sustain:if:able kiwi

Academic paper proposal – Climate justice and the performing of prayer in digital spaces across transational margins

A paper proposal I submitted today, for a hybrid conference early in 2026.

Climate justice and the performing of prayer in digital spaces across transational margins

The 2024 Tuākoi ‘Lei Declaration by the Pacific Conference of Churches outlined how neighbourly love within creation can turn the tide for climate justice. The twelve-page document called for a decolonising of climate change language, using stories grounded in the faith and wisdom of Pacific people. The Declaration included digital photographs of church leaders kneeling together in prayer on a Fijian island. At this moment, performances of prayer were being digitally curated to assert indigenous identity and to express solidarity with communities experiencing the impacts of climate change.

This presentation will use visual grammar analysis of digital images in an interdisciplinary study of the performance of prayer in digital activism. First, selected indigenous digital activist social media sites will be examined to document how, in the Pacific, digitally performed prayer is framed as a holistic and communal activity. Second, the theological implications for prayer when climate justice is located in neighbourly love, as in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, rather than in rights and responsibilities derived from Genesis creation stories. Third, how digitally performed acts of Pacific prayer compare and contrast with digitally performed acts of prayer from the Global North.

The paper will outline how digital media plays an important role, first in allowing Pacific communities to voice an integrated worldview and second in weaving solidarity among global neighbours. However, such digital Pacific activism requires secularised approaches to digital activism that circulate in the Global North to renegotiate how they respond to cultures that kneel in public prayer.

Whether the proposal is accepted, time will tell. But I’m placing the proposal here because it’s another marker in my thinking around the digital activism research project, which I have been working on since my Visiting Research Fellowship in Edinburgh in 2024.

Earlier this year, I had an article published in Theology journal (Taylor, S. (2025). Visualizing online climate change activism: public eco-theologies in grassroots climate-justice organizations. Theology, 128(4), 247-256. https://doi.org/10.1177/0040571X251354942). The article drew on two case studies to describe the presence of prayer as a distinct contribution being made by faith-based digital activists online.

Since I submitted that article to Theology, I have continued to read and think around the practices of prayer in contemporary climate justice organisations. The paper proposal I submitted today frames some ideas and puts them in writing.