Focus and Scope

The Journal of Contemporary Rituals and Traditions (JCRT) examines how rituals and traditions are created, maintained, transformed, contested, mediated, and mobilized amid contemporary social change. The journal approaches ritual and tradition not as static survivals from the past, but as dynamic practices through which individuals and communities negotiate identity, authority, belonging, memory, crisis, and social transformation.

JCRT welcomes original research articles, comparative studies, theoretical interventions, review articles, and scholarly book reviews that make a clear contribution to international debates on ritual and tradition. The journal is interdisciplinary and welcomes scholarship from anthropology, religious studies, sociology, cultural studies, folklore, media studies, performance studies, heritage studies, history, and other relevant fields.

The journal’s scope is organized around four interconnected areas:

1. Ritual, Media, and Technology

This area includes digital and postdigital rituals; ritual practices involving artificial intelligence and algorithmic systems; religion and ritual on social media; representations of ritual in film, streaming media, music, and popular culture; virtual communities; online mourning and commemoration; and technologically mediated ritual experiences.

2. Ritual, Mobility, Identity, and Power

This area examines ritual in relation to migration, diaspora, transnational mobility, urbanization, ethnicity, gender, generation, leadership, authority, cultural appropriation, identity politics, belonging, and changing spatial and social relations.

3. Ritual, Ecology, Health, and Crisis

This area covers ritual responses to environmental change, climate crisis, disaster, health, illness, healing, death, the body, pandemics, food systems, agriculture, maritime life, and Indigenous ecological knowledge.

4. Ritual, Heritage, Pluralism, and Social Transformation

This area includes religious and cultural acculturation, interreligious relations, peacebuilding, conflict resolution, cultural resilience, heritage-making, tourism, commodification, ritual economy, creative industries, material and visual culture, culinary and musical traditions, decolonization, and Indigenous knowledge.

JCRT gives particular attention to the Global South and its transnational connections. However, the journal is global in geographical scope and welcomes research from all regions when it advances understanding of ritual and tradition in contemporary societies.

Community-based and local case studies are welcome, but manuscripts must move beyond description. They should engage relevant international scholarship, employ a clear theoretical or conceptual framework, explain their methodological approach, and demonstrate how the case contributes to broader debates in the study of ritual, tradition, and contemporary social transformation.

JCRT generally does not prioritize manuscripts that:

• provide only descriptive accounts of ritual sequences or local traditions;

• merely identify moral, religious, or cultural values without sustained analysis;

• discuss culture, religion, communication, or social harmony without a clear connection to ritual or tradition;

• present historical materials without explaining their contemporary significance, reception, or transformation;

• lack engagement with current international scholarship;

• make claims about cultural preservation without examining change, contestation, agency, or power;

• offer narrowly localized findings without demonstrating broader theoretical, comparative, or international relevance.

Historical research may be considered when it illuminates the contemporary reconstruction, circulation, mediation, political use, or reinterpretation of ritual and tradition.