The Religion and Globalisation Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, is launching a research blog on religious responses to COVID-19. We are looking for reflections, analysis, opinion, commentary pieces, photographic essays and multimedia contributions at the interface of the COVID-19 pandemic and the life of religious communities and ritual practices.

Since the beginning of the spread of COVID-19 within and outside of China, every religious tradition has undergone radical changes. With the implementation of safety measures, some religious lives have gone digital. The enforcement of hygienic and ‘social distancing’ practices has dramatically changed aesthetic, affective and material dimensions of ritual acts. Religious leaders and congregations of followers have responded in innovative as well as controversial ways to the spread of COVID-19, producing new cultural phenomena that might be temporary, or long-lasting. This research blog aims to look at ritual innovations and religious responses at the time of coronavirus in Asia with a global and comparative outlook.

We are interested in critical reflections and multimodal contributions that can add to the understanding of the mutual shaping of religion and society during the COVID-19 pandemic, including and encompassing the following topics:

• The use of new media and the various meanings of the digitization, de-sensorialization and disembodiment of religious gatherings
• The new instances of visibility of religious and spiritual dimensions in the public sphere from a post-secular vantage point
• The use of religious identity politics to display conflicting ideologies of healing and socio-political tensions among communities occupying unequal positions of power
• Religious innovations that change ritual praxis and discourses around the protocols of accessibility, the authorization, legitimization or contestation of new practices
• Transformations of local as well as transnational religious events and the economic impact of religious change across borders, including pilgrimage economy as well as religious networks of aid
• Religious responses providing for rationalization, moral justification, divination, techniques of the mind-body complex that provide for comfort, healing and wellness in times of uncertainty and distress – and how these affect people’s choices and habits

We welcome contributions of about 1,000 words. If you are interested in sending a contribution, please send your personal details (name, affiliation, email address) and a short abstract describing the main theme and the format of your contribution to Carola Lorea at aricar@nus.edu.sg, Natalie Lang at arinklgk@nus.edu.sg and Alicia Chan at alicia.c@nus.edu.sg

Audience

Blogs on CoronAsur : Religion and COVID-19 are written for a broad audience interested in religion, anthropology, history and related topics. All articles should be written with a non-specialist, public audience in mind, including policy makers, the media, students, and the general public.

Write in a natural style that avoids acronyms and academic terms not widely used outside of specific disciplines.

Requirements
The following are required material for the CoronAsur blog:

Word count
Approximately 1000 words

Format for sharing
Share a Google doc or email a Word doc.

Paragraph length and spacing

• Keep paragraphs short. No longer than 4 sentences.
• We adhere to the one space after the period philosophy, not two.

Formatting

• Use headers and sub headers to break up your post.
• Avoid big blocks of text.
• When writing headlines be specific and indicate a benefit to the reader
• Use bullet or numbered lists.

Spelling
CoronAsur uses UK English and the Collins Dictionary for spelling and punctuation (available free online).

References
All referencing should be in the form of links rather than citations. Links should point to more detailed information and, if possible, be open access. Avoid using footnotes or endnotes. Please integrate all content into the main body of your article.

Editing
All posts submitted are reviewed for length, clarity, and style, primarily to ensure posts are appropriate for the blog format. Authors work with Contributing Editors to finalise their contribution, but all final editorial decisions rest with the Editor.

We reserve the right to make final copy edits, including formatting and title changes as necessary.

Images
Images are always welcome. If you have photographs or other images that you’d like to include, send them as separate JPEG or PNG files. Please make sure that the images are high-resolution and that you either own the images or have the right to reproduce them.

Author bio

• Author bio should be 50 words max.
• Link to your email, Institution, Twitter, LinkedIn

Promoting

Please plan to promote your post throughout your social networks. We ask that you share it more than once on multiple networks over multiple days.

Published contributions are released under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence and, if republished elsewhere afterwards, should include our publication name (‘CoronAsur: Religion and COVID-19’) and the original link.

Kenneth DEAN
Prof Dean received his PhD and M.A in Chinese from Stanford University. He is Lee Chair and James McGill Professor Emeritus of McGill University. Prof Dean is the author of several books on Daoism and Chinese popular religion, including Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plains: Vol. 1: Historical Introduction to the Return of the Gods, Vol. 2: A survey of village temples and ritual activities, Leiden: Brill, 2010 (with Zheng Zhenman); Epigraphical Materials on the History of Religion in Fujian: The Quanzhou region, 3 vols., Fuzhou: 2004 (with Zheng Zhenman); Lord of the Three in One: The spread of a cult in Southeast China, Princeton: 1998; Epigraphical Materials on the History of Religion in Fujian: The Xinghua region; Fuzhou 1995 (with Zheng Zhenman); Taoist Ritual and Popular Cults of Southeast China, Princeton 1993; and First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (with Brian Massumi), Autonomedia, New York. 1992. He directed Bored in Heaven: a film about ritual sensation (Dean 2010), an 80 minute documentary film on ritual celebrations around Chinese New Year in Putian, Fujian, China. His current research concerns transnational trust and temple networks linking Singapore Chinese temples to Southeast China and Southeast Asia. As part of this project, he is conducting a survey of 800 Chinese temples in Singapore.

