Lived Experiences and Social Transformations Poetics, Politics and Power Relations in Practical Theology (Theology in Practice, 11) 9004509984, 9789004509986

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Lived Experiences and Social Transformations

Theology in Practice Editors-in-Chief Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Vanderbilt University) Elaine Graham (University of Chester)

Editorial Board Tom Beaudoin (Fordham University) Eileen Campbell-Reed (Union Theological Seminary, New York City) Joyce Ann Mercer (Yale Divinity School) Anthony Reddie (University of South Africa) Phillis Sheppard (Vanderbilt University) Claire E. Wolfteich (Boston University)

Volume 11

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/thip

Lived Experiences and Social Transformations Poetics, Politics and Power Relations in Practical Theology

By

CL Wren Radford

Cover image: Artists’ Book ‘My Story Is’. Photo by Anneleen Lindsay Photography. Copyright CL Wren Radford. Used with kind permission. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001516

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2352-9288 ISBN 978-90-04-50998-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-51318-1 (e-book) Copyright 2022 by CL Wren Radford. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements List of Figures x

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Introduction 1 Sharing Lived Experiences as a Political Practice 4 Practical Theologies and Lived Experiences 8 Locating This Research 11 Poverty Truth Commission 11 Austerity and Poverty in the UK 13 Troubling the Turn to Lived Experience in Practical Theology The Structure of This Book 20

Part 1 Developing an Approach for Working with Lived Experiences 1 The Dynamics of Sharing Lived Experiences 27 ‘The Difficulties of Telling and Listening’ 28 Fragments, Silences, and Not-Knowing 30 Voice and Telling the Self 33 Social Relations 36 Critical Interpretations and Creative Work 42 Concluding 51 2 Passionate Ambivalence 52 Theological Knowledge-Making and Disciplinary Desires Engaging Lived Experiences 57 Practical Theology as a Process of Making 64 Imaging Making with Heterogeneous Sources 68 Risking Transformation 76 Relationality and Complexity 77 Fragments 80 Particularity and Alterity 82 Concluding 86

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Part 2 Creative Interventions into Austerity 3 Tracing the Labyrinth 89 One 90 Finding Entryways 92 Pathless Forest 94 Two 100 Welcome to Our World 102 Three 108 A’ in a Guddle 110 Washing Line 111 Four 114 Silences 115 Five 116 A Cord of Three Strands 118 Root and Branch 121 Fear of the Brown Envelope 124 Six 126 Experiences Don’t Sit Still 128 4 Disrupting Austerity Cultures of Judgement and Disbelief 130 Austerity Cultures of Judgement and Disbelief 130 Welfare Cuts and Assessments 132 Disability Assessments 132 Family Cap and Rape Clause 135 The Asylum System and Refugee Experiences 138 Testimonial Spaces 140 Judgement and Disbelief as Social and Material 143 Art-Activism as Creative Interventions 146 Figures 146 Connecting Stories 150 Creative Interventions in Cultures of Judgement and Disbelief Concluding 160

Part 3 Theological and Political Disruptions 5 Transformations in the Everyday 165 Troubling ‘Transformation’ 165 Poetic Modes of Transformation 168

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Putting Cultures of Judgement on Trial 168 Incarnational and Performative Interventions 173 Cultural Transformations in the Everyday 178 A Return: Risking Transformation 184 Everyday Transformations as Social, Material, and Spiritual 6 Enacting Disruptive Encounters 192 ‘Face-to-Face’ Sharing 192 Collaborative Practices 196 Creative Arts-Based Research Practices 203 Reflexivity 209 Reflexivity through a Body in Pain 212 Fragile, Ongoing, Responsive Practices 218 Ongoing Lived Experiences 218 Political and Theological Making with Lived Experiences Concluding Bibliography Index 253

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Acknowledgements First and foremost, thank you to all at Poverty Truth Community who collaborated on this project, whose creativity and courage fill these pages but always exceed words, and who continue together in the journey for justice. Thanks particularly to ‘Fiona’, ‘Kitty’, and ‘Victoire’, who steered the project with much laughter and thoughtfulness. This project was made possible through funding from the AHRC, and I am grateful to Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities for their support in working out the details of a ‘researcher-in-residence’ position. A huge thank you as well to Anneleen Lindsay for her photography of the Connecting Stories exhibition that have provided many of the images for this work. I am deeply grateful for the support and encouragement of several colleagues and friends. Particular thanks go to Heather Walton, for her guidance and wisdom in so many areas, and her example of working theologically with great creativity, love, and humour. Thank you to Elaine Graham for her generous support and feedback in the process, both as examiner and editor. Without Heather and Elaine, and their work in practical theology in the UK over the past decades, this kind of project simply could not have been imagined; I am truly grateful for their grit and grace in trying to create a more welcoming and interesting field. Thank you to Anna Fisk for her friendship and insightfulness, as well as her helpful feedback and keen eye. I am also grateful to Bonnie Miller-McLemore for her support and vision as editor. Thanks to Katie Cross for being a listening ear and a great sounding board for ideas, and to Scott Midson and Karen O’Donnell for their unfailing encouragement. Thank you to Meg MacDonald for listening to the ups and downs and being an incredible believer in this work. And finally, to S., my love, thank you for holding my hand through everything, except when I needed it to type.

Figures 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Tents with text written by commissioners. 91 Connecting Stories, view on entering the exhibition space. 91 Labyrinth/pathless forest. 98 Close up of text on the tents. 99 Commissioners meeting one another within the labyrinth. 101 Frames display stories; film from commission events plays silently. 101 Participant invites to Connecting Stories. 103 ‘Nothing about us’ banner between tents. 109 Varied text on tents. 109 Thread poem: a’ in a guddle. 111 Washing line poem. 112 Light and shadow in the space between the tents. 114 Text on the outside of the tent; life story booklets inside. 117 Waiting to be told. 117 A cord of three strands. 119 Root and Branch. 123 Fear of the Brown Envelope. 125 Conversations in the labyrinth. 127 Encountering one another in the labyrinth. 127 Fragments. 129 Broken Washing Machine. 152 Fear of the Brown Envelope insert. 154 Multiple ways of interacting. 155 What remains. 185 A willingness to listen. 193 Crochet woollen web. 201 Connecting Stories planning session. 207 Different texts and gaps. 229 ‘There is no contents page’. 230

Images 2, 4–6, 8, 9, 11, 13–19, 21, 22, 25, 26, 28, 29 taken by Anneleen Lindsay Photography. All images copyright CL Wren Radford.

Introduction Engaging with lived experiences of marginalisation has become a vital practice for academics and activists seeking to address unjust social and political relations. In the political arena, practices of sharing lived experiences are seen to provide ways of gaining insight into social issues, changing legislation and professional practice, and enabling moves toward justice and reconciliation. Within practical theology, similar moves have positioned lived experiences as a critical resource through which theologies are generated by processes of reflection. Although there are different approaches to engaging with lived experiences in practical theology, there is common ground in seeing practical theology as the hermeneutics of lived engagement in spiritual practices and relation to the sacred.1 Lived Experiences and Social Transformations troubles the assumptions of the stability and transparency of lived experiences in both fields by shedding light on the disruptive, disclosive, and generative nature of lived experiences, and their resistance to being easily incorporated into such political and theological projects. This work critically examines both activist and academic practices of sharing and responding to lived experiences that aim to transform social and political relations. My central argument is that practices of sharing lived experiences are a way of encountering others, but that these encounters are already mediated through ongoing unequal relations. These encounters are all too often interpreted through dominant frameworks in which certain experiences are framed as lacking validity and credibility for constructing theological and political meaning. I argue that sharing lived experiences does not automatically transform such situations, as it can replicate and reinforce the power inequalities at work in these dominant discourses. This is particularly the case when lived experience is treated as a way of providing direct and complete knowledge of others that can be easily interpreted and used by those in positions of power. Instead, I suggest that practices of sharing and responding to lived experiences can be transformative when disruptive of these existing power dynamics and offering alternative imaginings of social relations. Crucially, such disruptions must include reshaping the power relations that structure these same practices of sharing, representing, and interpreting lived 1 R. Ruard Ganzevoort, “Forks in the Road when Tracing the Sacred: Practical Theology as a Hermeneutics of Lived Religion,” Presidential Address at the International Academy of Practical Theology, 2009. Available at: http://www.ruardganzevoort.nl/pdf/2009_Presidential .pdf. Accessed 29th Dec 2020.

© CL Wren Radford, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004513181_002

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experience. Drawing on feminist, mujerista, and postcolonial theologies, I articulate the sacred, everyday nature of such disruptions. This research developed through collaboration with Poverty Truth Commission (PTC), a community engaged in practices of sharing lived experiences, and this book is constructed with and through PTC’s reflections and experiences. Based in Scotland, PTC are an organisation where people share their lived experiences of poverty with civic and political decision makers and the wider public in order to create change around inequality. Between 2009 and 2019, PTC ran four commissions that explored themes including kinship care;2 media representation; asylum and refuge; welfare cuts and assessments; stigma; and mental health. In this collaborative research project, PTC members reflected on their practices of sharing lived experiences through a series of workshops culminating in an exhibition. Through this collaboration, this book offers the particular example of sharing lived experiences of poverty under austerity in the UK. Collaborating with PTC highlighted the cultures in which their varied experiences of poverty are routinely judged and denied validity due to social discourses that construct images of poverty at the intersections of race, class, gender, disability, family, sexuality, and legal status. As I argue, these judgements influence access to material resources including income, food, housing, and physical safety. In discussing creative interventions to austerity cultures in the UK, I seek to contribute an understanding of the social and material aspects of inequality and thus the implications for theologies of transforming inequality. In this collaboration with PTC, crucial questions were highlighted about this practice of sharing lived experiences. What it is we think is being shared when people share their lived experiences? What relations are invoked in sharing lived experiences? Who gets to interpret these experiences, and whose interpretations ultimately come to matter? How do existing discourses about poverty, gender, race, disability, immigration, and sexuality inform these interpretations? How are experiences of marginalised groups used as examples and misused by those in power? What happens when lived experiences become removed from both those sharing and the contexts in which they were originally shared? Such questions are at once practical and theoretical, political and theological. I suggest engagement in such questions is crucial in any setting of sharing lived experiences, including theological research practices. In making this argument, then, Lived Experiences and Social Transformations not only discusses these practices of sharing lived experiences, it also 2 Kinship care is a term for a child being placed in the legal care of a wider family member, often a grandparent.

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performs these practices by facilitating an encounter with the PTC community. In order to do so, I construct an approach for making theologies with and through particular lived experiences, and reflexively examine this collaboration and my representation of it in the text. Just as I draw on the practices of PTC to indicate that sharing lived experiences can disrupt power in social and political contexts, I stage a disruption of my own by questioning practical theological entanglement with lived experiences. In enacting these claims about the need for practical theologians to grapple with the complicated, uneasy, and yet generative nature of lived experiences, I recognise that the tensions and contradictions I pose to fellow practitioners and academics are those that also animate my work. Through this, I offer a contribution to the field by modelling a collaborative, creative method and a deeply reflexive engagement in practical theological research. The term ‘lived experiences’ itself raises questions about the authority of experience and the need for the modifier ‘lived’. ‘Lived experience’ has come to be widely used in third sector, policy, and activist contexts in the UK, remaining at once usefully ‘intuitive’ and underexamined.3 The terminology of ‘lived experience’ suggests a more personal form of experience, often referring to people directly impacted by a policy or issue. For example, in the case of PTC using ‘lived experience’ to distinguish between people who have been through disability assessments for welfare as claimants, as opposed to those who have ‘experience’ as assessors in the welfare system. Calls to ‘listen to people with lived experience’ thus come to indicate how those most impacted by policies are often excluded from decision-making processes. However, as I explore in this work, awareness of not having ‘direct lived experience’ can also result in those in relative positions of power and privilege failing to recognise their connectedness and complicity in such systems. In using the term here, I seek to signal these wider contexts whilst highlighting the limits of such appeals. I have also chosen to use the terms ‘sharing’ and ‘sharing and responding’ to denote the various ways in which lived experiences may be related through ‘in-person’ telling and writing, as well as song, poetry, literature, and art. I have aimed to move away from terminology around ‘speaking’, ‘narrating’, and ‘listening’, partly in order to recognise textual and visual forms, and also given the limits of the metaphors of speech and voice that I discuss in the first chapter. Sharing points toward the relational element of this practice, but also perhaps the fragility. As such, this work is also about the limits of sharing.

3 Ian McIntosh and Sharon Wright, “Exploring what the Notion of ‘Lived Experience’ Offers for Social Policy Analysis,” Journal of Social Policy 48 no.3 (2019): 450.

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There are situations in which lived experiences are demanded as evidence for judgement—for example, welfare assessments and the Border Agency—as well as painful and traumatic experiences that indicate where it is not always appropriate to ask for others to share. Equally, as I explore throughout, sharing lived experiences does not provide full and transparent access to others, and so in working with lived experiences we must be aware of these limitations and the dangers of our claims to know others through these practices of sharing.

Sharing Lived Experiences as a Political Practice Sharing lived experiences has become a popular, even ubiquitous practice for individuals and communities seeking to address marginalisation and oppression. ‘Telling one’s story’ now takes many forms, from speaking in public forums and posting on social media, to creating expression through literature, poetry, and visual and performance arts. Recent high-profile examples include No Friend but the Mountains (2018), a work typed on a smuggled phone by Kurdish poet Behrouz Boochani while imprisoned on Manus Island due to the Australian government’s refugee policies;4 Manchester United footballer Marcus Rashford’s campaigns for an extension of free school meals during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, drawing on his own experiences of growing up in poverty; and Hannah Gadsby’s stand-up comedy piece Nanette (2018), addressing how the telling of her experiences of homophobia, sexism, and sexual violence are framed by dominant cultural narratives of gender and sexuality. These are accompanied by countless other examples of speaking out against experiences of marginalisation that gain far less public attention. Lived experiences may be shared with the aims of overturning stigma, changing legislation, bringing into public consciousness forms of oppression, and enabling marginalised groups to participate in political life. In other words, practices of sharing lived experiences are seen as transformative of our social and political relations. Contemporary forms of sharing lived experiences are influenced by longer histories of testimonial witnessing. Holocaust survivor and writer Elie Wiesel argues that the Holocaust writings of his generation gave rise to a “new liter-

4 Behrouz Boochani, No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, trans. Omid Tofighian (London: Picador, 2018).

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ature, that of testimony”.5 Latin American ‘testimonio’ literature, for example I, Rigoberta Menchú (1982), offered first-person accounts of the violence and exploitation of oppressive political regimes and the struggles to resist and overthrow these regimes.6 In various truth commissions across the globe, perpetrators and survivors have testified to experiences of civil war, violence, and oppressive political conditions, most prominently the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the wake of apartheid. Feminist movements since the 1960s have drawn on testimonial forms to question women’s exclusion from aspects of public life, taking women’s everyday experiences as starting points for political activity. These practices continue to inform social justice movements, as well as shaping politics in ways that “notions of ‘justice’ have become bound up with witnessing, testifying, and truth telling”.7 However, the performance of these practices of sharing lived experience stories by grassroots activists, researchers, and organisations remains both problematic and productive. Traversing personal and public spheres, lived experience narratives question the assumed divides between personal and political, enabling new forms of subjectivity for envisioning alternative futures and reconfiguring public life.8 Yet, making these experiences public exposes those sharing to potential abuse or to being stereotyped as a ‘passive victim’.9 In the highly public examples of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford, women testifying about sexual abuse are often met with harassment and moral judgements about all areas of their lives.10 The MeToo movement, started by activist Tarana Burke in 2006, has seen women sharing their experiences of

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Elie Wiesel, “The Holocaust as a Literary Inspiration,” in Dimensions of the Holocaust: Lectures at Northwestern University, annotated Elliot Lefovitz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1977), 9. Rigoberta Menchú and Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, I, Rigoberta Menchú: an Indian Woman in Guatemala (London: Verso, 1984). Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, “Testimonial Cultures: An Introduction,” Cultural Values 5 no.1 (2001): 1–2. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (New York, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 17. Rebecca Chopp, “Reimagining Public Discourse,” in Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power, ed. Dwight N. Hopkins (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2007). Schaffer and Smith, Human Rights and Narrated Lives, 37, 45; Paul Gready, “The Public Life of Narratives: Ethics, Politics, Methods,” in Doing Narrative Research, Second Edition, ed. Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire, and Maria Tamboukou (London, Los Angeles, Sage, 2013). Leigh Gilmore, Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives (New York: Columbia Press, 2017).

