PhD candidate Joe Decker presented at Sacred Journeys 12, an international and interdisciplinary conference on pilgrimage studies held in Canberra, Australia in July. His paper, “Reinventing Pilgrimage Beyond Religion: An Ethnographic Study of Pilgro-Tourism, the Kumano Kodo, and Global Pilgrims,” draws on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Japan, during which he walked all four of the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage routes and volunteered at a local guesthouse and the World Heritage Center in Hongū. His research examines how the globalization of pilgrimage is reshaping rural communities and the lived experiences of both Japanese and international walkers. Decker also participated in a panel for the Pilgrimage Phenomenology Project, to which he contributed an auto-ethographic essay that will be published in Pilgrimage Phenomenology: Narrating Being, Becoming, and Belonging, a collected volume later this year.
The College of Arts