Carola LOREA
Dr Lorea is a scholar interested in oral traditions and popular religions in South Asia, particularly eastern India, Bangladesh and the Andaman Islands. Her research lies at the intersection between orality-literacy studies and the anthropology of religion, with a particular focus on sound cultures, folklore and heritage discourse, esoteric religious movements and the ethnography of Tantrism. Her monograph Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman: a Journey Between Performance and the Politics of Cultural Representation (Brill, 2016) is the result of a four year travel-along ethnography with Baul performers in West Bengal. She received research fellowships from IIAS, Gonda Foundation (Leiden) and SAI (Heidelberg) to study travelling archives of songs in the borderlands of India and Bangladesh. She authored several articles on folklore and sacred songs, translated the works of Bengali poets and novelists, and has been socially engaged as an interpreter for Bangladeshi refugees in Italy.

Clair HURFORD
Prior to starting her role as an Institute Research Associate, Clair worked as a Communications co-ordinator for Asialink Arts at the University of Melbourne. Clair was an Online Producer at the National Film and Sound Archive in Australia between 2003-2014. Clair’s role at ARI includes highlighting the work of ARI’s researchers through ARI’s communications channels. Clair has lived and travelled extensively in Southeast Asia and Japan where she was the volunteer website manager for Kyoto Journal. Her interests include material culture and Asian cities.

Fabian GRAHAM
Dr Graham is working closely with lingji masters and tang-ki spirit mediums, and adopting a participatory approach to fieldwork where possible, his research interests include the anthropology of Chinese religion; spirit possession; temple ritual and material culture; the invention, inversion and reinterpretation of tradition; visual anthropology; and new ethnographic, narrational and analytical approaches to the study of religious phenomena. While at the ARI Dr Graham will be continuing two projects both of which began in 2010. The first is a comparative study of the Nine Emperor God festivals in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, and the second is a long-term study of lingji mediums and new deity cults in Taiwan.

Nan OUYANG 
Dr Ouyang is broadly interested in sacred space in East Asia, modern Chinese religion, and Chinese historical geography. Her dissertation examines the transformation of Mt. Jiuhua from a local attraction to a national pilgrimage destination in the late imperial and Republican eras. While at ARI, she plans to study Buddhism on Mt. Jiuhua during the Mao era (1949–1976) by using diverse materials including local archives. She studied in Shanghai, China and Tucson, the United States, and received her doctorate from the University of Arizona in the USA.

Natalie LANG
Natalie Lang is an anthropologist working with both the Asian Urbanisms Cluster and the Religion and Globalisation Cluster. Her research interests include religion, urbanity, migration, and diaspora in La Réunion, South Asia, Singapore, and Paris. Natalie Lang conducted her doctoral research at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen, on Hindus in the French overseas department La Réunion in the Indian Ocean. Before joining ARI, Natalie Lang was a Junior Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. She holds an MA in Migration and Diaspora Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and a BA in South Asian Studies from the University of Heidelberg.

Ning Ning CHEN
Dr Chen research interests include the fields of religion and sacred space, rurality and rural landscapes, and Chinese lineage culture. Her doctoral research uses the (re)production of lineage landscapes (e.g. ancestral temples and ancestral tombs) as a means of examining rural governance, identity, everyday life and trans-local social networks in rural Wenzhou, southeast China. Her previous MA research engaged with the sacred-secular relationship by drawing on an ethnographic study of the industrial use of ancestral temples in rural Wenzhou. She has published this work in Social and Cultural Geography and Journal of Rural Studies. While at ARI, she will be developing her doctoral dissertation for publication, and also start a new project on Chinese clan associations (Zongqinhui). Her postdoctoral project will explore the complexity and dynamics of the creation of sacred networks through the analysis of Zongqinhui.

Ying Ruo SHOW
Dr Show received her PhD in Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore in 2017. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. She was Visiting Fellow at the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre, ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, and Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr University of Bochum. Her research interests include lay Buddhist narratives, gender and religion, and the history of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia.

Alicia CHAN
Having just completed her Bachelor's degree in History at the National University of Singapore, Alicia joined the team to learn and help out with the editorial process of managing CoronAsur. Her interests lies mainly in East Asian history and gender, for which religion plays a central part in.

Henry KWAN
Mr Henry Kwan is a Technical Specialist at Asia Research Institute, he provides advice for special IT projects, liaise with NUS IT on various IT security and new systems implementation. He is also managing the Institute's website and statistic reports for various stakeholders. He is currently the Business Partner of NUS IT Shared Services, managing Central Library & CDTL. Prior to joining NUS, he worked as a Senior Engineer Assistant in a Singaporean multinational technology company, Creative Technology Ltd. He was an Application Programmer in Information Frontiers Pte Ltd, a subsidiary of a local ISP. In early 2000s, he worked in a world-class digital government solutions company, CrimsonLogic Pte Ltd, as a Software Engineer working on various e-Payment projects. He had also joined Gul Technologies Group, a global PCB manufacturer as a Management Information System (MIS) administrator.