourses can indeed help spread verbal violence on Twitter. This paper discusses group polarization on Twitter through Mouffe's distinction of agonistic and antagonistic politics, as elaborated in the 2013 book "A…
Victims of feminism”: Exploring networked misogyny and #MeToo in the manosphere
The manosphere is a detached set of websites and social media groups united by the belief that men are oppressed victims of feminism. Even though the manosphere has existed since the early 2000s, its activities have been arguably influenced and increased by the perceived need for counterbalancing the growth of online feminist discourses, such as those conveyed by #MeToo. By applying the theoretical lens of networked misogyny, this article explore…
Religion and the internet: Digital religion, (hyper)mediated spaces, and materiality
This article offers theoretical reflections on the study of religion and the Internet by critically discussing the notion of "digital religion" (Campbell 2012). In particular, it stresses the importance of integrating material and spatial approaches to the study of digital religion. In doing so, it proposes the theory of "hypermediated religious spaces" to describe processes of religious mediation between online and offline environments by taking…
Hate in a Tweet: Exploring Internet-Based Islamophobic Discourses
Islamophobia is the unfounded hostility against Muslims. While anti-Muslim feelings have been explored from many perspectives and in different settings, Internet-based Islamophobia remains under-researched. What are the characteristics of online Islamophobia? What are the differences (if any) between online and offline anti-Muslim narratives? This article seeks to answer these questions through a qualitative analysis of tweets written in the afte…
The veil and its materiality: Muslim women’s digital narratives about the burkini ban
In the summer of 2016, around 30 French cities banned the burkini—swimwear used by Muslim women that covers the entire body and head—from public beaches. French authorities supported the ban by claiming that the burkini was unhygienic, a uniform of Islamic extremism, and a symbol of women’s oppression. Muslim head-coverings, including the burkini, are religious objects whose materiality points to complex semantic meanings often mediated in Intern…
Materiality, Authority, and Digital Religion: The Case of a Neo-Pagan Forum
The study of material culture increasingly pays attention to digital religion, but there are certain aspects, such as religious authority, that remain under-researched. Some questions are still open for inquiry: What can a material approach contribute to the understanding of religious authority in digital venues? How can authority be materially displayed on the Internet? This article shows how religious authority is affected by material practices…
The Myth of Catholic Italy in Post-Fascist Newsreels
This article analyzes how Catholicism had a central role in the identity-creation process after the War. The study employs the online archive of the national agency ‘Istituto Luce’ to analyze 261 newsreels about religion released between 1946 and 1965. The article uses (i) Benedict Anderson’s work on imagined communities and (ii) Roland Barthes’ concept of mythology as theoretical frameworks. This study indicates that the majority of newsreels pr…
Hybrid Muslim identities in digital space: The Italian blog Yalla
Islam is often regarded as being incompatible with European values. In Italy, for example, anti-Islamic points of view reiterate the religion’s alleged inconsistency with Catholicism and secularism. This article argues that narrative practices can challenge this idea by articulating Muslim hybrid identities that are compatible with Italian culture and society. The second-generation blog Yalla Italia represents a ‘third space’ where young Italian …
Islamexit: Inter-group antagonism on Twitter
While analyses of Twitter have shown that it holds democratic potential, it can also provide a venue for hate speech against minorities. The articulation of opinion-based identities, the tendency to homophily, and the use of emotional discourses can indeed help spread verbal violence on Twitter. This paper discusses group polarization on Twitter through Mouffe's distinction of agonistic and antagonistic politics, as elaborated in the 2013 book "A…
Hate in a Tweet: Exploring Internet-Based Islamophobic Discourses
Islamophobia is the unfounded hostility against Muslims. While anti-Muslim feelings have been explored from many perspectives and in different settings, Internet-based Islamophobia remains under-researched. What are the characteristics of online Islamophobia? What are the differences (if any) between online and offline anti-Muslim narratives? This article seeks to answer these questions through a qualitative analysis of tweets written in the afte…
Online Catholic Communities: Community, Authority, and Religious Individualization, written by Marta Kolodziejska
The veil and its materiality: Muslim women’s digital narratives about the burkini ban
In the summer of 2016, around 30 French cities banned the burkini—swimwear used by Muslim women that covers the entire body and head—from public beaches. French authorities supported the ban by claiming that the burkini was unhygienic, a uniform of Islamic extremism, and a symbol of women’s oppression. Muslim head-coverings, including the burkini, are religious objects whose materiality points to complex semantic meanings often mediated in Intern…
Contextualizing current digital religion research on emerging technologies
This article provides an overview of contemporary research within the interdisciplinary arc of scholarship known as digital religion studies, in which scholars explore the intersection between emerging digital technologies, lived and material religious practices in contemporary culture, and the impact the structures of the network society have on understandings of spirituality and religiosity. Digital religion studies specifically investigates ho…
Global Perspectives on Religion, Media and Public Scholarship
This article encourages researchers of religion, media and culture to develop new, global, comparative conversations about the meaning and purpose of public scholarship. Key terms like “religion”, “media”, “publicness” and “scholarship” can be understood and articulated differently in different social, cultural and geographical locations, and dialogue across our academic contexts is needed to help explore these parallels and divergences. This art…
Materiality, Authority, and Digital Religion: The Case of a Neo-Pagan Forum
