Viral contagion, a social relationship acting between bodies and across national borders, is a dramatic instantiation of global encounters. Thinking with a virus and its representations in diverse cosmologies, we developed CoronAsur: a collective research project that takes a global health crisis as a starting point to develop new forms of international collaboration that can democratize the scholar­ship on religion and disease and decenter Western narratives of Covid-19.

How does the digitization of ritual gatherings impact lived religion? In which ways has the enforcement of hygienic and ‘social distancing’ protocols changed the aesthetic, affective and material dimensions of religious communities? How are the mutual shapings of religion and society unfolding during a pandemic and in a post-pandemic world?

CoronAsur: Asian Religions in the Covidian Age (University of Hawai’i Press, 2023) is about to be released as a fully open access “phygital” volume. It follows the documentation and analysis of the abrupt societal shifts triggered by the pandemic to understand current and future pandemic times, while revealing further avenues for research on religion that have opened up in the Covidian age.

The project founders and editors will discuss transformations in religious communities’ engagements with media, spaces, and moral and political economies, documenting the dynamic range of ways the pandemic shaped, and was shaped by, religious people and their practices across Asia.