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sexual assault; yet this is also caught up in wider power dynamics as cisgender, white, non-disabled women’s experiences frequently gain more attention and empathy, including in ways that are used politically against more marginalised women such as trans women and sex workers.11 Reflecting on the doubt cast on her 2019 autobiography Skint Estate, Cash Carraway argues that middle-class women may be able to hint at sexual abuse in their narratives, but workingclass women are required to give explicit details of traumatic encounters.12 Reflecting on the video of police brutality toward Rodney King in 1991, Elizabeth Anderson highlighted where the suffering and pain of Black people is used as a spectacle for white consumption, yet can also be treated in ways that resist “the documentary form that dehistoricizes both the body and the event” to create a collective countermemory.13 Anderson continued this discussion for what she terms the ‘Trayvon generation’, in which she considers 17-year-old African American Darnella Frazier recording the killing of George Floyd in April 2020. Her piece moves between recognition of encountering racial violence and finding “joy and power in communal self-expression”, as, she states, her “essay is not a celebration, nor is it an elegy”, and as such seeks to resist the commodification of Black trauma.14 Furthermore, respectability politics play a large role in how representations of Black experiences are responded to in public. As Anthony Reddie notes, because Black lives have come to be seen as ‘the other’—transgressive and ‘ontologically problematic’—“sympathy and therefore justice as a response to racialized violence can only become operative when the recipient of violence is seen to be blameless”.15 Thus, respectability politics often frames how Black people’s experiences are seen, especially when they are shared by Black Lives Matter activists or Windrush campaigners—even as the same activists aim to dismantle constructions of respectability bound up in whiteness. Similarly, appeals to the ‘authority’ of lived experience can lead white people to share

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Alison Phipps, “Whose Personal Is More Political? Experience in Contemporary Feminist Politics,” Feminist Theory 17 no.3 (2016): 303–321. Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). Cash Carraway, “Lidl Women (a monologue)” in DOPE 11 (2020). Available at: https://issuu .com/dogsectionpress/docs/dope11. Accessed 2nd Jan 2021. Elizabeth Alexander, “‘Can You be BLACK and Look at this?’: Reading the Rodney King Video(s),” Public Culture 7 no.1 (1994): 92. Elizabeth Alexander, “The Trayvon Generation,” The New Yorker 22 June 2020.Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/22/the-trayvon-generation. Accessed 2nd Jan 2021. Anthony Reddie, “Racial Justice for the Windrush Generation in Great Britain,” The Ecumenical Review 71 no.1 (2020): 82.

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their individual experiences as evidence of a lack of structural racism in society, rather that reflect on the mediation of those experiences through powerful political discourses and ideologies.16 These examples skim the surface of where lived experiences emerge from and are shared in the midst of unequal power relations. Feminist theorists of standpoint epistemology such as Patricia Hill Collins, Nancy Hartsock, and Donna Haraway have argued that ‘experience’ is not neutral evidence as it is already interpreted through complex social processes and discourses, and that invoking experience requires more work to confront and explore how such judgements and interpretations are made.17 Similarly, Joan Scott argues that experience is “not the origin of our explanation, but that which we want to explain”.18 As I suggest in this work, experience does not provide ‘pure’ data but is already itself an interpretation and is mediated by social relations and the contexts in which ‘experiences’ are produced. Due to this, it is necessary to examine where experience is often commodified and to return aspects of social context and power relations to the discussions; asking not what ‘lived experience’ is, but what ‘lived experience’ does when entering various public fields.19 The assumption is no longer that “testifying in itself embodies social change,” rather it is vital to focus on “testimony and the conditions, histories and structures that surround its production”.20 Paying attention to the processes of sharing, representing, and interpreting lived experiences is necessary 16

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Barbara Applebaum, “‘Doesn’t my experience count?’ White students, the authority of experience and social justice pedagogy,” Race Ethnicity and Education 11 no.4 (2008): 405–414. Nancy Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. Sandra Harding (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). Sandra Harding, “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is ‘Strong Objectivity?’” The Centennial Review 36 no.3 (1992): 437–470. Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986). Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, 14 no.3 (1988): 575–99. Patricia Hill Collins, “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought,” Signs 14 no.4 (1989): 745–73. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (London, New York: Routledge, 1991). Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender and Culture (London: Turnaround, 1991). Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience”, Critical Inquiry 17 no 4 (1991): 780. Phipps, “Whose Personal Is More Political?”, 307. Susan Chase, “Narrative Inquiry: Toward Theoretical and Methodological Maturity,” in Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, Fifth Edition, ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, 2018), 555, emphasis in original.

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for unmasking and challenging power inequalities surrounding knowledge production in research practices and in the public sphere. Lived Experiences and Social Transformations engages these concerns, aware that this research is itself inextricably tied to such power dynamics.

Practical Theologies and Lived Experiences Within practical theology, practices of sharing lived experiences inhabit a similarly critical and contradictory space. Practical theologies influenced by liberationist principles of doing theological reflection from the experiences of marginalised groups have aimed to sustain “the voice of theology done from human experience in the public arena”.21 Feminist practical theologians have articulated that moving women’s experiences from being seen as ‘in-credible’ to ‘credible’ sources for theological knowledge, moving from silence to speech, is transformative of theological, ecclesial, and public practices.22 As with the wider feminist movement, these have been critiqued for often assuming white, middle-class, cisgender, heterosexual women’s experiences as universal. Practical theologians have also developed distinct research practices in relation to the lived experiences and faith expressions of marginalised groups.23 More recently, attention to both poetics and trauma theologies have highlighted that lived experiences are not transparent nor easily shared and understood, rather they are ambivalent, fragmented, and troubling.24 Two brief examples from my own context in Scotland illustrate the complexity of theological practices of sharing lived experiences to address inequality. Firstly, working at the Centre for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI) in the 21 22

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Pamela Couture, “Social Policy,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, ed. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 155. Riet Bons-Storm, The Incredible Woman: Listening to Women’s Silences in Pastoral Care and Counseling (Nashville, Tenn: Abingdon Press, 1996). Elaine Graham, Transforming Practice: Pastoral Theology in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Mowbray, 1996). For example, Bons-Storm, The Incredible Woman. Jan Berry, Ritual Making Women: Shaping Rites for Changing Lives (London and New York: Routledge, 2009). Susannah Cornwall, “British Intersex Christians’ Accounts of Intersex Identity, Christian Identity and Church Experience,” Practical Theology 6 no.2 (2013). Chris Greenough, Undoing Theology: Life Stories from Non-normative Christians (London: SCM Press, 2018). Anthony, Reddie, “People Matter Too! The Politics and Method of Doing Black Liberation Theology (the Ferguson Lecture—the University of Manchester, 18th October, 2007),” Practical Theology 1 no.1 (2008). Nicola Slee, Women’s Faith Development: Patterns and Processes (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2004). Heather Walton, Writing Methods in Theological Reflection (London: SCM Press, 2014).

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late 1980s, practical theologian Duncan Forrester argued that conversations addressing social policy “must include the people who would be most directly the subjects of the policy”.25 In both ecclesial reports and academic theological papers, Forrester included the voices of people experiencing economic inequality. Reflecting on this methodology, Forrester later wrote: “we had in the work of CTPI from very early on a determination not to speak about people and their problems behind their backs. So when we are discussing poverty, we have poor people as participants; when we are talking about homelessness, there are homeless people present”.26 However this approach has been criticised on the basis that within these reports, “while the poor are heard, the experts and the theology/policy elite are still steering the process”.27 Furthermore, as Forrester’s engagement with feminist, womanist, and mujerista theology was limited, the result was a methodology that—much like the Latin American liberation theologies of the time that influenced Forrester— addressed poverty and public life without consideration for gender, race, and sexuality. Secondly, community organiser Bob Holman edited Faith in the Poor (1998), a book of testimonies from people experiencing poverty describing their ordinary lives in Easterhouse in Glasgow.28 Holman suggests that people living in poverty are unfairly considered as being unable to express their opinions and experiences, and so powerful politicians and professors do not seek to listen to these views.29 He argues from a Christian perspective the need to “release and propagate the words of those who are most precious to God”, indicating that “the fight for access to the media is a part of the battle for greater equality” as those who benefit from inequality are the ones producing “the words of newspapers, books, TV, radio and parliament”.30 However, it is difficult to 25 26

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Couture, “Social Policy”, 155. Duncan Forrester, “The Political Service of Theology in Scotland,” in God in Society: Doing Social Theology in Scotland Today, ed. William Storrar and Peter Donald (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 2003), 101. Douglas Gay, A Practical Theology of Church and World: Ecclesiology and Social Vision in 20th Century Scotland. Ph.D Thesis 2006, University of Edinburgh, 207. Available at: https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/1699/Gay_thesis.pdf;jsessionid= E4F55F9AC1A196DBB92CFCB400AC5A9C?sequence=1. Accessed 31st Dec 2020. Bob Holman, Faith in the Poor (Oxford: Lion, 1998). Despite six of the seven stories in the book being told by women, Holman’s commentary does not pay attention to the interaction of gender and poverty, even though these women testify to experiences of sexual violence, domestic violence, and where the task of caring for and supporting children falls predominantly to women. Holman, Faith in the Poor, 216–7. Holman, Faith in the Poor, 22–23.

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predict how those in power will respond to encountering others’ experiences. For example, the then-leader of the Conservatives Iain Duncan Smith visited Easterhouse in 2002 and Holman introduced him to a number of local residents and projects. Duncan Smith named this as his epiphany or ‘Damascus’ moment, but ultimately articulated these encounters as claims to have witnessed the ‘dependency’ of poverty and a ‘broken society’: central narratives in authorising the punitive welfare sanctions he introduced as Work and Pensions Secretary in the Coalition Government in 2010 as part of austerity in the UK.31 In this way, those professors, church leaders, and politicians that Holman encourages to encounter others’ experiences of marginalisation can offer their own interpretations and narrations of poverty in ways that further entrench inequalities. These examples illustrate the necessity of examining the claims to and desires for transformation in practices of sharing lived experiences, and also of attending to the power relations that shape such practices. Discussing the interrelation of power and knowledge in public theology, white British feminist theologian Elaine Graham considers that “those wishing to intervene in the public domain, either to effect change in policy or in public opinion, need to be aware of whose voices are heard, and those seeking to represent or make space for formerly silenced voices need to think about how that process comes about”.32 Graham argues for critically evaluating the claims “for the liberative potential of speaking from experience,” indicating that such theologies may assume universal ideals of what is liberating, or may treat marginalised voices as raw information to be analysed and interpreted by typically white, middleclass, Western academics.33 Reflecting on the possibilities of “adopting some methods of study and enquiry that address questions of power and authority in the production and reproduction of knowledge”, Graham indicates that these issues are present both in political practices of sharing lived experiences in public, and also in practical theological research processes that engage lived experiences.34 I suggest that examining these two areas in relation offers a productive path for understanding the theological, ethical, and political aspects of practices of sharing lived experiences to create transformation.

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Tom Slater, “The Myth of ‘Broken Britain’: Welfare Reform and the Production of Ignorance,” Antipode 46 no.4 (2012): 948–69. Elaine Graham, “Power, Knowledge and Authority in Public Theology,” International Journal of Public Theology 1 no.1 (2007): 61. Graham, “Power, Knowledge and Authority in Public Theology,” 55–57. Graham, “Power, Knowledge and Authority in Public Theology,” 57, 59–61.

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Locating This Research Three ‘sites’ have critically shaped the focus of this research into sharing lived experiences of marginalisation. The work of PTC is a concrete example of a practice of sharing lived experiences to address social and political relations, and collaboration with this community has been central to this research. Austerity has and continues to impact experiences of poverty and marginalisation in the UK, in both the material aspects of cuts to welfare and public services, and the political and media rhetoric that shapes how experiences of poverty and inequality are interpreted by the wider public. As I noted above, lived experiences play a central role in practical theology, yet in the “highly complex networks of meanings and theories, actions and practices, relationships and conversations” that make up practical theology, there are tensions that influence how this research can be located as part of the practical theological conversation.35 Poverty Truth Commission Based in Glasgow, PTC brings together people living at the sharp end of poverty with social and political decision-makers to share and listen to different experiences of inequality. Those sharing their experiences of poverty are sometimes referred to as ‘testifying commissioners’, although this language has moved to ‘commissioners’ or ‘members’; I have used these variously in the text to be precise about whether someone is speaking from their lived experience of poverty. Since 2009, PTC has run four commission ‘rounds’ in which people with experiences of poverty have met with people in decision-making positions to work together over eighteen months, taking time to listen to people’s experiences before identifying key themes for that commission round. For example, the first commission (2009–2011) focused on kinship care, media representation, and violence; and the fourth commission (2016–2018) focused on asylum and refuge, welfare cuts, and mental health. These commission rounds held ‘closing’ events where commissioners presented their findings through telling their ‘stories’, performing sketches, songs, stand-up comedy, and showing short films. PTC often uses the language of ‘stories’ as a shorthand for ‘lived experiences’; in this work, I have used the term only where it relates to the specific language used by PTC members. Alongside this, PTC hosts regular gatherings for people to share their experiences and talk; and runs specific projects, for example the Mutual Mentoring Scheme whereby civil servants are partnered with people experiencing 35

Ganzevoort, “Forks in the Road when Tracing the Sacred,” 1.

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Introduction

poverty in order to learn from one another. In this way, PTC aims not only to bring particular experiences into public consciousness, but also to influence who is in the room when specific decisions are made about systems that impact people experiencing poverty. In the last few years, other ‘Poverty Truth’ groups have also formed in different parts of the UK, such as in Leeds, Salford, Manchester, and West Cheshire; however, I have not examined these newer groups in this research. Similar to the views of Forrester and Holman, central to PTC’s work is the belief that those who are impacted by policies and who experience the daily reality of poverty should be involved in shaping policies and actions to address poverty. This is often expressed through the phrase “nothing about us—without us—is for us”.36 In the past ten years, around ninety commissioners have taken part, with many remaining involved in long-term projects such as working groups on the ‘Cost of School’ or food poverty. This work is supported by a part-time staff team of two to four people. PTC is a project under the ‘umbrella’ of Faith in Community Scotland (FiCS), an anti-poverty organisation encouraging faith communities to address inequality in Scotland. However, PTC is not a ‘faith organisation’, and this research does not include questions of partnerships between faith groups and community organisations, nor the faith practices of those involved in PTC. PTC’s work was a significant impetus for carrying out this research. I developed a connection with PTC having facilitated a reflection and planning day for their community in 2014. Prior to this, I had attended an initial event in the lead-up to the formation of the first commission round in 2009, where people testified about their experiences of poverty in front of 400 people in Glasgow City Chambers. On the reflection day, the commissioners’ critical engagement with their practices of sharing lived experiences raised crucial questions about ethical issues and the nature of changes brought about by sharing experiences. Recognising the resonance of these questions with those in practical theology, I discussed with the co-ordinator of PTC the potential for a research project that would support commissioners’ ongoing reflections on their practising of sharing their lived experiences. Beginning this research, I was conscious of time and energy constraints on individual commissioners and on PTC as an organisation. I was aware that I could not assume what research methods and questions would be relevant for those sharing their lived experiences of poverty. Influenced by participative research methods, including participative action research, I decided to 36

This phrase originated in disability movements and has been used in the South African post-apartheid reconciliation process.

Introduction

13

undertake the research in two stages allowing for reflection and development between them: 1. The initial cycle of research—“Encountering Themes”—reflected PTC’s practising of sharing lived experiences, in particular their ethics and values, in order to establish a more collaborative project that would be suited to PTC’s ways of working. This involved workshops with commissioners, and participant observation for over a year at various PTC meetings and events. This was supplemented with interviews with practitioners and activists from four of PTC’s partner organisations who are involved in sharing lived experiences, namely around youth exclusion, criminal justice, disability, and poverty. The responses from this cycle are discussed in chapter one. 2. I then developed with a small planning group from PTC a creative project “Connecting Stories”. Through a series of creative workshops, this facilitated commissioners’ reflections on sharing their experiences. This group became known as the ‘creating-curating group’ as together we made creative pieces and hosted an interactive exhibition for other commissioners and the wider public, encouraging participants’ responses to the creative pieces and to the wider work of addressing poverty through sharing stories. Connecting Stories is represented most directly in chapter three, and is further reflected on in chapters four, five, and six. Connecting Stories engaged commissioners’ embodied knowledge and meaning-making capacities to develop generative and evocative representations of their everyday lives and their commitments to addressing poverty. This creative collaboration with PTC deeply shaped not only the content of this research, but also my ways of practising research—my ways of knowing, being, and acting in the world as a practical theologian. As such, Connecting Stories stands at the heart of this work. Austerity and Poverty in the UK This research is rooted in the particular situation of austerity as a social, political, and economic condition in the United Kingdom. Austerity in the UK saw cuts to welfare payments and public services, introduced in the wake of the 2007 financial crash. These policies disproportionately impacted people experiencing poverty, disabled people,37 Black and minority ethnic women, and

37

Whilst there is debate about identity-first or person-first language, I have chosen to use ‘disabled person/people’ throughout this text as it reflects the language much of the disability-led movement in the UK.

