"In this study of Tapestry, a church-run foster youth mentoring network, and St. Sebastian’s Summer Camp, a predominantly Latinx church-run community day camp, I develop and document one promising pairing in response to this quandary: an adapted form of Digital Storytelling (Lambert, 2012) as a communal spiritual practice appropriate to what I call faith-adjacent spaces. Such spaces are convened by modes of activity separate from formal institutional programs and rituals but still connected to religion in meaningful, visible ways. In this participatory multimodal ethnography, I draw on socio-spatial and narrative analytic frameworks to reveal and explore (1) organizational practices of belonging that already exist at Tapestry, (2) the function of new collaboratively designed Digital Storytelling practices at Tapestry and St. Sebastian’s, and (3) the role of my various researcher-facilitator identities in this work. I present these findings in the form of a four-part audio documentary that interweaves recordings from my ethnographic fieldwork, excerpts from the artifacts that participants and I co-created, audio engagements with academic and practitioner literature, and researcher narrative and analysis." (Abstract)
CHAPTER I: NO GROUP, ONLY GROUP FORMATION, 5
Cold Open: A Church that Doesn't Look Like Church -- Act 1: Why We're Here -- Break 1: Elizabeth Drescher and Robert Putnam -- Act 2: Godly Play, the Remix -- Break 2: Bruno Latour -- Coda: Tapestry Is the Weaving
CHAPTER II: SPACE IS A SOCIAL PRACTICE, 28
Cold Open: Non-Retail Non-Therapy -- Act 1: Community By Design -- Break 1: Doreen Massey -- Act 2: Gratitude on Behalf of Whomever -- Break 2: Carla Roland Guzmán -- Coda: Faith-Adjacent Spaces
CHAPTER III: EMPATHETIC ENGAGEMENT, 52
Cold Open: (Lack of) Progress Report -- Act 1: The Obligatory Segment about Data and Research Methods -- Break 1: Kristine Rodriguez Kerr, Katherine Newhouse, Lalitha Vasudevan, and Carey Jewitt -- Act 2: Opting In, Blurring Out -- Break 2: John Jackson Jr. -- Coda: Revealing Ritual
CHAPTER 4: CONVERSATIONS WITH ARTIFACTS, 74
Cold Open: Launching the 'Project Thingie' -- Act 1: Pseudonyms, Scripts, and Other Negotiations -- Break 1: Joe Lambert -- Act 2: Saying Goodbye to Peg -- Break 2: Daniel Makagon and Mark Neumann -- Coda: Closing the Story Circle(s)