On Being Spiritual: Pilgrimage as an Information Context

Religious and secular pilgrimages have been part of human history since the beginning of time and remain very much alive today, whether it is the Holy Land, the Hajj, Lhasa, Kumbh Mela, Char Dham, or else the Camino de Santiago, Kumano Kodo, Glastonbury Tor, Elvis’s Graceland, national parks or war memorials. Pilgrimage has been an object of study across disciplines, in art, architecture, and heritage (Avril et al 2015; Paul Davies 2013), history (Elsner 2005; Janin 2002), literature (Edwards 2005), social anthropology (Badone and Roseman 2004), religious studies and tourism (Ross-Bryant 2017; Norman and Cusack 2015; Coleman and Elsner 2002; Llyod 1998) among others. Yet, pilgrimage as a context for research in Information Studies has been surprisingly overlooked (exceptions include Bati, 2015; Caidi et al., 2018, along with some foundational work on spirituality by Kari (2007) or Gaston et al. (2015)). This panel fills the gap by offering an information perspective to the study of pilgrimage, shedding a light on approaches and concepts from our field that can enrich our understanding of the complexities of the pilgrim’s journey through the lens of information and media practices, embodied experiences, memory work, curation practices, community-building, information mediation and sharing, and virtuality and pilgrimage in a global and digital world