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Introduction

white women, particularly through the Coalition Government of 2010 implementing “the deepest and most precipitate cuts ever made in social provision” in the UK.38 This has been accompanied by political and media rhetoric framing those in poverty as being to blame for the country’s financial and social ills in order to justify cuts to welfare, for example in naming people living in poverty as ‘scroungers’. As I explore in chapter six, this rhetoric of ‘scroungers’ and the ‘deserving/undeserving poor’ influences how people’s experiences of poverty and marginalisation are understood and interpreted in political, public, and theological contexts. The demonising of people in poverty is not new, nor is the need for careful theological reflection on the political rhetoric surrounding policy approaches to poverty, social exclusion, and welfare. However, it is useful to focus on austerity in this research in part because PTC have maintained a focus on themes of welfare cuts and assessments under austerity and because austerity frames many of the experiences engaged in this research. Similarly, whilst thenChancellor Sajid Javid declared austerity had “ended” in 2019, these austerity policies and the accompanying rhetoric remain in place and their negative impact is still deeply felt by many communities.39 To date, theological responses to austerity in the UK have predominantly emerged in political and public theologies, and where practical theology shares borders with these disciplines. These theologies are influenced by wider traditions surrounding questions of ecclesial social action and theological contributions to public life in postsecular society,40 and by increased attention to Catholic Social Teaching and Anglican traditions of the ‘common good’ for resourcing theological responses to social concerns.41 Debates in this area have

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Peter Taylor-Gooby, The Double Crisis of the Welfare State and What We Can Do About It (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), viii. Dearbail Jordan, ‘Chancellor Sajid Javid declares end of austerity’, BBC News, 4th September 2019. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49577250. Accessed 2nd Jan 2021. Elaine Graham and Anna Rowlands, Pathways to the Public Square: Practical Theology in an Age of Pluralism (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2005). Elaine Graham, Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Public Theology in a Post-Secular Age (London: SCM Press, 2013). Elaine Graham, Apologetics without Apology: Speaking of God in a World Troubled by Religion (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2017). Sebastian Kim, Theology in the Public Sphere: Public Theology as a Catalyst for Open Debate (London: SCM Press, 2011). Malcolm Brown, Jonathan Chaplin, John Hughes, Anna Rowlands and Alan M. Suggate, Anglican Social Theology: Renewing the Vision Today (London: Church House Publishing, 2014). Andrew Bradstock and Hilary Russell, “Politics, Church, and the Common Good,” in A Companion to Public Theology, ed. Sebastian Kim and Katie Day (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2017). See also the work of the William Temple Foundation.

Introduction

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largely focused on faith organisations’ provision of welfare and care given cuts to public services and the roll-back of the welfare state, for example in raising theological questions about faith groups running foodbanks.42 These debates often seek to find a distinctively Christian or theological frame for these contributions to public life.43 However, practical responses have also shaped the naming of these theological characteristics away from notions of stating ‘propositional doctrines’ toward “modes of discourse that are performative, sacramental, and incarnational.”44 Chris Shannahan discusses the need to consider the “cultural violence” of austerity—the blaming of people in poverty— alongside the material impact, arguing that theologies of the common good have not been adequately able to resource activism against austerity.45 Approaches in political theology have begun to note the importance of lived experiences for understanding features of austerity and political responses but have not always reflected further on the role of lived experiences in shaping these theologies. Charles Roding Pemberton draws on interviews and encounters with foodbank users and volunteers in constructing a theology in response to foodbanks and food insecurity becoming a permanent feature of life in the UK due to austerity.46 Luke Bretherton details London Citizens’ work in understanding the impact of the recession on ‘ordinary people’ and the response of organising Living Wage campaigns, an example of the increased engagement in community organising in the UK. Although Bretherton indicates that 42

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Helen Cameron, “The Morality of the Food Parcel: Emergency Food as a Response to Austerity,” Practical Theology 7 no.3 (2014): 194–204. Heather Buckingham and Andy Jolley, “Feeding the Debate: a local foodbank explains itself,” Voluntary Sector Review 6 no.3 (2015): 311–323. Chris Allen, “Food Poverty and Christianity in Britain: A Theological Reassessment,” Political Theology 17 no.4 (2016): 361–377. Charles Roding Pemberton, Bread of Life in Broken Britain: Food Banks, Faith and Neoliberalism (London: SCM Press, 2020). Luke Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Malden, MA, Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Luke Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Helen Cameron, Deborah Bhatti, Catherine Duce, James Sweeney, and Clare Watkins, Talking About God in Practice: Theological Action Research and Practical Theology (London: SCM Press, 2010). Helen Cameron, John Reader, Victoria Slater, and Chris Rowland, Theological Reflection for Human Flourishing: Pastoral Practice and Public Theology (London: SCM Press, 2012). Justin Beaumont and Paul J. Cloke, Faith-based Organisations and Exclusion in European Cities (Bristol: Policy Press, 2012). Graham, Apologetics without Apology, 122, 148. Chris Shannahan, “The Violence of Poverty: Theology and Activism in an ‘Age of Austerity’,” Political Theology 20 no.3 (2018): 243–261. Pemberton, Bread of Life in Broken Britain.

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“listening to people’s stories” is part of the process of community organising, his interest is in articulating a political theology that recognises community organising as enabling religious associations to engage in and renew democratic life in postsecular society.47 As such, these lived experiences do not appear in his theological account, in contrast to practical theological methodologies that take lived experiences as the basis for theological reflection. These are useful approaches that contribute to a vital conversation in these areas. However, this research takes a different route to the theologies that focus on the contributions of faith groups in addressing the impact of austerity. I aim to develop a theological account that pays attention to whose experiences—whose knowledges and embodied knowing—are seen as relevant in developing theological responses to austerity and how such experiences are engaged. For this, it is important to turn to where practical theologies have developed productive resources for meaning-making with and through lived experiences. Furthermore, I suggest that in responding to austerity, practical theology benefits from engaging with mujerista, feminist, womanist, and postcolonial theological approaches, as these have wrestled with critical questions of power and knowledge in shaping theological responses to poverty and marginalisation. Although austerity was enacted in a number of different countries, this focus is particular to the United Kingdom, and to the impact of austerity on communities experiencing poverty in Scotland. Whilst I suggest that there may be resonances with how lived experiences are shared and contested in other contexts, I do not apply this argument to other settings for, as I argue in chapter two, abstracting particular material experiences of poverty in order to relocate them in different contexts contributes to misrepresentations of poverty and marginalisation. Thus, rather than indicating how my argument can be applied to wider settings, I examine how particular theological practices of engaging with lived experiences are enmeshed in power relations and contain the potential to reinforce or disrupt these dynamics. It is my hope that this will enable others to assess the practices and methods in their own situations. Troubling the Turn to Lived Experience in Practical Theology ‘Lived experience’ is integral to practical theology, yet it remains contentious within the discipline. The turn to practice and lived experience has resulted in a “sea-change” in practical theology, moving away from notions of “applied

47

Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy, 123–5.

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theology” toward “theological reflection”, with a sense of practice and lived experience shaping and being shaped by theological understandings.48 However, questions of how to gather, interpret, and represent lived experiences, and to what ends, have become divisive issues in practical theology, particularly in debates over engagement with social scientific methodologies and the ‘normativity’ of theologies in interpreting experiences.49 Although these are important discussions, I do not examine these here. Instead, I detail the construction of a particular approach in chapter two, drawing on poetic practical theologies and feminist and postcolonial theologies. I also then assess my engagement with practices of collaboration, creative arts-based methods, and reflexivity in chapter six. In this, I am not aiming to avoid the dilemmas and debates surrounding methods but to enact and examine this particular approach of working with and through the tensions, fragments, fault-lines, and possibilities of lived experiences in practical theology. I aim to show that theological reflection with and through lived experiences is a complicated and uneasy process, yet I also argue that grappling with these dynamics is generative for our theological and political practices. Within practical theology, approaches of “constructive narrative theology” have promoted narrative methods that consider “telling one’s story to offer the development of personal agency in generating coherent meaning from disparate life events”.50 However, as Elaine Graham, Heather Walton, and Frances Ward note, the enthusiastic claims made “by theologians from all traditions for the healing and redemptive qualities of storytelling” often fail to remain with the disturbing and discomforting aspects of lived experiences and of constructing theologies with these narratives.51 They argue that “by moving through narra-

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Zöe Bennett, Elaine Graham, Stephen Pattison, and Heather Walton, Invitation to Research in Practical Theology (Abingdon, Oxon, and New York: Routledge 2018), 63. Elaine Graham, “Is Practical Theology a Form of ‘Action Research’?” International Journal of Practical Theology 17 no.1 (2013): 148–178. Elaine Graham, “The State of the Art: Practical Theology Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: New Directions in Practical Theology,” Theology 120 no.3 (2017): 172–180. Tone Stangeland Kaufman, “From the Outside, Within, or In Between? Normativity at Work in Empirical Practical Theological Research,” in Conundrums in Practical Theology, ed. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore and Joyce Mercer (Boston: Brill, 2016). Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, “The Theory-Practice Binary and the Politics of Practical Knowledge,” in Conundrums in Practical Theology, ed. Bonnie J. MillerMcLemore and Joyce Mercer (Boston: Brill, 2016). John Swinton and Harriet Mowat, Practical Theology and Qualitative Research, Second Edition (London: SCM Press, 2016). Walton, Writing Methods in Theological Reflection. Elaine Graham, Heather Walton, and Frances Ward, Theological Reflection Methods, Second Edition (London: SCM Press, 2019). Graham, Walton, and Ward, Theological Reflection Methods, 83.

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tive and into poetics, contemporary theologians are seeking to remind us that new wine cannot be contained in old skins; new modes and registers of meaning must be created that are accountable to the painful realities that confront us”.52 This highlights the possibilities of remaining accountable to the disruptive nature of lived experiences through poetics, as poetics gestures to where traumatic experiences are not easily told nor represented, and to where such experiences testify to our world as both wounded and also woven through with marvels in the everyday. As a growing area of interest in practical theology, poetics is also particularly useful for this research as it offers critical attention to the activity of meaning-making, and to the transformative aspects of meaning-making. Although ‘theopoetics’ has received more attention in constructive theologies,53 white British feminist theologian Heather Walton has argued that not only there is greater scope for poetic practical theologies, but also that practical theologians are already working poetically in their construction and creation of meaning.54 Through the poetic approaches of Rebecca Chopp, Mayra Rivera, Heather Walton, and Michel de Certeau I explore how poetics disrupts and reshapes theological practices and public life by directing attention to what is often overlooked by totalising systems. In this way, poetic approaches highlight the political nature of theological knowledge-making, responsive to both who and what has been typically excluded from meaning-making practices in theology. However, poetics does not offer a clear path for engaging with others in practical theological research; it cannot be translated into specific research methods for gathering, interpreting, and representing lived experiences. Instead, I draw on a poetic mode to raise questions about how we construct our theologies through various sources, which is a deeply political and theological issue. Courtney Goto has critiqued how certain texts—typically those by

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Graham, Walton, and Ward, Theological Reflection Methods, 83. Catherine Keller, From A Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986). Catherine Keller, Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Catherine Keller, Intercarnations: Exercises in Theological Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). Mayra Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015). Heather Walton, “Poetics,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, ed. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Walton, Writing Methods in Theological Reflection. Heather Walton, “We have never been theologians: postsecularism and practical theology,” Practical Theology 11 no.3 (2018): 218–230.

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white, male, Protestant authors—have become central to the discipline, while the contributions of scholars of colour, Roman Catholic, and feminist scholars are not seen as foundational but as “supplemental and therefore optional”.55 This creates a template of disciplinary categories that are seen as “neutral” yet reinforce these particular biases.56 As feminist theorist Sara Ahmed argues, citation is a political practice and following well-worn paths can create exclusions. She likens citations to “academic bricks through which we create houses. When citational practices become habits, bricks form walls”, and it is often people who have been traditionally excluded from academic disciplines who come up against these walls.57 Ahmed suggests the possibilities of creating a “crisis around citation, even just a hesitation, a wondering that might help us not to follow the well-trodden citational paths”.58 In this work, I draw on more heterogenous sources than is often common within practical theology, aiming to use my citational practices as working a different path. I draw on feminist, mujerista, and postcolonial practical and constructive theologians, with Courtney Goto, Rebecca Chopp, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, and Mayra Rivera as key conversation partners throughout. Alongside this I reference cultural theory in the work of Michel de Certeau, and feminist and postcolonial theorists such as Sara Ahmed. I draw on literature, poetry, and art, particularly the work of Liz Crow, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Helen Oyeyemi. I also locate the words, images, and work of PTC participants as central to constructing this argument. This range of sources may lead to hesitation for practical theologians, though it is my hope that this hesitation can be part of the disruption of accepted ways of interpreting lived experiences and constructing meaning within the discipline. Furthermore, much of my argument is that practical theology has overlooked the significance of embodied, everyday relations, and thus it is necessary to engage with sources outside of the discipline for these vital resources. In chapter two, I outline that this making with heterogeneous sources is a key part of my approach, one that is engaged throughout the text. I do not aim to unify these sources, but seek an openness to their contrasts and contradictions, often using citations to remain with images, language, and

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Courtney Goto, Taking on Practical Theology: The Idolization of Context and the Hope of Community (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 71. Courtney Goto, “Writing in Compliance with the Racialized “Zoo” of Practical Theology,” in Conundrums in Practical Theology, ed. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore and Joyce Ann Mercer (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 177. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 148. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 148.

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Introduction

terminology unique to specific sources. In this way, I aim to contribute to the discipline of practical theology by constructing a methodology for making theology with and through the disruptive nature of lived experiences as they are presented in theology, theory, literature, poetry, art, and activists’ praxis.

The Structure of This Book In part one, I develop an approach for working with and through lived experiences. Chapter one maps the contours of the practice of sharing and responding to lived experiences. For this, I draw on the initial cycle of research with PTC and their partners—“Emerging Themes”—and bring these into conversation with feminist, mujerista, and postcolonial theologians. This highlights what a PTC member named as the “difficulties of telling and listening,” noting the need to remain with the affective, fragmented, and not-known in lived experiences. What emerges is an understanding of how practices of sharing lived experiences are enmeshed in existing power relations, and the impact this has on whose experiences are treated as credible and how they are interpreted. In moving away from questions of ‘who is speaking’, to ‘who is knowing’, I argue for attention to how epistemological perspectives are constructed in and through the sharing of lived experiences. Drawing on participants’ experiences and Ada María Isasi-Díaz’s articulation of “lo cotidiano” or “the everyday”, I consider where what is being ‘shared’ in lived experiences is not only description or raw material but also the critical interpretations and creative work of those sharing. Chapter two then focuses on constructing an approach for making theology with and through lived experiences. I name this as an approach of “passionate ambivalence”—passionate in drawing on relations with others and desires to address injustice; ambivalent in recognising that such relations and desires are influenced by uneven power dynamics. I address where practical theology risks recuperating the disruptive nature of lived experiences into abstracted categories and containers that misrepresent the complexities of embodied experiences of marginalisation. I draw on literature to offer images of making with and through heterogeneous and troubling lived experiences. I suggest this approach “risks transformation” through attention to complexity and relationality, to fragments, and to particularity and alterity in encounters as ways of maintaining an ethical responsiveness to others in research. In part two, I turn to examine the specific setting of sharing lived experiences in the context of austerity in the UK and the work of PTC. Chapter three creatively re-presents the Connecting Stories project with PTC, bring-

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ing together aspects of the interactive exhibition alongside an account of the creative and collaborative process. The chapter works through six sections, each section opening with textual and visual impressions of the exhibition alongside participants’ reflections on the exhibition. This is followed by ethnographic and autoethnographic vignettes documenting the development of the project through planning, creative workshops, making the exhibition, and finally taking the exhibition down. Although refusing a sense of complete knowledge of others, the text is offered as a site of encounter with testifying commissioners’ lived experiences, and with my own embodied experiences. Some readers—particularly those most interested in collaborative research or who want to get a sense of the creative project at the heart of this work—may wish to begin with this chapter. Chapter four examines austerity in the UK and creative interventions into austerity that work with lived experiences. I argue that many of the experiences encountered in the research testify to “cultures of judgement and disbelief” in which people’s experiences of poverty are routinely treated with suspicion, particularly in welfare assessments, seeking refuge, and testimonial spaces. These cultures influence both access to material resources of income, housing, food, and physical safety, and also how people and their experiences are recognised or misrecognised in public. I then discuss artist/activist Liz Crow’s 2015 sculptural performance Figures alongside the Connecting Stories exhibition as examples of creative interventions that share lived experiences of the sharp end of austerity. I note that these interventions foreground the activity of making meaning through lived experiences and hold open space for plural and particular experiences. Furthermore, I consider where these interventions are ongoing by beginning to enact alternative ways of relating to one another and to society without setting these up as an end point in themselves. In part three, I examine the implications for theological and political practices of transformation through sharing lived experiences. In chapter five, I consider the tensions and contradictions in discussions of transformation in practical theology. Working through the poetic approaches of Rebecca Chopp, Mayra Rivera, and Michel de Certeau, I examine the possibility of responding to lived experiences as enacting performative interventions into power relations that are at once material, mundane, and sacred. Recognising what surfaced in PTC participants’ reflections on sharing their experiences, I suggest that transformations in the everyday are vital for developing practical theological responses to inequality. Chapter six reflects on specific practices of sharing lived experiences as paradoxically reinforcing or interrupting unequal social relations. I argue for the need to assess how these practices are themselves influenced and struc-

