Ending Long Term Partnerships and Extended Walking Pilgrimage

About

Kathleen’s most recent ethnography, Walking the Way Together: How Families Connect on the Camino de Santiago (2021), addresses how families invest in pilgrimage as a practice for strengthening kin relationships. Her second book, Sacred Divorce: Religion, Therapeutic Culture and Ending Life Partnerships (2014), explores how people turn to religious and therapeutic strategies as they seek to create meaning from relational disruption. Her current ethnographic project brings these two strains of research together, asking how people use long-distance walking practices like the Camino de Santiago and the Appalachian Trail to heal from and make sense of ending life partnerships. Kathleen is interested in how people tell their stories and what their experiences of walking and ending might teach us about social forces that shape intimacy. She is interested as well in how positionality shapes the experience of extended-walking pilgrimage as an ending ritual.