Materialness and legitimacy: atheist strategies for production and circulation of images

Abstract

This research project is a continuation of the inquiry into the Brazilian Association of Atheists and Agnostics (ATEA) during which the legal advocacy was used as a legitimation strategy in Brazilian society. As a PhD candidate the main focus of research will be how atheistic means of socialization has incentivized a grassroots movement in which nonreligious lifestyles may prosper. The production of atheist-oriented materials goes beyond a struggle against religion or pure criticism of it but rather it shares atheists´ worldviews on social and moral values. These undertakings aim at detaching socially negative perspectives on atheists who are recognized as suspicious for not believing in god and for developing a rising enlightened nonreligious culture. Through constant interaction with literature on religion and public sphere and the recent phenomenon known as nonreligious this research seeks to describe and analyze individual and associative materialities which promote an atheism more centrered on morally acceptable actions instead of a warrying one. The analysis of books, images, video, lifestories, spaces of sociability is used as means of further understanding values and sensibilities of this nonreligious culture. This research project is being developed under the projeto temático Religião, direito e secularismo (Religion, rights and secularism) overseen by Professor Paula Monteiro and is sponsored by FAPESP. This project is also part of a collaborative partnership with the international project Understanding nonreligion in a complex future coordinated by Professor Lori Beamen based in the University of Ottawa, Canada. (AU)