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Introduction

tured by these power relations in order to disrupt these dynamics. I assess face-to-face sharing, collaborations, creative arts-based research, and reflexivity, paying particular attention to the material and embodied aspects of these practices. From this, I argue for acknowledging the fragile nature of sharing lived experiences, which suggests that rather than seeing sharing lived experiences as one-off encounters with others, we need to continue responding to ongoing lives in order to build more just political and theological practices with others. Whilst the argument progresses through these six chapters, this is not a strictly linear progression as I offer returns and re-formings of key themes, much like musical repetitions that offer restatements of central concepts. These returns enable me to engage with the two different levels of the argument: firstly, the level of the collaborative research with PTC to analyse their practices of sharing lived experiences and discuss poverty and austerity in the UK. Secondly, the ‘meta’ level in which I construct and then examine this methodology of making theology with and through lived experiences, gaining insight into the nature and performance of practical theology. Yet this is not a two-stage process; rather, I move between the two levels as they inform one another, using the returns and re-formings to bring together critical elements from textual and theoretical sources with the understandings emerging through research with PTC, and to reflexively consider my own practising of theological research. This allows for there to be several key threads to this book. Some are foregrounded in the discussion: questions about epistemologies, and whose knowledge is valid and valued; issues of unequal power dynamics and how these can structure social practices, including and especially practices of liberation, collaboration, and theological research. Other threads do more detailed work, creating the forming and re-forming of underlying themes in different chapters. One such thread is refusing the assumption of a unified, coherent, stable self, challenging the presentation of ‘lived experience’ as belonging to or being expressed by such an individualised self; this I think forms some misuses of ‘lived experience’ as removed from material and social settings that are always structuring experience and its interpretation. Instead, this work embraces postcolonial and feminist reflections around contradictory, fragmented, and relational selves, exploring the implications this has for understand lived experiences as materially and socially implicated, emerging from but also challenging existing relations and systems of meaning. Similarly, I work with the notion that marginalised communities are not monolithic but contain difference and contradiction, that there cannot be a ‘lived experience’—or even an exhibition or book of ‘lived experiences’—that

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summarises an entire person or community and makes them fully available to be known. Key to this are productive images and discussions in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Mayra Rivera, appearing in chapters two and five that offer depictions of non-unitary selves and bodies capable of holding together the contradictions of pain, suffering, joy, anger, despair, and hope. These ideas also play out in practices of sharing lived experiences, for example in notions of ‘voice’ and ‘listening to unheard voices’ that are common in activist and academic circles, as well as in engaging in reflexivity; in chapters one and six I examine where notions of a coherent, unified self can underpin these practices, and what alternatives might be possible when we allow for mutable images of selves, others, and communities. The implications of this are then clear in my critique of austerity as flattening the complexity of lives and bodies, as well as in my argument that notions of transformation must not seek to resolve and eradicate such tensions and contradictions within communities and persons. In this way, fragmentation, tension, and contradiction are central images in this work. In chapter two, I make an argument for such an approach, noting where feminist and postcolonial theologians have attended to fragments as they are, rather than in trying to provide a sense of whole picture from bringing together the pieces. During this research, I heard and engaged with many experiences that were challenging and found many tensions and complexities within PTC and within practical theology that I have aimed not to flatten or erase for the sake of my own argument here. Instead, I have intentionally aimed to embody in this writing my argument for making meaning with and through such complexity, fragmentation, and contradiction.

Part 1 Developing an Approach for Working with Lived Experiences

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Chapter 1

The Dynamics of Sharing Lived Experiences I begin to trace the contours of sharing lived experiences as a practice in this chapter by bringing into conversation practitioners’ reflections on sharing lived experiences alongside feminist, mujerista, and postcolonial theology and theory. I develop a picture of the complexity of sharing and responding to lived experiences through these different insights, noting where these practices are deeply relational and embedded in existing power dynamics. In particular, I consider where what is ‘shared’ in these practices is the creative work and critical interpretations of marginalised communities. In staging this conversation, I aim to keep a focus on the work of Poverty Truth Commission (PTC) and their collaborators, whilst also setting this in relation to theoretical reflections that have emerged from different locations. One of the risks in this is the potential to paper over differences between these contexts, to consider that experiences of marginalisation are commensurate in any setting. In light of this, I aim to be attentive to the differences as well as lines of continuity, for example, in retaining language and images specific to different contexts. The insights from activists and practitioners were developed through an initial cycle of research—“Encountering Themes”—involving workshops and interviews in which participants reflected on their own engagement in sharing lived experiences. The primary focus of this was with PTC, with whom I conducted a series of group workshops as well as participant observation in attending regular community lunches, writing workshops, and public events. I was particularly interested in surfacing the ethical issues surrounding sharing lived experiences so that any continuing research might be conducted in ways that participants would find valuable, respectful, and interesting. At the time, PTC were collaborating with several other organisations who engage with sharing lived experiences to create change, and it was suggested by PTC members that I conduct interviews with these groups. I interviewed eight participants from four organisations: a human rights-based anti-poverty organisation with a UK network focused on addressing poverty in local communities; a youthwork organisation focused on excluded young people; an arts-based criminal justice group; and a disability-led advocacy organisation. At the end of this cycle of research, I also hosted a feedback session with participants from each of these organisations to discuss the themes that I was beginning to identify. What became clear in this research was that activists and practitioners recognise the transformative possibilities around sharing lived experiences whilst

© CL Wren Radford, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004513181_003

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also being sensitive to the challenges and tensions in engaging these practices; many participants stated that they welcomed the space to reflect. As one of the PTC commissioners, Shirley, stated in a workshop: “because of the difficulties of telling and listening, it’s good to reveal what it is to share a story”.1 As I noted in the introduction, PTC commissioners and other practitioners often used ‘stories’ as a way of referring to the lived experiences they share. In one lunchtime PTC gathering, I witnessed a newer commissioner ask about the use of the phrase “story” as she felt that it might sound like they were “making up” the things that happened to them. Another commissioner, Kitty, nodded in understanding, saying that it felt like a useful shorthand to say “story” instead of “the lived experiences that we have been through, only some of which we are sharing with you now”, but that sometimes the fuller understanding of this might be forgotten. Throughout this work, I use ‘story’ when directly reporting discussions with PTC members and practitioners, and otherwise use the term ‘lived experiences’.

‘The Difficulties of Telling and Listening’ Practitioners and activists reflected in the interviews and workshops on particular situations of sharing their lived experiences at public events, noting the emotive and affective dimensions of sharing. Becca, a young woman who had been involved with PTC for a number of years, discussed sharing her experiences at a formal event where, despite having prepared and rehearsed, she became very emotional when speaking. She stated it was important that people were “kind and caring, they showed me respect”, giving her space to pause and time to finish what she wanted to say. Becca stated, “they didn’t try to fix it for me”, clarifying that the chairperson could have told her “you don’t need to finish” or she was taking too long. Instead, Becca related that the chairperson said that “the story needed to be heard”, giving time for Becca to finish what she had prepared. Becca summarised that it was important to her that she felt recognised as someone capable of relating her own lived experiences, and that her emotions were neither demanded nor derided in sharing her experiences as part of PTC. In response to hearing this, another testifying commissioner, Ewan, gave the example of sharing his lived experiences at a large event. Although this had

1 Throughout this work, pseudonyms have been used for participants.

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gone well, he stated that he had become distraught outside the venue after the event, and it mattered to him that someone else from PTC came to support him. Ewan contrasted this with situations where he did not feel respected, such as at the Jobcentre, where he would need to regularly meet with advisors to show his records of searching for employment in order to receive welfare payments.2 If he had not applied for enough jobs in a week or was late to an appointment, he would be ‘sanctioned’, which means having his welfare payments stopped for anywhere between a week to six months, with the potential for longer penalties of three years. Ewan noted that whilst his personal situation was difficult, if he tried to explain this to staff and became emotional, he risked being sanctioned or removed by security. This highlights situations in which explaining personal circumstances or showing emotion is interpreted as being ‘disrespectful’ or ‘difficult’. Acknowledging these experiences, the workshop group discussed the importance of the supportive environment created by PTC, but also the challenges of working sensitively and effectively with people’s lived experiences. The group summarised our learning with the insight: “it’s important to remember how hard it is for people to share their stories”, emphasising that this should be central whenever working with people’s lived experiences. In a similar way, activists with another anti-poverty group based in London spoke about supporting one another when speaking at events and conferences. One activist, Jack, stated he always compliments people sharing their lived experiences, “whether for the first time or they’ve been doing it for years, I always give them a boost”.3 Another activist, Rhiannon, spoke about the value in travelling home from an event with others in order to share in the difficulties and successes. Rhiannon’s emphasis was different to that of PTC commissioners, as she saw this need for support due to responses received from those listening. She indicated situations of being met with disbelief, which I discuss further in chapter four. Similarly, Rhiannon noted where members of the public often disclosed their own personal experiences, particularly experiences similar to her own of the care system and homelessness. She highlighted two instances of people opening up about their experiences of abuse and exploitation in response to what she had shared, often saying that they had not told anyone else before. Rhiannon explained the impact of hearing this:

2 In the UK, Jobcentres are social security offices and employment centres, where those seeking work are asked to attend regular meetings to demonstrate that they have been applying for jobs before in order to then receive any out-of-work benefits. 3 19th May 2016, Transcript, 7.

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Well, we bring that home with us… I don’t want to pass it on to my grandchildren, I don’t want them to say, “what’s the matter Nanny, you look really stressed and upset?” But coming home on the train, I can talk to the others, I can get it out, I can get someone to document it, so it’s not lost forever… and then I can let it go and get back to my life. Although sometimes I do carry it for a long time. But that’s the advantage of going out in a group, it’s not just what we do together, it’s how we are afterwards.4 Although I am choosing not to give details of those examples here, it had clearly been difficult for Rhiannon to hear and respond to those lived experiences; I also found it difficult to hear. Reflecting back on her words, I am struck by Rhiannon’s desire that responses from listeners are not “lost forever” but are documented, a way of valuing what has been heard, and also processing her own emotions in the challenges of sharing lived experiences. This suggests that even in situations where it is expected that lived experiences will be shared, there are still unanticipated, affective, and disruptive elements of working with lived experiences. At various moments during my research with PTC, I witnessed occasions on which people might gently shake their head when asked whether they might like to share with the group, often stating “not today”, or “it’s just too much right now”. One PTC member stated in the workshops that she had chosen not to share her experiences in public as it felt like too much to speak about whilst many of her family members were still alive, but that she liked to contribute her experiences in less “obvious” ways, often through poetry and art, and in supporting others. I appreciated in this the opportunities PTC holds for people to be present and participate without feeling forced to open up and share their experiences. In group sessions, PTC also often held space for silences, including in response to what someone had shared, recognising that no words could form an adequate response, or preventing the group from moving on too quickly. Similarly, whilst PTC worked with a couple of commissioners to develop some longer “life story” pieces, the majority of what was considered to be “sharing lived experiences” involved sentences, paragraphs, pieces of poetry, and sketches. In other words, short snippets and fragments of what felt possible to share, rather than full life stories. Fragments, Silences, and Not-Knowing Theologians attentive to trauma have articulated where lived experiences of oppression and violence are not easily told but often emerge in fragments, 4 19th May 2016, Transcript, 39.

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silences, and multiple retellings. Theological engagement with marginalised experiences needs to account not only for an individual’s experiences of traumatic events, but also longer histories and the impact on particular communities. For example, Mayra Rivera draws on histories “marked by disruption, displacement, and irrecoverable loss—such as those of Caribbean peoples— whose very existence emerged from the obliteration of African and indigenous cultures, religions, and languages”.5 She draws on Caribbean philosophy and poetry in the work of Édouard Glissant and Derek Walcott, and the queer Chicana writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga to recognise the potential emerging from these creative expressions of lived experiences that offer alternative ways of knowing and being in the world. For Rivera, such an approach must be attentive to fragments, to the “shards of vocabularies”, to “loss and opacity, interruption and silence”.6 Furthermore, she notes where these ties to others through colonial relations are impossible to fully grasp, but that this not-knowing is “no excuse for indifference” as our entanglement in worldwide relations can be sensed and imaged through poetic practices.7 Drawing on trauma theorists who note the impossibility and necessity of writing about the Holocaust, Rebecca Chopp’s work has been influential in arguing for attention to fragmentation and the failure of language in representing and accounting for traumatic experiences. In her early work on liberation theology, Chopp argues suffering cannot “be fully expressed in theory or fully represented in symbols”.8 However, this is not a “failure” that needs to be overcome, instead it provides an orientation toward “respecting and protecting this gap between the named and the unnameable”, and Chopp suggests this gap is something “Christian theologians should know something about”.9 For Chopp, theologies engaging with testimonies of lived experiences need to keep open this gap, rather than trying to translate these fragments and silences into recognised modes of speech and theory. She suggests theology as a “poetics of testimony” can best respond to experiences of oppression and suffering by “reimagining theory as the language that serves the fragments, the uneasy nature, the words against words in order to describe the real”.10 However, in 5 6 7 8 9

10

Mayra Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015), 3. Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 3. Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 4. Rebecca Chopp, The Praxis of Suffering: An Interpretation of Liberation and Political Theologies (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2007), 2. Rebecca Chopp, “Theology and the Poetics of Testimony,” in Converging on Culture: Theologians in Dialogue with Cultural Analysis and Criticism, ed. Delwin Brown, Shelia Greeve Davaney, Kathryn Tanner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 64. Chopp, “Theology and the Poetics of Testimony,” 64.

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her engagement with trauma theory, Chopp remains deeply hopeful about the possibilities of such traumatic experiences being redeemed, and about the possibilities of theological and political discourses being reshaped through a “hearing” of these marginalised voices and experiences. Chopp’s work also often sees “trauma” and “suffering” as identical, rather than being alert to the similarities and differences, and risks maintaining the Christian tradition’s problematic identification between suffering and redemption. More recently, trauma theologies have questioned such hopeful, redemptive views of engaging with experiences of trauma. In Spirit and Trauma, Shelly Rambo draws on the work of trauma theorist Cathy Caruth in order to articulate trauma as “the suffering that remains”. Rambo states: “trauma is the suffering that does not go away. The study of trauma is the study of what remains. The phenomenon of trauma’s remainder presents challenges to our understanding of what constitutes an experience and, subsequently, what it means to witness an experience”.11 In this, theology and trauma are gathered “around what is not known”, finding “resonance in this unknowing”.12 For Rambo, theological discourse is reshaped in attending to trauma, a “haunted” language that is a “compelling language not insofar as it contains truths but insofar as it testifies to truths that cannot be contained”.13 Although similar to Chopp in seeing theology remade through a “testimonial positioning instead of in its confident proclamations”, Rambo articulates a theology in testimonial mode that witnesses to the persistence of life in death, and to death in life, attentive to the “undertow” of death’s pull in life.14 This signals a more ambivalent, less optimistic role in engaging with the testimonies of traumatic experiences, recognising that such difficulties are part of sharing and responding to truths that cannot be easily contained. I am not drawing extensively on trauma theologies here, and I am wary of generalising in ways that see trauma and marginalisation as identical. However, these discussions enable a focus on the forms of expression beyond linear, coherent narratives and particularly how certain experiences of marginalisation often fall outside of the dominant narratives available for sharing experiences, which I explore in the section below on voice and the telling of the self. Such fragments, silences, and not-knowns are easily overlooked and brushed aside in our ways of acknowledging and encountering others,

11 12 13 14

Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 15. Rambo, Spirit and Trauma, 15. Rambo, Spirit and Trauma, 165. Rambo, Spirit and Trauma, 165, 160.

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including in theological practices. In chapter two, I explore the possibilities of working theologically with these fragments and silences. Voice and Telling the Self Part of this notion of ‘the difficulty of speaking and listening’ is in recognising both who and what is able to ‘be heard’ in typical forms of public discourse and who is excluded. Postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak’s oft-quoted question of “can the subaltern can speak?” raises these questions of power and coloniality in the forming of public discourse. She discusses the example of Hindu widows in colonial India performing the practice of sati or ‘widow sacrifice’, and on how this has been interpreted through colonial, gendered, classed, racial, religious, caste-based, and legal lenses.15 Spivak suggests that even in looking back through the details of women whose names have been “grotesquely transcribed” by British officers, “one cannot put together a ‘voice’. The most one can sense is the immense heterogeneity breaking through the skeletal and ignorant account”.16 She suggests that the meanings of such acts are obscured through patriarchy and imperialism, and that the women’s intentions—whether as resistance or otherwise—are ignored or missed as a result. Spivak’s rhetorical strokes articulate that if the subaltern is heard, they are ultimately either not the subaltern, or they have been ventriloquised by those in power, for example a researcher. In this frame, “the voice of the subaltern cannot be heard, because its language cannot be understood within the dominant discourse”.17 This demonstrates the tensions and contradictions in finding suitable forms of expression that adequately do justice to the reality of the subaltern’s experiences and can also be understood by those in dominant positions. Metaphors of voice, like those of Spivak’s, are frequently used in wider public discourse and in academic research when dealing with lived experiences. Within practical theology, ‘voice’ can be invoked to consider issues of power, for example, with questions such as “whose voices are heard and whose are silenced in the pursuit of knowledge?”18 Mary Clark Moschella articulates

15

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). Spivak notes that these terms themselves are misinformed and show the ‘race-classgender overdeterminations of the situation’, 306. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 297. Yahu T. Vinayaraj, “Spivak, Feminism, and Theology,” Feminist Theology 22 no.2 (2014): 148. Michael Paterson and Ewan Kelly, “Values-based reflective practice: A method developed in Scotland for spiritual care practitioners,” Practical Theology 6 no.1 (2013): 53.

