Putting the Waz on Social Media: Infrastructuring Online Islamic Counterpublic through Digital Sermons in Bangladesh

Abstract

While the presence of religious content is rapidly increasing over digital media, the HCI literature on digital media production has remained mostly limited by its focus on secular contents and analyses. Hence, the production, politics, and impact of such religious videos from the Global South have remained understudied in HCI. In this paper, we shed light on this topic through our nine-month-long ethnographic study on the production, sharing, and consumption of Islamic sermon videos (locally known as Waz) in Bangladesh. We report how faith, informal learning, local collaboration, creativity, and care play crucial roles in creating Islamic sermon videos and their proliferation online. We discuss how the sermon videos create a religious counterpublic in Bangladesh. We further discuss how such faith-based media production makes important lessons pertinent to the national grassroots politics in the Global South, politics of social media platforms, and HCI4D scholarship.