Thanks to financial support from the Catharina Halkes Fonds, last year I was able to conduct two vital research trips to Dresden and Hannover, to collect the final data for my dissertation. In each city I conducted interviews, visited churches, attended worship services, did city walks, and made important ethnographic observations. In Hannover I was also able to visit Christopher Street Day (Pride).

I presented on the “I” in embodied research, arguing from a feminist point of view that we need to include ourselves – our bodies – into our (theological) research more: “We need the ‘I’ in embodied theological research, because bodies – especially female bodies – have been ignored for too long. We need the ‘I’ in embodied theological research, because we do research with and from our bodies. And our bodies are not clean slates: they have stories to tell.”