The study of material culture increasingly pays attention to digital religion, but there are certain aspects, such as religious authority, that remain under-researched. Some questions are still open for inquiry: What can a material approach contribute to the understanding of religious authority in digital venues? How can authority be materially displayed on the Internet? This article shows how religious authority is affected by material practices…
Introduction: Islam, Space, and the Internet
This special issue comes from a panel we organized at the conference of the European Association for the Study of Religion (easr) held in Bern in June 2018.1 The panel, titled "Space, Religion, and the Internet," aimed at exploring the relationship between religion and new media by considering the spatial turn in Religious Studies. We launched an open call for the panel and, while it was not restricted to a specific religion, it mostly attracted …
Likes, Comments, and Follow Requests: The Instagram User Experiences of Young Muslim Women in the Netherlands
Young Dutch Muslim women often lead complex existences: on the one hand, they may be considered “other” to European culture and expected to conform to so-called Western values; on the other hand, they can be subject to scrutiny within their cultural and religious communities. This article explores young Dutch Muslim women’s online practices by focusing on Instagram. By discussing the theories of third spaces (Bhabha, 1994; Pennington, 2018b) and …
Proselytism and Ostentation: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the European Court of Human Rights’ Case Law on Religious Symbols
This article focuses on the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR) case law about religious symbols (N=27) from 2001 to 2018, exploring the following questions: What discourses does the ECtHR employ in cases about religious symbols? How do ECtHR’s discourses about religious symbols evolve in time? The data is innovatively analyzed through critical discourse analysis and leads to two findings: first, the ECtHR tends to endorse ‘Christian seculari…
Religion and the internet: Digital religion, (hyper)mediated spaces, and materiality
This article offers theoretical reflections on the study of religion and the Internet by critically discussing the notion of "digital religion" (Campbell 2012). In particular, it stresses the importance of integrating material and spatial approaches to the study of digital religion. In doing so, it proposes the theory of "hypermediated religious spaces" to describe processes of religious mediation between online and offline environments by taking…
Pushing Intersectionality, Hybridity, and (Inter)Disciplinary Research on Digitality to Its Limits: A Conversation Among Scholars of Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment
During the past two decades or so, the emergence and ever-accelerating development of digital media have sparked scholarly interest, debates, and complex challenges across many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. Within this diverse scholarship, the research on digitality, gender, sexuality, and embodiment has contributed substantially to many academic fields, such as media studies, sociology, religion, philosophy, and educatio…
Victims of feminism”: Exploring networked misogyny and #MeToo in the manosphere
The manosphere is a detached set of websites and social media groups united by the belief that men are oppressed victims of feminism. Even though the manosphere has existed since the early 2000s, its activities have been arguably influenced and increased by the perceived need for counterbalancing the growth of online feminist discourses, such as those conveyed by #MeToo. By applying the theoretical lens of networked misogyny, this article explore…
Emoji and Religion in the Twitter Discourses on the Notre Dame Cathedral Fire
The fire that destroyed a large part of the world-famous Notre Dame Cathedral in France in April 2019 shocked the world. A lively expression of thoughts and feelings during and after the fire arose on Twitter. In this article, we will analyze the discourses about the Notre Dame fire on Twitter, with a specific focus on emoji, focusing on the thoughts and feelings emoji express and how they convey the meanings religious buildings have for people. …
Comment by Evolvi to Singler
Comentário De Evolvi a Singler
Comentário ao texto do debate
Digital Minority Religions: Introduction
Religion has always been, to a certain extent, mediated. Communication practices are at the core of religious communities, but it is in recent decades that the rapid developments of media technologies have created new possibilities for interactions about religion. In this context, a focus on religious minorities represents a unique opportunity for scholars to analyze the internet in nuanced ways within the framework of digital religion. Through t…
Secular Media, Religious Activists: The Role of Religion in Anti-Gender Mobilizations in Europe
Anti-gender groups, by promoting a Christian-inspired traditional view of family, challenge the idea that European society is becoming more secular. Given that previous literature has highlighted how these groups extensively use digital media and are connected to the Vatican, this article explores the following questions: How do anti-gender groups discuss religion on social media? What is the role of religion for anti-gender activists? By means o…
Liberation through consumption? How vibrator brands construct female sexuality in a postfeminist framework
This article examines how vibrator brands use empowerment rhetoric to construct discourses on female masturbation. Through a discussion of 11 popular brand websites, it explores portrayals of the ‘ideal’ woman, positioning masturbation within neoliberal and postfeminist frameworks, and promoting consumerism as emancipation. It highlights exclusionary portrayals catering to young, able-bodied, white women, analysing commodified sexual liberation a…
How to be a woman (in politics): Constructions of gender in responses to Giorgia Meloni’s Instagram Posts
Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Italian far-right party Fratelli d’Italia, is the first female Presidente del Consiglio in the history of Italy and is known to be vocal against feminism and gender-related issues. This unique scenario calls for an examination of gender from several perspectives; this paper focuses on users’ responses to Giorgia Meloni’s gendered posts (LGBTQIA + families, patriarchy, abortion, mansplaining) during the general electi…
Sociology (16 works) · Political science (13 works) · Media, Religion, Digital Communication (11 works) · Media studies (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Social Media and Politics (8 works) · Social science (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Art (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works)