Abstract Body mapping draws on artistic inquiry to explore embodied knowledge and meaning making within lived experiences, engaging the body and its social context in ways that qualitative interviews alone cannot. In body maps, story-tellers visually represent their experiences with unique colors, symbols, and words drawn on a body outline, and co-constructed interpretive keys support data analysis. By encouraging creative flexibility and embodied mindfulness, body mapping is an ideal approach to capture knowledge gaps within lived experiences such as religious trauma.

Traumatic religious experiences are often obscured or discredited, creating an epistemic vacuum around religious harm. Chronic religious stress and shame also embed themselves within the flesh, distorting the body’s ability to know and trust itself. Due to this embodied contextual knowledge, religious trauma may significantly shape responses to existentially challenging experiences like autoimmune disease, where a malfunctioning immune system introduces uncertainty and uncanniness. Using body maps to explore these simultaneously shifting beliefs and bodies, we can illuminate religious trauma’s impact on embodiment and meaning in illness while also witnessing endangered testimonies of religious harm.

Beginning in January 2025, this ongoing research study includes eight story-tellers who created body maps following semi-structured interviews on religious and health histories. Preliminary analyses indicate religious trauma compounds illness experiences through epistemic injustice. Dismissed religious harm parallels stories of contested symptoms, and body maps consistently depict “wrongness” connected to autoimmunity and traumatic religious experiences. Visualizing the toll of trauma and illness overwhelmed many story-tellers, but acknowledging their experienced reality with art also increased bodily connection and acceptance, indicating the value of body maps as a research method and an embodied exercise.