Abstract
To date, older adults have received little attention in the newly emerging technological narratives of transnational religion. This is surprising, given the strong association of later life with spiritual and religious engagement, but it likely reflects the ongoing assumption that older adults are technophobic or technologically incompetent. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with older Sinhalese Buddhist migrants from Sri Lanka, living in Melbourne, this paper explores the digital articulations of transnational religion that arise from older migrants’ uses of digital media. We focus on how engagements with digital media enable older Sinhalese to respond to an urgent need to accumulate merit in later life, facilitating their temporal strategies for ageing as migrants. We argue that these digital articulations transform both the religious imaginary and the religious practices that validate and legitimize a life well-lived.
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
7-1-2023
Volume
23
Issue
3
Publication Title
Global Networks
Publisher
Wiley
School
School of Arts and Humanities
RAS ID
56475
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
First Page
646
Last Page
658
Comments
Gamage, S., Wilding, R., & Baldassar, L. (2023). Digital media, ageing and faith: Older Sri Lankan migrants in Australia and their digital articulations of transnational religion. Global Networks, 23(3), 646-658. https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12414