The project explores the social and discursive patterns of Indian Dalit activism and its cultural and political strategies of dealing with caste discrimination through online production on blog and news platforms.
Tereza's project "Challenging Marginalisation Online: The Case of Dalit Movement Network Through Blog and News Platforms" follows the increased use of online media by marginalized communities in recent years. By adopting the methods of computational text analysis and social network analysis, the research aims to understand the role of religious and secular motives in socio-political mobilisation.
In this short text, Tereza looks back at the experience of attending summer schools focusing on quantitative methods and evaluates how beneficial it was for her research and self-development in the Study of religions.
Religious experiences can be found across many cultures in various forms. Nevertheless, we can trace their underlying and potentially universal factors. In her thesis, Jana asks whether these factors include sensory deprivation, social seclusion, and the influence of authority. She further explores how these factors manifest in the context of experience. Her research is based on the predictive processing theory, assuming that our bodies and minds constantly predict ongoing events and that under the influence of studied factors, these predictions – including those learned from religion – can dominate over sensory perceptions.
