About this blog

CoronAsur is a research blog hosted by the Religion and Globalisation Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. CoronAsur started as a way to document abrupt religious responses to the pandemic. Since its inception in March 2020, the CoronAsur project has reflected upon questions about ritual innovations, new forms of religious mediation, diverse understandings of the pandemic, and the mutual shaping of religion, society, and politics.

In addition to the research blog (launched in May 2020), the CoronAsur project developed into a multidimensional research initiative with a number of interlinked projects. These include the virtual workshop Religion and the Covid-19 Pandemic: Mediating Presence and Distance, followed by the homonymous Special Issue in Religion; the research project “Religion Going Viral'' funded by an ARI Seed Grant and Yap Kim Hao Memorial Fund at Yale-NUS; new articles on Asian religions, spaces and media during the pandemic (see Chen et al. 2021 and Lorea et al. 2021); an open-access edited volume with the University of Hawaii Press- CoronAsur: Asian Religions in the Covidian Age (Hertzman et al. 2023); a workshop on Covid vaccines, titled Faith in Immunity: Religions, Vaccines and Structures of Trust, followed by a forthcoming special issue with Asian Medicine.

The blog continues to host new data, reflections, analyses, and multimedia contributions written by scholars and practitioners about the myriad ways the COVID-19 pandemic has been received, interpreted and countered by religious communities in Asia and beyond. We also invite contributions that document and reflect upon "post-pandemic leftovers" in the "new normal". How have various religious practitioners and communities dealt with changing circumstances and what happens to these changes in a post-pandemic world? We are interested in case studies which examine changes to religious practices that have outlived the pandemic moment of crisis, including in terms of digital religion, material religion, everyday lived religion, and ritual performance.