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that qualitative methods are needed to “to lift up the voices of those whose stories are seldom heard”.19 Discussing the relevance of “knowledge of the other” for practical theology, Swinton and Mowat articulate that this “mode of knowing gives a voice to particular groups—patients, counsellors, church communities, chaplains, families and so forth—and allows previously hidden life experiences and narratives to come to the fore and develop a public voice”.20 Yet, as Spivak’s questioning highlights, the challenge is that dealing in ‘voices’—especially ‘unheard voices’—often masks the construction and commodification of the experiences of marginalised groups, precisely so that they may be ‘heard’ in public. Engaging the concept of ‘voice’ in order to address power dynamics in practical theology, Courtney Goto draws on Spivak and adopts the metaphor of ventriloquism. Indicating that “giving voice” problematically assumes the other lacks a voice, she argues the “practical theologian is in a privileged position to know what the other would say, to speak on the other’s behalf, or to allow the other to speak and be heard like never before”.21 Goto notes that just as a ventriloquists’ dummy is created by the performer, practical theologians create representations in their texts that are a “version of reality authored by the scholar”.22 Often the scholarly community believes the illusion that the “dummy” being presented is real, due to research methods enabling claims to authority and plausibility, and the desire for the work to be useful.23 The researcher thus holds power over how participants are understood and interpreted: the “performer dictates the reality, including how the dummy is perceived, experienced, and known by the audience”.24 These problems should not result in abandoning attempts at including others’ lived experiences; rather, practical theologians should develop and critical reflections on their power in constructing such representations, presenting these reflections alongside the representations themselves. Remaining with the metaphor of ventriloquism, Goto summarises: “one must allow the audience to see one’s lips move to dispel the illusion of who is speaking”.25 Goto’s critique of practical theology is uncomfortable and evocative: the terminology of not ‘speaking 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

Mary Clark Moschella, “Practice Matters: New Directions in Ethnography and Qualitative Research,” in Pastoral Theology and Care: Critical Trajectories in Theory and Practice, ed. Nancy J. Ramsey (Chichester, UK; Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2018), 21. John Swinton and Harriet Mowat, Practical Theology and Qualitative Research, Second Edition (London: SCM Press, 2016), 32, emphasis mine. Courtney Goto, “Experiencing Oppression: Ventriloquism and Epistemic Violence in Practical Theology,” International Journal of Practical Theology 21 no.2 (2017): 184. Goto, “Experiencing Oppression,” 183. Goto, “Experiencing Oppression,” 184–185. Goto, “Experiencing Oppression,” 185. Goto, “Experiencing Oppression,” 192, emphasis in original.

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for others’ has perhaps become too familiar in our ethical discussions, but no researcher wants to consider themselves as making a “dummy” of their participants and community. However, even when the researcher’s own ‘voice’ appears in the text to reflect on the construction of that text, ‘voice’ remains problematic in being treated as a way of providing transparent access to both participants and researcher. Notions of voice in qualitative research are typically inherited from what Jacques Derrida termed the “metaphysics of presence”, the assumption of a coherent, stable, unified, ahistoric self that is expressed through language, through voice.26 Such assumptions see voice as ‘the mirror of the soul’ or the ‘essence of the self’ in which voice is “present, stable, and self-reflexive”.27 This extends to the voice of the researcher, as reflexivity can also rely on notions of providing “unfettered access to the interior thoughts of the researcher”.28 As I develop in this work, postcolonial and feminist theologies seek to embrace multivalent, contradictory, fragmented, and relational selves, as well as recognising the heterogeneity of communities, rather than the notion of a unified, coherent, individualised self that can be easily understood through the voicing of their experiences. Voice is also often problematically aligned with a sense of agency. Exploring where feminist research has paid too little attention to colonial power dynamics, ethnographer Kamala Visweswaran articulates the need to refuse the notions of “the university rescue missions in search of the voiceless”.29 Critiquing the equating of ‘voice’ and ‘speaking’ with agency, Visweswaran considers silence and the refusal to speak as strategies of resistance, noting the example of participants in her research who chose not to speak of personal experiences of child marriage.30 Naming the colonising moves of ethnography’s attempts to “break such resistance”, to “solve” and “conquer” such enigmas, Visweswaran claims “shifting identities, temporality, and silence” as appropriate feminist tools.31 She suggests that by constructing silence and 26

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Patti Lather, “Against empathy, voice and authenticity,” Women, Gender and Research 4 (2000): 16–25. Elizabeth A. St Pierre, “Decentering Voice in Qualitative Inquiry,” International Review of Qualitative Research 1 no.3 (2008): 319–336. Lisa A. Mazzei and Alecia Y. Jackson, “Complicating Voice in a Refusal to ‘Let Participants Speak for Themselves’,” Qualitative Inquiry 18 no.9 (2012): 746. Elizabeth de Freitas, “Interrogating Reflexivity: Art, Research, and the Desire for Presence,” in Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues, ed. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra L. Cole (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2008), 470. Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 100, 69. Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, 51–52. Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, 60, 50.

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shifting positions in her own account, she moves away from seeing others as a puzzle to solve, refusing this sense of consumption of others’ experiences for both herself as researcher and for her readers.32 In discussing the power dynamics surrounding ‘giving voice’ to others as a political practice in research, Sara Ahmed advocates for supplementing notions of ‘voice’ and ‘speaking’, building from Spivak’s original questioning of the subaltern speaking and being heard. She argues that the “question of speaking has taken on a life of its own becoming abstracted from the conditions of knowing and labour which allow for the very possibility of speaking or listening”.33 Alongside the familiar “who is speaking here?”, Ahmed suggests the question of “who knows?” as a way of foregrounding the epistemic and material conditions in which others can be known, conditions which “make speech acts possible, and which affect the form that speech acts take”.34 This is to recognise that not all speech can be ‘heard’ and subsumed by the researcher or practitioner into their knowledge-making projects. Instead, Ahmed considers the task “may be to listen out for those voices that will not be assimilated into an epistemic community”, recognising the “possibility of a knowledge which does not belong to a privileged community”.35 This question of whose knowledge is being centred is critical in any setting of sharing lived experiences, and relies on understandings of how knowledge of the other is influenced by social and material relations.

Social Relations Relationships and collaboration were emphasised by participants as central to their practices of sharing lived experiences. For some, this was about recognising their existing relationships, noting that although they share ‘personal’ lived experiences, these are already orientated toward their families, communities, and wider culture. Rhiannon spoke about her sense of ‘carrying’ others from her neighbourhood when speaking at events: “because we are carrying on our backs a lot of people, a lot of people, we are carrying in our hearts a lot of people, a lot of people, and we want them to be respected, and part of that is to

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Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, 50. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 60. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 186. Sara Ahmed, “Who Knows? Knowing Strangers and Strangerness,” Australian Feminist Studies 15 no.31 (2000): 64.

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get our own self-respect… so we do our best”.36 Similarly, PTC commissioners reflected in a workshop that their lived experiences already involved others in their families and communities, with Shirley explaining she checked with her teenage children what she was planning to say at a public event or in a written report because they are “right in the middle of my story”. Responding to this, another testifying commissioner noted that although she had shared her lived experiences in small groups at PTC, she had not shared at larger events because this could not avoid mentioning others in her family and community, and she did not feel comfortable talking about them in a public setting. Relationships within these groups are also a crucial context for sharing lived experiences, enabling collaborative ways of working with the similarities and differences between people’s experiences. PTC commissioners repeatedly emphasised the importance of listening to one another, reflecting that this enabled them to elaborate and understand not only others’ different experiences, but also their own experiences. Julie, a practitioner with a disability-led advocacy organisation, spoke about the reference group being made up of people with different experiences of diverse impairments and health conditions and suggested that this enabled members to put their particular experiences into a wider context. Julie stated that when someone shared their experiences at an event they would highlight how their experience related to the experiences of the wider reference group, commenting: “one of the advantages [of this way of working] through our collective meeting is that all the time people are… not necessarily explicitly… but are actively being encouraged to put their story into context… so that, it’s my story, but how does it tell a bigger story… we contextualise all the time”.37 In a similar way, James, a practitioner with an arts-based criminal justice group discussed hosting song-writing sessions involving prisoners, exprisoners, criminologists, and prison officers exploring the themes of “reintegration” or “re-entry” into community. Describing the process of collaborative writing as working from images to create a “collective word bank” and then writing songs individually, James stated that “what comes out is a kind of blend, or percolation of different kinds of re-entry experience that get refracted back through [the individual’s songs]”.38 He also described developing arts-based practices with families of people in prison, again using these relational and collective methods to explore different experiences within fam-

36 37 38

19th May 2016 Transcript, 26. 22nd April 2016 Transcript, 5. 16th May 2016 Transcript, 2.

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ilies and communities. These examples demonstrate specific practices for recognising differences within particular communities and the importance of foregrounding difference when sharing lived experiences. They also show where PTC and other organisations often work in ways that enable people to develop critical perspectives on their own experiences through dialogue and discussion with others. In her elaboration of mujerista theology through the lived experiences of Hispanic and Latina women, mujerista theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz develops an account of this relational aspect of sharing experiences. She articulates a “meta-ethnographic method” of using interviews and group workshops to gather women’s accounts of their daily lives, interpreting these through a process of synthesis that values both differences and similarities in order to create key themes.39 Crucial to this process of interpretation is the maintenance of the “central metaphors” and concepts in each of the women’s accounts so that the different accounts are not incorporated into each other or considered “the same”; rather, the voices of the women “are specific, but they resonate with other Latinas”.40 She relates that the women were already making connections with one another’s experiences in the interviews and workshops. Describing the gathering and presenting of women’s voices as a theological method, Isasi-Díaz states that one of the goals of mujerista theology has been focusing on how the women themselves construct and analyse their practices, and that her theological work seeks to enable the development of this capacity, which she terms as ‘moral agency’.41 Whilst I would question too strong an emphasis on agency, as noted above, what I recognise here is Isasi-Díaz’s articulation of theological methods that work with and value the already existing interpretive practices of particular communities. Thus, in my own research, I looked for methods such as creative workshops that enabled participants to continue in these forms of sharing experiences in collaborative and relational ways, and to support their reflections on the specific lenses they brought to their own experiences by placing them in relation to others’ experiences. However, social relations are not always a positive aspect of sharing experiences. Participants regularly spoke about the stigma they endured in experiencing poverty, and the kinds of judgements they encountered from the wider public. For example, a number of PTC members spoke about feeling humilia-

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Ada María Isasi-Díaz, En La Lucha = In the Struggle: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology, Tenth Anniversary Edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004). Isasi-Díaz, En La Lucha, 142. Isasi-Díaz, En La Lucha, 82.

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tion and stigma in using foodbanks, with one commissioner stating that she would walk with her child in the pram for hours in the rain to a foodbank in a different part of the city where she would not be recognised, and that this impacted whether she might be willing to speak about using foodbanks at public events. Participants also spoke about being labelled as ‘scroungers’ and the impact of the wider public and political discourse surrounding austerity in which people in poverty function as scapegoats for the financial crash and are seen to be to blame for both their own individual situations and wider social issues. Rhiannon, an activist with an anti-poverty organisation, discussed these media messages, stating: we’re just examples of the millions of people in poverty out there, who walk past papers like the Daily Mail and see words like ‘feckless parents’ or ‘feral children’, ‘scroungers’, ‘skivers’, and you think “that’s me they are talking about, that hurts, how dare they”… but they dare, because we’re poor, and we don’t have the voice of the media behind us… so they can get away with calling us what they like.42 She went on to note the impact this had when sharing her experiences in public, and the kinds of responses she received from people questioning the validity of her experiences. In chapter four I explore this further, with reference to how austerity in the UK has shaped how experiences of poverty, disability, and seeking refuge can be heard in public spaces. These are examples of the impact of social and political discourses on marginalised groups, and here I want to briefly note how these discourses influence and materialise in bodies and relations. As Rivera argues, such “social myths and stories may seem abstract and immaterial, but they constitute bodies as much as the material elements that nourish or poison their flesh”.43 For example, laws can “regulate movements of people across national boundaries”, or more indirect discourses “teach us day after day what bodily features are significant” and “we act according to that knowledge”.44 In this way, social-material relations are deeply ambivalent; although interconnections can be beneficial, they can also be harmful, especially for people whose visible attributes are seen to justify “hierarchies of power”, exposing them

42 43 44

Transcript, 19th May 2016, 22. Mayra Rivera, “Flesh of the World: Corporeality in Relation,” Concilium 2013 no.2: 54. Mayra Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 113.

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to violence, intolerance, and oppression.45 Rivera emphasises that it is not enough to note these relationships, rather it is necessary to trace their impact on bodies: “unless we understand ourselves as not only connected to, but also constituted by relationships, we will be unable to track the effects of social arrangements and practices in others and in ourselves”.46 What this indicates is the necessity of understanding how these wider social dynamics influence our encounters with others and wider society, including these encounters in sharing lived experiences. These practices do not take place outside or beyond the discourses that stigmatise and oppress; instead we need to acknowledge the existing social relations that are already at work when we come to share and respond to particular lived experiences. Furthermore, Rivera articulates how these ongoing social discourses constitute people, bodies, and material circumstances. Rivera draws on Judith Butler’s work on performativity to articulate the way bodies are shaped by and also shape social norms.47 Butler signals that gender is neither biologicallydetermined, nor the expression of a stable, inner essence. Rather, a person’s body becomes gendered by the repetition of social norms, and also these social norms concerning gender are stabilised as an effect of these repetitions. However, Rivera is also critical of where Butler’s emphasis on linguistic metaphors loses a sense of embodied interactions in performativity. Rivera notes that the terminology around “internalizing” or “inscribing” social norms—as if “an image stamped on pliable wax”—is misleading, arguing instead that “corporeal materiality is dynamically constituted in relation to social forces”.48 Noting the resonances between discussions of the incarnation and these social norms, Rivera critiques notions of “immaterial principles” that “take flesh”, as such principles are then seen as “ideal rather than sensible—accessed intellectually even if copied materially” meaning these notions retain conceptions of bodies and matter as passive.49

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Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 113–4. Mayra Rivera, “A Labyrinth of Incarnations: The Social Materiality of Bodies,” Journal of the European Society of Women in Theological Research 22 (2014): 192–3. Mayra Rivera, “Response to Liew,” Syndicate Symposium on Poetics of the Flesh, 1st Jan 2017. Available at: https://syndicate.network/symposia/theology/poetics-of-the-flesh, emphasis in original. Accessed 30th Dec 2020. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London, New York: Routledge, 1993). Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999, Reprint from 1990). Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 142. Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 145.

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This recognition of performativity raises questions of where practices of sharing lived experiences have the potential to reinforce or disrupt the social norms and discourses that are already underway. In both political and theological modes of working with lived experiences, we need to ask whether people are required to ‘perform’ their experiences in ways that conform to existing harmful ideals of what marginalisation ‘looks like’. I explore this further in chapters four and five, but here I want to note that practitioners were also deeply aware of trying to avoid shaping lived experiences in ways that conformed to problematic social narratives for ‘telling one’s story’, particularly those of ‘victimhood’ or of ‘individual transformation’. For example, Isla, a practitioner with a youth organisation, noted that she wanted to avoid any sense of “sensationalist” approaches that would “contrast the ‘before’ of being a ‘broken and dysfunctional’ person with an ‘after’ of being all shiny and new”, and particularly where such narratives benefited charities and organisations.50 The performance of such narratives would reinforce social myths about poverty as the fault of the individual who then ‘overcomes’ these problems, rather than offering the opportunity to disrupt and adapt such norms. Furthermore, this focus on the materiality of performativity in Rivera’s work has also highlighted the embodied nature of practices of sharing lived experiences. As Rivera states that social discourses teach us about what “bodily features are significant”, it is important to note where these inform how we respond to others’ lived experiences. Race, gender, class, and disability, bodily gestures and speech patterns, all inform whether a person is treated as a believable and credible witness to their own lived experiences. In her work on women’s witnessing to violence and oppression in public spaces, Leigh Gilmore indicates where problematic histories have associated racialised and gendered bodies with doubt so that pre-existing judgements “taint” both the person witnessing and their testimony; as a result women, and particularly women of colour, “encounter doubt as a condition of bearing witness”.51 Such judgements are seen to “stick” to bodies via the performative repetition over time.52 In chapter four I explore how austerity discourses create distinctions between ‘deserving/undeserving poor’, noting how perceptions of race, gender, sexuality, disability, family, and work all influence such judgements.

