Drawing on Sociology of Religion and STS for the study of Online Communities: A case study of Fantasy Sports.

This paper takes as its starting point the idea that the sociology of religion has an export problem (Guhin) and considers what the sociology of religion might offer, analytically, to a fieldsite that is not religious in any traditional sense. My dissertation research is a multi-sited ethnographic account of the users and developers of the online communities of Fantasy sports. The central research plan and questions have been shaped and informed by my training in the sociology of religion, notably through attenuation to ritual, community, and boundaries with an emphasis on meaning-making at each level of analysis. The field sites of online communities on the one hand and the producers of a digital product on the other are more obviously suited to the sociological subfields of the social studies of technology or organizational sociology. However, this chapter frames the advantages of drawing on the tradition of the sociology of religion for non-"Religious" fieldsites and puts the two literatures in conversation to identify opportunities to expand the scholarly conversation of each subfield. Here, I introduce the ethnographic field sites, methods, analytical lenses and key concepts used throughout the dissertation project. As a standalone piece, this paper introduces the framework for how two secular communities that share features of a religious community, including a ritual construction of time, community and boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]