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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the affordances of a collaborative ethnographic approach conducted with art in all its phases as part of an experimentation with arts-based ways of analyzing and presenting cooperatively harvested insights of the embodied moral self to a wider audience

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic work done among ex-evangelical women in Germany who are part of a global digital community of apostates, I explore a collaborative approach where the methodology is modeled after practices done independently by participants. Early on, it became strikingly clear how critical art and movement was for the participants as they left Evangelicalism for something else, unpacking and 'deconstructing' their old belief systems and experimenting to create new moral selves (c.f. Mattingly 2013). Appreciating their creative ways of understanding themselves and the world around them in different ways, I decided to apply these methods to the ethnographic design itself. The combination of art and movement became a vehicle for me to experience an embodied understanding of how they went through the deconversion processes and became a vital tool for analysis in the form of poetry, walking, dancing, and painting. Concluding in cooperation, the participants and ethnographer will work together to create a final art piece to demonstrate how they as bodyminds have transformed through deconversion. With the intention to go public, I therefore explore the possibilities of expanding the reach of research through artistic abstraction and symbolism, especially when discussing sensitive topics such as deconversion, secularism, gender, trauma, sexuality, and apostasy. Conducting a collaborative ethnography with art throughout all research stages is an opportunity to un-learn ways of doing ethnography that are perhaps too far removed from both participants and the wider public. This approach, I argue, is a creative pathway to knowing otherwise together.