50 51 52

17th May 2016, Transcript, 10. Leigh Gilmore, Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About their Lives (New York: Columbia Press, 2017), 20. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Second Edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).

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I was also aware of the embodied nature of sharing and responding to lived experiences in this research. In conducting a particular group interview, I felt the demands of being seen as an attentive researcher—sitting for several hours in metal-legged plastic chairs listening to deeply affecting personal experiences—scraping against the realities of being a disabled researcher living with chronic illness. Even though participants came and went to smoke or use the bathroom, passing the baton of testimony between them, I felt I could not interrupt those speaking to ask for just a moment to stretch, let my mind wander, and run my aching hands under cool water. I found this hard to write about afterwards, doodling on the page of a research journal whilst circling around questions in my mind: Why is it I feel that conducting practical theological research erases the particularities of my body in the world whilst also demanding I reflexively display its vulnerability on the page? Why, in that situation, did I feel I had to set these parts of me aside to ‘perform listening’, rather than listening with and through my embodied experiences? Reflecting on that day, I also wrote about hearing painful personal experiences around stigma, illness and impairment, family, and interventions from social care: Much of what I heard reflects on where middle-class, white, nondisabled people can wall-off certain experiences as ‘personal’, rather than having them opened to strangers to judge as ‘evidence’—for example, the ability to care for a child or being eligible for social security. I’m aware of where I may do this as a researcher too, deciding what is important in what I hear and what I share from my own life. Where does this sit with asserting feminist notions that ‘the personal is political?’ Who gets to decide what is relevant? I wondered how I could adequately respond to the experiences I had heard that day, to the massive yet disjointed revelations they disclosed, and also to where my body reminded me of my own embodied presence in the research.

Critical Interpretations and Creative Work PTC members and collaborators reflected on the different contexts in which lived experiences can be shared, noting how power dynamics often influ-

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enced how people were treated in sharing their experiences. Working with a disability-led advocacy community, Julie highlighted the “fashion” for “hearing stories” at conferences. However, she felt that most settings fail to recognise the participation and learning of those sharing their experiences, stating: “they aren’t there to have their experience sort of zuked out of them! And everybody to say ‘oh how wonderful to have somebody with lived experiences!’… so to try to have a shift in power would be part of it to ask ‘in what capacity are we there?’”.53 Noting it was best when those sharing their experiences were included as full participants whose learning and perspectives were valued, Julie recognised the irony that it is often organisations who do not work in this way who needed to hear people’s experiences the most. Practitioners and activists highlighted the risk of ‘instrumentalising’ lived experiences, putting pressure on people and the experiences they share to produce an end result rather than valuing the complexity of these experiences. Isla, a youth worker, reflected on receiving feedback from people in positions of influence after sharing with them videos created by young people about their experiences. She reported that although policymakers had stated this was “exactly what’s needed to make a difference on the ground”, they also felt unsure what to ‘do’ with these videos because government and funders “are interested in fixed and single issues… you either have a mental health issue or a homelessness issue and we will run campaigns around either of them but… they’re not going to overlap”. Isla spoke about her own frustration with this, saying “but that’s not life and everyone knows it’s not life, but… they have these individualistic teams and budgets and competition for resources”.54 PTC commissioners also expressed their dissatisfaction at situations where those in power listened for only what they considered to be relevant information. In a workshop, Fiona gave an example of one testifying commissioner meeting with a policymaker for the first time, and yet when the commissioner shared her experiences she was told by this policymaker “I’ve heard that story before”. Fiona explained: “you can’t just label people for gender, race, sexuality, class… you can’t just say ‘that’s the story from poverty’… you have to respect people’s individual stories. Hearing a person’s story, you can’t say ‘I’ve heard that story before’, you may have heard similar, but not the same, you can’t generalise”. The group stated the need to recognise that when people are sharing their lived experiences, it is important to respond with “more than labelling them as being ‘about’ a particular issue”. In the next chapter, I explore further

53 54

22nd April 2016 Transcript, 16. 17th May 2016 Transcript Two, 2.

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how this separating out of different aspects of experiences replicates colonial, taxonomic approaches to lived experiences. In a similar way, I observed PTC commissioners talking about their frustrations with other people emphasising only the negative aspects of their experiences, failing to recognise their efforts and creative working toward change. I noted in my research journal after attending one of the regular writing groups: B. talked about a kinship care event, and her frustrations at a policymaker speaking about issues “as if it was still 2009”, as if no progress had been made in the last few years because of the kinship network: “she only emphasised the negatives”. B. felt this “didn’t recognise the years and years of hard work kinship carers have put in and the changes we’ve got from this”, for example, in 2015 kinship carers receiving the same allowance as foster carers. She talked about the benefits of the homework club they’d started, how much her granddaughter had come on through this. Her granddaughter had been wrongly branded a ‘troublemaker’ by the school at first because they didn’t understand what it meant to be a ‘kinship kid’. She beamed with pride talking about her granddaughter’s recent ‘glowing report’ from the school. Reflecting on this commissioner’s passion, it is important to consider how we speak about others and how we frame our theologies in ways that testify to the active working of communities, to their care and pride in their achievements. Such a statement echoes liberationist, mujerista, and womanist approaches in which people refuse to see themselves as defined by oppression or to take a romanticised view of poverty and suffering, instead recognising communities as “en la lucha”, “in the struggle” against oppression.55 These reflections raise the questions of what we think is being ‘shared’ when people engage with this practice of sharing lived experiences. Policymakers, politicians, church leaders, and academic researchers may engage with this practice, but mistake what they are hearing as only ‘information’ about a particular issue that can be analysed in their own ways for their own purposes. As Kwok Pui-lan argues in her discussions on the production of feminist and postcolonial theologies, “[w]e need to recall that during the colonial period, Third World peoples provided raw data and materials for Western ‘experts’

55

See for example Isasi-Díaz, En La Lucha.

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to examine, analyze, and theorize”.56 Kwok articulates instead the possibility of recognising the forms in which marginalised communities have expressed themselves as the basis for theory building, rather than seeing it as material to be interpreted through a Western theoretical lens. What I want to suggest then is that lived experiences, far from being raw materials, already carry with them the critical interpretations and creative work of those who are sharing about what they have lived and witnessed, and this is also being ‘shared’ in the performance of these practices. In order to do so, I turn to Isasi-Díaz’s articulation of “lo cotidiano” or “the everyday”.57 In working with the lived experience narratives of Hispanic and Latina women, Isasi-Díaz saw these lived experiences as emerging from and “entrenched” in lo cotidiano, the day-to-day reality of these women. Lo cotidiano comes to be a sophisticated and complex concept in Isasi-Díaz’s thought, as she argues that it goes beyond “perspective” and “context” but has a specific epistemological aspect in relating to how Hispanic and Latina women make meaning in the material and relational aspects of their everyday lives. She states: Lo cotidiano of Latinas is a matter of life and death, it is a matter of who we are, of who we become, and, therefore it is far from being something objective, something we observe, relate to, and talk about in a disinterested way. Finding ways to earn money to feed and clothe their children and to keep a roof over their heads is lo cotidiano for Latinas. Finding ways to survive corporal abuse is part of lo cotidiano. Finding ways to effectively struggle against oppression is part of lo cotidiano.58 For Isasi-Díaz, lo cotidiano enables a view of shared experiences but, in dealing with the concrete and specific, resists turning these experiences into a universal or essentialised category. Isasi-Díaz articulates that lo cotidiano fundamentally relates not just to what grassroots communities know, but their ways of knowing and interpreting their realities. There is a descriptive element to lo cotidiano in illustrating both the inequalities faced by that community and also their active struggles 56 57

58

Kwok Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 74. Lo cotidiano is a key concept in Latinx theologies and is discussed by theologians including María Pilar Aquino and Camren Nanko-Fernández. Here I focus on Isasi-Díaz’s work as she links Hispanic and Latina women telling their lived experiences with the concept of lo cotidiano. Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), 69, emphasis in original.

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against inequality in their everyday forms of resistance and survival. For IsasiDíaz, sharing lived experiences thus enables grassroots communities to face the reality of their situation rather than dealing with an idea about their lives based on what they have been told about themselves by those in power. Yet, this descriptive element cannot be removed from the interpretive aspect, as lo cotidiano is “not only what is but also the interpretive framework we use to understand what is”.59 Precisely because meaning is made in and through everyday material experiences of work, family, class, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and community, Isasi-Díaz considers that what is being shared in Hispanic and Latina women’s experiences of the everyday are their ways of knowing and interpreting. This is to recognise the value of grassroots communities’ critical and creative strategies that are practiced in their everyday lives. Isasi-Díaz discusses that often Hispanic and Latina women experiencing poverty face decisions about values and commitments that those in positions of power and privilege do not have to make. She states: those of us with resources often go through the day without having to think much about how to feed and dress ourselves, how to pay for transportation to get where we are going, or to pay for doing the laundry. It is at this level of facing the particularity and specificity of everyday life that grassroots people—Latinas—embrace lo cotidiano and in doing so, lo cotidiano becomes the space—time and place—where they exercise their moral agency and determine who they are, who they become, and how they live their lives.60 She gives the example of a whole pack of coffee being cheaper to buy in the long run, but for people experiencing poverty, they may not have that money all at once, or will need to budget to afford other things on that day, so it is better to have a take-out cup of cheap coffee when possible. Similar discussions often surround food poverty in the UK, with those in positions of power and privilege suggesting ‘cheap’ recipes to show that it would be ‘easy’ to live on low wages or on benefits. These arguments often fail to recognise the realities of not having enough money ‘up front’ to buy packs or in bulk, the cost of electricity and gas for cooking, having necessary cooking implements, and

59

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Ada María Isasi-Díaz, “Mujerista Discourse: A Platform for Latinas’ Subjugated Knowledge,” in Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy, ed. Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 49. Ada María Isasi-Díaz, “Lo Cotidiano: A Key Element of Mujerista Theology,” Journal of Hispanic / Latino Theology 10 no.1 (2002): 12. Isasi-Díaz, “Mujerista Discourse,” 52.

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the many other decisions about money that need to be made every single day. PTC members often talked about these ‘decisions’ as being a ‘lack of choice’, for example many commissioners spoke about not eating so that they would be able to provide food for their children. For Isasi-Díaz, these decisions in everyday life about food, laundry, transport, and clothing are part of people’s critical and moral capacities that are exercised in the struggles of everyday life rather than apart from it. Throughout her work, Isasi-Díaz emphasises that Hispanic and Latina women sharing their lived experiences both illustrates this capacity and is a product of these everyday decisions and interpretations. Yet those in positions of power, including theological practitioners and academics, rarely value this everyday knowing. She states that this is in part because it is often considered ‘trite’ or ‘private’ and thus lacking political significance; overlooked in favour of thinking about “decisions that deal with structural issues, the ones that deal with society at large”.61 In contrast, she considers that thinking about the political consequences of everyday reality is what can spark movements for justice.62 Similarly, she highlights where theological language has focused on expressions of rationality as a systematic, logical process, excluding different creative forms of expression and also emotive, imaginative, and sensory ways of knowing. She suggests the need for theological language to be woven from these everyday ways of knowing, and engaging not only “linear logical argumentation” but also “prophetic denunciation, songs and poems of protest and hope, lamentations and language of consolation… liturgical rituals, street demonstrations, and protest actions”.63 What this suggests is that in sharing lived experiences through various creative forms, ways of embodied knowing and interpreting reality are also being shared, and political and theological approaches need to find ways of working with and valuing these epistemologies. Isasi-Díaz recognises the subjective nature of these critical interpretations that emerge in and through the continual “action-reflection-action” in the lives of grassroots communities.64 She considers that this subjectivity demonstrates that all social narratives are subjective—despite their claims to objectivity— and that interpretations are socially and historical located, laden with power and political interest.65 For Isasi-Díaz, lo cotidiano, this subjective everyday lived reality, is “a powerful point of reference from where to begin to imagine a different world, a different societal structure, a different way of relating to the

61 62 63 64 65

Isasi-Díaz, “Mujerista Discourse,” 55. Isasi-Díaz, “Mujerista Discourse,” 55. Isasi-Díaz, En La Lucha, 184. Isasi-Díaz, “Mujerista Discourse,” 55. Isasi-Díaz, En La Lucha, 183.

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divine (or to what we consider transcendental/radical immanence), as well as a different way of relating to ourselves: to who we are and what we do”.66 Here, Isasi-Díaz indicates that sharing lived experiences, due to these experiences being enmeshed in lo cotidiano, enables the envisioning and enacting of “alternative symbolic orders”.67 This is deeply tied to Isasi-Díaz’s understanding of redemption, flowing from God’s essence of love, as taking place within concrete realities, as she sees that “redemptive reality” is not something “apart from our daily reality: it is part of our daily living; it impacts the situations we face day in and day out”.68 However, Christopher Tirres notes that IsasiDíaz does not present in her work a clear indication of how people move from their daily experiences to a “conscientized” awareness of the everyday that enables them to “construct an alternative symbolic order out of their experience of lo cotidiano”.69 Whilst this may be a valid criticism, there is not always a step-by-step programme for developing these alternative visions. It is crucial to keep in mind that this sense of critical interpretation is worked at rather than immediate and obvious. This work is something that PTC recognises in the ongoing creation of a community that shares and listens to one another, and that Isasi-Díaz references in discussing her methods of facilitating workshops with Hispanic and Latina women. Drawing on Isasi-Díaz’s work here, I seek to recognise the value of this interpretive capacity and the creative work that goes into the sharing of lived experiences by marginalised communities. This highlights that some ways of working with lived experiences ultimately replicate power dynamics by treating lived experiences as raw data that can be extracted from those sharing, without engaging with their ways of knowing or inviting their participation. Yet, there are also forms that call into question such processes of interpreting and framing lived experience and offer the potential for transforming unequal relations. I am wary of entirely separating these two forms and suggesting that they are always easily identified; rather, there is the need to see both the harmful and the disruptive potential in all our practices. Two events in this research signalled practices of sharing lived experiences that, whilst still taking place within complex social relations, offer the possibilities of engaging with people’s critical interpretations and creative work. The first comes from interviewing Rhiannon who was very involved in sharing her lived experiences in order to create change around poverty, and

66 67 68 69

Isasi-Díaz, “Mujerista Discourse,” 49. Isasi-Díaz, “Mujerista Discourse,” 49. Isasi-Díaz, En La Lucha, 4. Christopher D. Tirres, “Conscientization from Within Lo Cotidiano: Expanding the Work of Ada María Isasi-Díaz,” Feminist Theology 22 no.3 (2014): 316.

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particularly the care system. She spoke about the negative media portrayals of people in poverty, and that the format and context for sharing her experiences mattered because this was a key part of overturning this stigma. Stating that “the world is very happy to stick labels on people, you know… only an unemployed person or only this only that”, she noted how people hearing about her experiences sometimes only focused on the negative elements. For example, Rhiannon related how others would comment on how she did not gain high school qualifications and went back to college in her 30s but they would then leave out that she went on the study at university. She explained: when you have had poverty from your childhood, when it’s been part of your life all your life, you have so much taken away from you, so much is other people’s interpretations of what you are thinking or feeling or doing, or not doing… everything is taken away from you. Your pride, your dignity, your confidence, your ability to think clearly even, sometimes it’s completely taken away from you.70 In light of this, Rhiannon explained that she had found it powerful to work on a project where she was able to name that when she was sharing her lived experiences with policymakers and politicians—particularly in sharing with social work trainees to change their practices—she was contributing to her community and society. She felt that in sharing her lived experiences in this way to address injustices, she could name herself as an activist. She also collaborated with a photographer in creating a suitable image of herself to go alongside her words. She stated: everyone else’s labels were stuck to me, I felt like an old suitcase, and I was able to put them off and put my own labels back on. I’m an activist, I get out there and I do things… I could take back some of the power that had been drained out of me. And it was even a revelation to me too, how powerful that control was.71 Rhiannon notes here about how sharing her lived experiences in this project provided a way of challenging the stigma and terms such as ‘scrounger’ that had been applied to her. She uses this powerful imagery of the labels on an old suitcase, the interpretations that other people have applied to her life. Rhiannon’s awareness of these dynamics was also evident in the careful ques-

70 71

19th May 2016 Transcript, 14. 19th May 2016 Transcript, 15.

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tions she asked prior to the interview about the nature of the research project and how she and her community might be included in my work. Thus, whilst I am quoting her use of poetic and incisive phrases here, I am aware that this encounter with Rhiannon and her community is a limited glimpse of their activist work and lives. The second example was attending an event titled “Denial of Dignity”, a collaboration between PTC, an arts-based criminal justice organisation, and a disability-led theatre group. Songs, life stories, and sketches were performed, as well as facilitated roundtable conversations with those sharing and those attending. Performers detailed their experiences of disability discrimination, the criminal justice system, seeking asylum, homelessness, and benefits sanctions, highlighting how public services and wider culture deny their dignity, often refusing the believe the validity of their experiences. Although many performed their own words, this was not always possible, for example those who had written songs from prison could not attend so those songs were then performed by others in the room. A PTC staff member read out a testimony about the asylum system because it was not safe for the person who was currently waiting on a decision about their status to speak publicly about the asylum process. The disability-led theatre group requested that the audience did not take photos or videos, as their social media accounts were used to ‘prove’ that they were not ‘disabled enough’ to be in receipt of disability benefits. Yet, while speaking about dehumanising conditions that deny people’s dignity, the event was full of humour and creativity. Standing at the back of the room at this event, I chatted with Kitty—a PTC testifying commissioner— about how these performances encouraged her to think about aspects of others’ lives that she had been less aware of, and how these interacted with elements of her own experiences. It was important to her that the day showcased lots of different experiences and also different ways of sharing, rather than focusing on one particular issue or modelling only one way of telling. There was space here for heterogeneity, for cutting humour and creativity; for speech, song, silence; for laughing at jokes and for taking difficult emotions seriously. Afterwards, talking with one of the facilitators, we reflected that there was something crucial in the room about different people hearing from one another and creating a sense of solidarity, rather than reinforcing a divide between “those who share” and “those who listen”. In hosting this event, practitioners and activists found a way of shaping alternative possibilities for determining how they wanted to share, guiding possibilities of response. Whilst social discourses that influence how lived experiences are interpreted were still evident at this event, the material and relational aspects of the setting enabled us to focus on and question these processes of representation and interpretation as a key part of sharing lived experiences.

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These examples highlight not only the importance of recognising the interpretive capacities of participants but also the labour involved in particular practices of sharing lived experiences. The lived experiences shared in words, songs, images, and life stories do not emerge fully formed, rather there are layers of intentionality and creativity that are shaped and considered. PTC members and other activists typically give careful consideration to what best represents them and their communities, and where these might intervene in specifically harmful practices in society. The community seeks to learn together about different perspectives they might not have otherwise considered. Recognising these layers of creativity, intention, and interpretation challenges modes in which lived experiences might be mined by academics and policymakers for their usefulness in understanding a particular social issue or theme. The participants in this research were clear: people do not live as a ‘single issue’ but lead complex lives. This emphasised the harms of treating lived experiences as ‘issues’ that could be separated out into containers and catalogued, or as “raw data and materials” to be “zuked” out of participants and interpreted elsewhere.

Concluding In this chapter I have highlighted the disruptive, affective, and relational nature of sharing and responding to lived experiences. Given the power dynamics at work in these practices, there is an ambivalence that needs to be examined. Sharing and responding to lived experiences has the potential for reinforcing unequal social power dynamics and exposing those testifying to stigma and judgement, particularly in treating people as a ‘single issue’. These modes of sharing often focus on the ability to provide information or data to be interpreted by those in power. However, I have also aimed to recognise the possibilities of practices that intervene in and disrupt such power dynamics. Practices of sharing lived experiences can remain with the fragments, silences, and not-knowns attentive to differences. This also involves recognising that what is being shared in the telling of lived experiences is more than raw material or descriptions of lived experiences, but the creative, critical, and interpretive work of grassroots communities. We might seek to move away from questions about ‘voice’ or ‘speaking and listening’ in order to foreground questions of ‘who is knowing and interpreting’ in situations where lived experiences are being shared. In the next chapter, I explore the possibilities of an approach in practical theology that can work with these disruptive and relational elements of our encounters with others.

Chapter 2

Passionate Ambivalence In this chapter, I develop a practical theological approach responsive to the embodied, disruptive, and revelatory knowledges emerging from everyday lived experiences of marginalisation. Engaging with poetics, this approach sees practical theology as a process of making to foreground how practical theologians construct representations of our own and others’ lived experiences. This process of making is ambivalent, carrying with it the dangers of misrecognition and pains of working against dominant cultural images, and yet, it also contains the potential for transformation. Recognising this ambivalence, I suggest an approach attentive to the complex, relational, and fragmented nature of knowledge, one that is responsive to particularity and alterity in encountering others. As I have noted, this is not an impartial approach; this research is itself entangled in in the practices of sharing, representing, and interpreting lived experiences. Naming this methodological approach as ‘passionate ambivalence’ recognises that this research is deeply implicated in what it seeks to explore, inhabiting a non-innocent and generative space as a result. I see theological research as an activity of “passionate engagement, indeed of true com-passion, with the beauty and the pain, with the joy and the suffering of the world”, whilst also recognising that this engagement with others has the potential to be harmful as well as beneficial given that theological research is located within existing social-material power relations.1 This way of proceeding in research is passionate in acknowledging my desires as a researcher—and in the persons and the texts that inform me—for theological praxis to be transformative by addressing the structures of inequality in our world. As ambivalent, it also recognises that, even when aiming to be liberating, theological praxis can be co-opted and co-opting. As I develop below, this ambivalence is not an absence of conviction, a shrug of uncertainty; rather it is acknowledging multiple and heterogeneous commitments, identities, and relations and enabling these in their heterogeneity to inform our political and theological making. Firstly, I address practical theology as a knowledge-making system, drawing on critiques of disciplinary claims to objectivity and order, analysing 1 Mayra Rivera, “Glory: The First Passion of Theology?” in Polydoxy: Theologies of the Manifold, ed. Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider (Routledge: New York, 2010), 170.

© CL Wren Radford, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004513181_004

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where this has impacted practical theology’s engagement with lived experiences. I highlight Marcella Althaus-Reid’s critique of the categorisation of ‘the poor’ in theological discourse, and Courtney Goto’s assessment of the misrepresentation of the complex, fluid nature of communities in practical theology. Secondly, I engage poetic approaches to argue for practical theology as an ambivalent process of making with and through heterogeneous elements. Illustrating this process of making, I draw on the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and Helen Oyeyemi to offer images of working with multiple and heterogeneous elements in ways that are at once painful, unpredictable, and transformative. Thirdly, I suggest three areas of attention for engaging with lived experiences of marginalisation in ways that ‘risk’ transformation: attending to the complex, relational nature of embodied knowledge; attending to fragments; and attending to particularity and alterity in encounters.

Theological Knowledge-Making and Disciplinary Desires In developing an account of sharing lived experiences, I recognise that our encounters with others’ lived experiences are already shaped by existing frameworks for knowing and understanding. The sharing of lived experiences takes place in the midst of cultures that influence deeply how we engage with others—how we register their experiences, their words and images, their bodies. Rivera articulates how the ongoing legacies of gendered, colonial, and racialised power dynamics influence our encounters with others, and the resulting implications for theologies of transcendence. She notes that in any encounter we “arrive too late. The Other has already been repeatedly encountered, named, and represented, and so have we”.2 Existing understandings of gender, sexuality, race, disability, class, and poverty influence how we consider others’ experiences, and our own. As Rivera continues: “We know, or think we know who the Other is and what she looks like—even if we realize we shouldn’t. We ‘recognize’ her face”.3 Starting from this place is to understand that there is no blank slate from which to engage theologically with lived experiences, but that theological knowledge is formed from within complex social and material relations. We

2 Mayra Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 102. As I discuss below, Rivera is working with Levinas’ terminology of “the Other” to name both the sense of those who are “strangers” to us, but also the sense of transcendence in any encounter with another person. 3 Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence, 102.

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cannot encounter others or practise theology away from or outside of the influence of such ongoing legacies. Rivera argues that we “cannot purge ourselves from the markings that history has left in us”, suggesting that aiming to do so “is not only impossible but dangerous”.4 This danger arises from claiming that we have found a pure place where these aspects of gendered, raced, sexualised, colonial power relations have no influence, rather than recognising that the world and its influences are vital to our considerations and actions as theologians. Such a ‘purity’ of relations is not where ethical responses arise, rather, our ethical relations occur in the midst of these political realities.5 For Rivera, postcolonial theory enables theological discourses to better account for these dynamics, as it “encourages us to see today’s encounters in their relationships to other encounters, with other people, at other places and times”.6 The question is then not how to work outside of such ongoing legacies of power, but how to account for our interactions with others’ lived experiences in the midst of existing systems of knowing and representing. Practical theologians have begun to name the ways in which the development of the discipline has been intertwined with the desires for academic institutional authority and recognition, resulting in the replication of these colonial, raced, and gendered power dynamics in theological knowledge production. Naming the disciplinary desire to secure academic rigor, Walton considers where practical theology has emulated modern theological projects of constructing “boundaries, separations, and divides” particularly between immanence/transcendence and sacred/secular.7 Invoking Bruno Latour’s refusal of the modern assumptions of a disenchanted world and the loss of transcendence, Walton argues that immanence and transcendence “can never, in a nonmodern, hybrid world, be separated out and purified”.8 With broad rhetorical strokes, she considers that practical theologians have been haunted by the question “but is this real theology?” and Walton follows Latour’s articulation that “we have never been moderns” to respond “we have never been theologians”.9 Rather than such projects of purification and separation, Walton considers that practical theologians are instead “the people 4 Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence, 103. 5 See also John Caputo’s discussion of Levinas. John D. Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1993), 124. 6 Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence, 103. 7 Heather Walton, “We have never been theologians: postsecularism and practical theology,” Practical Theology 11, no.3 (2018): 223. 8 Walton, “We have never been theologians,” 223–4. 9 Walton, “We have never been theologians,” 224.

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whose vocation it is to deal with the fact that life is complicated, ambiguous, and impure—and our challenge is to respond to this in faith”.10 Furthermore, Goto articulates that although the desires to secure rigor and objectivity in the discipline are understandable for defining practical theology as a field with a clear identity, this has harmful effects on practical theology as a community of practice. Arguing that critiques of the Enlightenment legacy are well discussed in theology but that “sensitivity toward colonialism’s legacy is not as widespread”, Goto states that “postcolonial perspectives allow us to take an alternative approach to what is taken for granted in knowledge production”, particularly “the role of politics and power in shaping what has been marked and transmitted as universally true or neutral”.11 Attempts to demonstrate the coherence, legitimacy, and rigor of practical theology rely on Western values “that tend to promote hierarchical and binary thinking”, perpetuating the distinctions between “what and who are more central to the field” and “what and who are comparatively peripheral”.12 This, argues Goto, replicates a “template” of disciplinary categories that continually reinforce the whiteness, maleness, and Protestant-centric nature of the discipline, yet are often “taken for granted as neutral”.13 Demonstrating that such positions and categories are actively, if implicitly, maintained within practical theology, Goto addresses the impact on practical theologians and their research practices. Referencing her own experiences as a Japanese American woman, Goto notes that those who experience “mostly minoritization” are not seen within disciplinary spaces as “credible knowers whose knowledge is essential to what every practical theologian should know”, and that even when contributing to the discipline, these scholars are seen as “guests” while politics continue as usual.14 Explaining that “ignorance” toward these power dynamics is an “active epistemic practice”, Goto highlights that this includes seeing the contributions of scholars of colour, Roman Catholic, and feminist scholars as “‘important’ but not essential or foundational” or seeing that ‘classic works’ should take priority over ‘minoritized texts’ in such a way as to consider these contributions as “supplemental and there-

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Walton, “We have never been theologians,” 224, emphasis in original. Courtney Goto, Taking on Practical Theology: The Idolization of Context and the Hope of Community (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 26. Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 7. Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 7. Courtney Goto, “Writing in Compliance with the Racialized ‘Zoo’ of Practical Theology,” in Conundrums in Practical Theology, ed. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore and Joyce Ann Mercer (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 177. Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 74.

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fore optional”.15 Equally, those who consider themselves “enlightened” often avoid addressing where “minoritized texts” have implications for how their own assumptions and actions are shaped by power and oppression.16 These ongoing legacies and power dynamics influence how we make connections and frame meanings in the discipline, shaping both how we engage with particular communities, and also what we consider to be a valid basis for theological knowledge. Arguing that white theology, as the “by-product of colonial Christianity”, often uncritically frames the conversation in practical theology, Tom Beaudoin and Katherine Turpin note that the discipline replicates colonial concerns for orderliness and procedural rationality.17 This results in attempts to “manage the meanings of practice for other people in a colonizing and culturally invasive manner”.18 Such objective, ordered approaches offer the notion that theology can be coherently systematised, rather than seeing theology as a practice of confronting the “limits of imposed frameworks” in order to “get at the inexpressible without losing a genuine sense of it—much like prayer or poetry”.19 Bodies, and particularly the embodied experiences of people of colour, disabled people, LGBTI people, and women have all too often been elided as legitimate sources of theological knowledge. Yet such embodied experiences of marginalised groups cannot be simply relocated into existing disciplinary knowledges without reconsidering both the frameworks that we use for interpretation and also how we as researchers benefit from the power dynamics inherent in such frameworks. In reflecting on the omission of raced bodies in practical theology, Phillis Isabella Sheppard considers that “raced bodies do not exist in a vacuum” and as such “researchers and readers alike are already predisposed to read through the lens of cultural misrepresentations”.20 Due to this, when practical theologians do seek to include accounts of race and raced

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Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 71. Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 73. Tom Beaudoin and Katherine Turpin, “White Practical Theology,” in Opening the Field of Practical Theology: An Introduction, ed. Kathleen A. Cahalan and Gordon S. Mikoski (Maryland and Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 354. Beaudoin and Turpin, 260, 267. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, “The Subject and Practice of Pastoral Theology as a Practical Theological Discipline: Pushing Past the Nagging Identity Crisis to the Poetics of Resistance,” in Liberating Faith Practice: Feminist Practical Theologies in Context, ed. Denise M. Ackermann and Riet Bons-Storm (Leuven: Peeters, 1998), 187, 190. Phillis Isabella Sheppard, “Raced Bodies: Portraying Bodies, Reifying Racism,” in Conundrums in Practical Theology, ed. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore and Joyce Ann Mercer (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 219.

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bodies in their work, we may ultimately be “benefitting from the underside of ‘images, icons, and ideologies’ in the name of research”.21 Sheppard thus articulates the tension that if practical theology seeks to make raced bodies visible, it “risks reproducing the very raced and racist ideologies it seeks to eradicate in the service of justice”.22 What Sheppard’s analysis here provides is this understanding that whilst we may include lived experiences into our theological research, we need to consider how the discipline has been shaped in a way that tends to elide and misrecognise particular embodied experiences, and where this may continue perpetuating harm. These critiques of disciplinary desires indicate the limitations and harms of objectivity, rigor, and the assumption of fixed, stable categories in practical theological methodologies. These categories influence how and whether particular lived experiences can be shared and responded to within the discipline. Challenging hegemonic theologies requires not only challenging their content, but also where hegemonic theologies structure discourse about God and humanity in line with the desires for an “administrative, taxonomic and colonial order”.23 These concerns are not abstract or immaterial but are deeply enmeshed with how practical theologians encounter and represent themselves, others, and the divine, particularly in relation to engaging with lived experiences. Below, I explore the impact this has on engaging with particular lived experiences from marginalised individuals and communities.

Engaging Lived Experiences As I have been suggesting, concrete, embodied experiences are vital to practical theology. Although debates continue as to the role of lived experience, much “practical theological research makes a pre-commitment to lived experience that is in the present moment and context… arguing that this is where theological and other kinds of truth and insight are to be found, at least in significant part”, resulting in “epistemological commitment to the empirical and the contextual”.24 Feminist practical theology both encourages a focus on

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Sheppard, “Raced Bodies,” 243. Sheppard, “Raced Bodies,” 246. Marcella Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology (London: SCM, 2004), 132. Zöe Bennett, Elaine Graham, Stephen Pattison, and Heather Walton, Invitation to Research in Practical Theology (Abingdon, Oxon, and New York: Routledge 2018), 176.

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experience in practical theology, and also highlights where women’s lives, having been excluded from practical theology, are “appropriate subject matter for theological reflection and as constitutive of theology itself”.25 This engagement in embodied experiences can be critical of current structures, and also constructive, disclosive, and revelatory, “both in the ways it reconstructs practical caring and reconfigures our images of the divine”.26 However, the disruptive and revelatory nature of lived experiences is often reduced through incorporation into existing theological frameworks. Walton has argued that both empirical and feminist practical theologies, despite their differences, have tended to “capaciously receive the insights of lived experience and seek to comprehend them within a higher sacred frame”.27 For Walton, this interpretive move tends to see everyday lived experiences as devoid of meaning and thus requiring existing theological systems to provide meaning, intelligibility, and a sense of the divine. Such moves can separate the sacred from daily life, rather than affirming the divine in the complexity and ambiguity of the everyday. Furthermore, Walton argues this takes a “benign understanding of theological practice”, seeing the world “as a place of wholesome coherence and embodied rationality where ordinary practice can innocently meet with theological reflection in a non-problematic union”.28 In other words, there is the danger of seeing both ‘practice’ and ‘reflection’ as straightforward, easily understood, with rigorous, closed meanings. In this way, specific and complex embodied experiences are often tamed through interpretation within broad, generalised categories. Beaudoin and Turpin critique this tendency in white practical theology of dealing with experiences in abstraction, for example, in making claims such as “‘we all have bodies’, ‘we are all mortal’, we all have ‘vulnerability’”.29 They argue: these are highly charged concepts when they arise from specific communities, and some bodies are more mortal and vulnerable than others, and what counts as an experience of one’s body is also culturally situated and subject to racial/class/gender circumstance. What goes unnamed is how

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Joyce Mercer, “Feminist and Womanist Practical Theology,” in Opening the Field of Practical Theology: An Introduction, ed. Kathleen A. Cahalan and Gordon S. Mikoski (Maryland and Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 105. Elaine Graham, “Words Made Flesh: Women, Embodiment and Practical Theology,” Feminist Theology 7 no.21 (1999): 113. Heather Walton, Writing Methods in Theological Reflection (London: SCM Press, 2014), 176. Walton, Writing Methods in Theological Reflection, 184. Beaudoin and Turpin, “White Practical Theology,” 265.

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these experiences arise under certain conditions of relative freedom and oppression.30 This move of generalising experiences recuperates the disruptive, revelatory potential of concrete experiences into dominant norms, failing to account for the power dynamics in the ability to make certain—typically white and non-disabled—experiences universal, whilst naming others as belonging to specific marginalised groups. As Sheppard argues, when race is mentioned within practical theology it is too often treated “as an ontological reality, something unchangeable and set in stone, rather than social inscription, and therefore eminently changeable”.31 She questions where certain bodies “are allowed into the discourse as more ‘raced’ than other bodies”, and where Black people’s bodily experiences “are conscripted into maintaining the invisibility of whiteness”.32 Sheppard highlights that bodily experience is often replaced with “abstract theological questions and categories ‘appropriate’ for and required by scholarly guilds”, but that it may be a necessary ‘truth-telling act’ in refusing such demands.33 This indicates the necessity of taking seriously where acts of representation and interpretation in practical theology reinforce inequalities. Theologians, particularly those who experience forms of privilege, need to be aware of their own embodied location in power relations, and of their performance of the social and cultural scripts that shape understandings of bodily experiences. Otherwise, as Elaine Graham notes, “bodily experience is restricted to a property of those speaking from a position of difference, which in practice means the abnormal, problematic, victimized body”.34 Ultimately, our strategies of meaning-making in practical theology can obscure or distort lived experiences arising from specific communities. To explore this further, I draw on examples from Marcella Althaus-Reid and Courtney Goto that indicate where practices of categorisation and abstraction in theological reflection misrepresent lived experiences of poverty and marginalisation, perpetuating harmful social constructions. Althaus-Reid argues that the category of ‘the poor’ in theological analysis rests on dominant Eurocentric hierarchies and categories, resulting in the exclusion of the materiality and complexity of people’s lived experiences of

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Beaudoin and Turpin, “White Practical Theology,” 265. Sheppard, “Raced Bodies,” 221. Sheppard, “Raced Bodies,” 232, 242. Sheppard, “Raced Bodies,” 243. Graham, “Words Made Flesh,” 115.

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poverty. Offering an historical-materialist reading of the production of theology, Althaus-Reid articulates that it is not the case that grassroots communities have been “excluded” from the production of theological knowledge, rather they have been “alienated” in their participation in the production of theology, including within liberation theology.35 She argues that, as Latin American liberation theology has retained concerns for theological “rigor” and the dualism between thought and action, even in engaging with grassroots communities liberation theology has reinforced the idea that “the theological needs of the academic are in tension with pragmatic or ecclesial needs”.36 Furthermore, liberation theology has become appropriated as a marketable product in Western theology, as for Althaus-Reid it has become a “theme park” or “botanic garden” for Western theologians—an interesting place to visit rather than a valid location for doing theology.37 As such, the meaning of liberation theology, and the experiences of Base Ecclesial Communities, is still brought and controlled by the Western visitor. Thus, she suggests, “Postcolonial Theologies go further than liberationist ones because their quest is to dehegemonize multiple bodies, such as human bodies in the discursive limits of sexuality, for instance, but also bodies of knowledge, including cultural and economic knowledge”.38 This construction of ‘the poor’ as a category of theological analysis fails to remain with the contradictions and complexities of communities’ lived experiences. Althaus-Reid argues that by making ‘the poor’ an “abstract authority obliterating the contradictions that gender, sexuality and race introduce in the analysis of poor masses” the result was a portrayal of “the deserving, asexual poor” in liberation theology.39 She summarises: ‘the poor’ (as in the option for the poor) has worked sometimes as a big blanket category in which people (women, for instance) are easily subsumed. That is, by the way, the modus operandi of ideology. People

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Althaus-Reid’s use of Marxist analysis to frame the alienation of grassroots communities indicates that whilst grassroots communities are producing theological reflections tied to their material context, the “product” of theology is removed from their control, and circulated without reference to these material conditions, removing the grassroots communities’ meaning. Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology. Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology, 110. Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology, 129. Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology, 129. Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology, 127; Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology (London: Routledge, 2000), 28.

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get subsumed by ideas. People become things, and ideas, paraphrasing Marx, become people.40 In this, Althaus-Reid’s concern is with the processes of abstraction, processes in which theological categories “become solidified, almost as if they were real”, and where these solidified categories become the standard to organise and judge real people and their messy realities.41 The result of being used as an abstracted term with minimal reference to materiality is that ‘the poor’ becomes commodified, meaning the term can be relocated from Latin American liberation to Western theologies, exchanged for ‘the poor’ in other contexts. ‘The poor’ in Argentina are read as ‘the poor’ in Scotland; yet all remain as mythical versions of the poor. Writing as an Argentinian woman teaching theology in Scotland, Althaus-Reid argues that when Western theologies have found it difficult to apply liberation theology in Europe, another misrecognition takes place: ‘the poor’ in Latin America are ‘just different’ to ‘the poor’ of Europe; they are seen as simpler and more religious—the idealised poor.42 What Althaus-Reid’s analysis alerts us to is how these processes result in taming the disruptive, revelatory nature of people’s lived experiences and thus also the erasure of their experiences from theological discourse. For Althaus-Reid, the construction of ‘the poor’ in theological discourse becomes “an object of codification, seldom of disruption”.43 In this theological process of abstraction—entwined with unequal socio-economic and political relations—“human beings misrecognise their relations to each other”.44 She considers that in searching primarily for coherence, theology expresses its taxonomic, “hegemonizing objectives”, and as such laments that “theology has become the art of erasing” the contradictions of lived experiences of poverty, gender, and sexuality.45 It is precisely these contradictions that enable theologies to engage with the vital questions of life rather than settling into established answers too quickly. Remaining “in the presence of ambivalence”

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Marcella Althaus-Reid, “In the Centre There Are No Fragments: Teologías Desencajadas (Reflections on Unfitting Theologies),” in Public Theology for the 21st Century: Essays in Honour of Duncan B. Forrester, ed. William F. Storrar and Andrew R. Morton (London, New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 368. Linn Marie Tonstad, Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade, 2018), 78. Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology (London: Routledge, 2000), 32. Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology, 128. Tonstad, Queer Theology, 78. Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 45.

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keeps open and alive texts and traditions, calling us “to experience the full reality of God, of life, beyond our attempts to domesticate divinity”.46 In a similar way, Goto analyses where communities are misrepresented by the assumption of coherent, stable categories and hierarchies in practical theology. She argues that the lived experiences of communities are often framed by notions of “context” in practical theology, a concept that has become a “code word that signals a taken-for-granted, more-or-less shared understanding” masking both the range of meanings from theory and also the “diverse lived experiences to which it necessarily refers”.47 Goto draws on Rachel Bundang’s ethnographic research to offer the “test case” of Filipino American Catholic prayer circles to examine how six different practical theologies would approach the lived experiences of this community. Filipino American Catholic prayer circles gather in the homes of families in the community, taking turns hosting statues of a localised Mary or Jesus, such as Ang Birhen ng Antipolo, Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage, and Ang Santo Niño, the Infant Jesus of Prague.48 Goto notes this faith community is full of hybridity and multiplicity in languages, cultures, religious traditions, and generations.49 In Bundang’s own reflections—infused with both “an immigrant daughter’s ambivalence” and also a sense of this being ‘home’—she states this is “a life that on many levels blurs the line between alien and familiar, even for the insider/outsider”.50 For Goto, communities characterised by such “hybridity, multiplicity, fluidity, and silence” can “make it difficult to grasp and describe their particularity while still accounting for difference”, yet she is also clear that this is not limited to “minoritized” communities.51 Through this example, Goto highlights the limits of practical theological methodologies that explain context through universally applicable methods or principles. She critiques the “container” model of context that examines a community through the categories of “local, national, global, and western

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Marion Grau, “Divine Commerce,” in Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire, ed. Catherine Keller, Mayra Rivera, Michael Nausner (St Louis: Chalice Press, 2004), 183, emphasis mine. Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 2. Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 112. Rachel Bundang, “May You Storm Heaven with Your Prayers: Devotions to Mary and Jesus in Filipino American Catholic Life,” in Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology, ed. Rita Nakashima Brock, Jung Ha Kim, Kwok Pui-lan, Seung Ai Yang (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 90. Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 113. Bundang, “May You Storm Heaven,” 88. Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 127.

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culture” with the research “moving from smaller to larger categories or ‘containers’” which are “implicitly understood to be nested one inside the other”.52 Such division between the local and the global does not hold for Asian American communities shaped by histories of colonialism and globalisation, as “translocality and transnationality are part of their reality, which is contradictory, discontinuous, and shifting”, with a sense of being “in-between”, shaped by both the “presence and absence of multiple cultures”.53 However, these features should not be used to mark minoritised communities as “other”, as most faith communities are more complex and heterogeneous than our representations have often led us to consider. As Goto notes, multiplicity, contradiction, and particularity are “present in many forms—multiple theologies, cultures, languages, aesthetic sensibilities, sexual orientations, gender expressions, histories and memories”.54 In Goto’s assessment, challenging the assumption of stable, coherent categories is not simply about being “better equipped for diversity” but is about recognising how theologians encounter, relate to, and interpret people, communities, cultures, and the divine. She summarises: “as it turns out, the ways that we practical theologians construe ‘context’ express, among other things, how we approach the otherness of what we seek to understand”.55 For Goto, by taking context as a stable, transparent object that can be revealed and examined with the right skills, practical theology has ignored the researcher’s “indelible imprint on what is ‘revealed’”.56 Essentially, our assumptions about what we will find and how we will find it—based on our experience, training, power, and privilege—influence what we think we have found, and how we construct those findings in our representations. What Goto’s and Althaus-Reid’s work offers here is a challenge to acknowledge and refuse the categories and containers that determine too much in advance what we think we will find when we encounter others’ lived experiences. These existing containers cannot hold the complexity, fluidity, and otherness of lived experiences. Such critiques of the abstraction of lived experiences draw attention to the processes of representing others in practical theological research. Drawing on the work of Gayatri Spivak, Goto discusses “epistemic violence”, defining it as “the harm done to an individual when her understanding of reality is ignored, obscured, and overridden by another per-

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Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 94. Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 105–6. Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 131. Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 109, emphasis in original. Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 110.

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son (or persons) who in words and actions redefine(s) that reality”.57 The danger of epistemic violence is particularly prevalent in practical theology “where we are given institutional authority to interpret and represent the lived experiences of others”.58 Goto asserts: Because practical theologians refer to real people and communities, there is no avoiding representation. If we can become vigilant of our propensity and practices to objectify, misrepresent, and override the other’s knowledge, we can find alternative ways—perhaps not avoid but mitigate the problems to which I am drawing attention.59 Akin to Althaus-Reid’s concern for theological concepts becoming abstracted and leading to misrecognition, Goto argues that there is a tendency to forget that our representations of others are just that—representations.60 She suggests that practical theologians often trust in good intentions and sound research methods that give legitimacy to our efforts in knowing the other.61 Similarly, Rivera argues that we “must avoid the implication that any person can ever be fully represented by concepts and categories”, indicating that even theologies committed to emancipation repeat imperialist tendencies by being overconfident in their abilities to represent others.62

Practical Theology as a Process of Making The arguments above have indicated the need for recognising the materiality and complexity of lived experiences. With an awareness of these unavoidable dangers in dealing with others’ lived experiences, I suggest a poetic approach for making theology with and through complex lived experiences. Broadly defined, poetics focuses on the strategies at work in the construction of texts and worldviews, and how such strategies make meaning in this constructive activity. Poetics is a generative point of focus for my argument precisely because it seeks to foreground how theological meaning is created through

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Goto, “Experiencing Oppression,” 182. Goto, “Experiencing Oppression,” 182. Goto, “Experiencing Oppression,” 189. Goto, “Experiencing Oppression,” 184–5. Goto, “Experiencing Oppression,” 132, 159. Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 12, 74.

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processes of representation and interpretation.63 In the previous chapter I highlighted where certain experiences, particularly traumatic experiences, are told through fragments, silences, and not-knowing. I suggest here that poetics offers a way for theological attention to these fragments and silences, by requiring a re-ordering of theological ways of making connections and shaping meaning that emerges from and is responsive to those who struggle against oppression. Poetic practical theologies have advocated attention both to meaningmaking approaches and to particular lived experiences that have been overlooked in dominant theologies. In exploring some of the critiques of practical theology discussed above, Walton notes the possibility of a poetic practical theology that goes “beyond the boundaries of current epistemological categories” and engages the “things we have perceived as being of little worth which are hard to study and impossible to pin down in texts and tables”.64 Experiences of oppression and trauma are not easily translated into linear narratives and logical theory, thus they are often not well represented in theological discourses shaped by modern rationality and reason. Yet, that traumatic experiences cannot be adequately expressed in language is not a ‘failure’ that needs to be overcome but should instead orient us toward alternative postures for relating to the fragmented, silent, and not-known. Similarly, the mundane elements of everyday life, particularly lives intertwined with marginalisation, have also traditionally been considered of less interest for theological discussion, dismissed as trivial or domestic. Feminist, womanist, postcolonial, and mujerista theologians have challenged this position, articulating the political and theological significance of the everyday and mundane elements of struggles for justice, working from the key principle that ‘the personal is political’ and also theological. The work of French cultural theorist and Jesuit Michel de Certeau has been influential in constructing poetic approaches, particularly in Walton’s work on poetic practical theologies. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1988) de Certeau argues that everyday practices such as walking, cooking, and reading are fundamental to how culture is made, yet go unrecognised by certain analytic

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There are different approaches to poetics in theology, including the strand of ‘theopoetics’ in the work of constructive theologians and philosophers Catherine Keller, Richard Kearney, and John Caputo, and in the work of liberation theologian Rubem Alves. Mayra Rivera’s approach to poetics, which I draw on here, is of an alternative tradition to the theopoetics of Keller and others, as she draws on the feminist Chicana writing of Gloria Anzaldúa and the Caribbean philosophy and poetry of Édouard Glissant. Walton, Writing Methods in Theological Reflection, 183–4.

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approaches. Everyday practices are seen by de Certeau as forms of poetic making, indicating the intelligence and inventiveness of those in the midst of “everyday struggles and pleasures”.65 This resonates with Isasi-Díaz’s articulation of lo cotidiano as the critical and interpretive everyday knowledges of grassroots communities, as explored in the previous chapter. For de Certeau, it is through these everyday practices that ordinary people make “innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy”, yet such practices do not surface in the totalising, panoptic visions of academic and analytic models.66 Recognising the challenges of representing these everyday activities without flattening them in his analysis, de Certeau’s work offers the ethical imperative of making space for others’ voices—in all their unmanageability and excess—to be heard.67 I explore the relationship between everyday practices and transformation in de Certeau’s work further in chapter five. What de Certeau’s work offers is an approach to theological meaningmaking that seeks to recognise often-overlooked and yet generative practices. Influenced by de Certeau’s work, Walton suggests engaging with “bricolage”, processes of working with and re-working the heterogeneous elements and making the most of “whatever is to hand”.68 Poetic bricolage, as a practice of being ‘differently productive’ in practical theology, proceeds not “along the fair, broad highways of academic knowledge” but instead “along the faultlines, cracks, and fissures in our disciplinary endeavours in which these grand designs fragment and begin to creatively re-form”, in particular by using scraps that “the machine-system discards as useless”.69 Emphasising such heterogeneous sources, Walton offers the reminder that the “pure façade of theological discourse” conceals “the heterogeneous, wildly weird, and rich rag bag of sources from which it is constructed” and encourages practical theology to embrace the “multiple sources, its generative hybridity, the deep longings and desires, performances and practices through which it was created”.70 Such

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Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988), xx. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xiii, 91. Ben Highmore, Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture (London, New York: Continuum, 2006). Phillip Sheldrake, “Michel de Certeau: Spirituality and The Practice of Everyday Life,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 12 no.2 (2012): 207–16. Heather Walton, “A Theopoetics of Practice: Re-forming in Practical Theology,” International Journal of Practical Theology 23 no.1 (2019): 14; quoting Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 21. Walton, “A Theopoetics of Practice,” 18. Walton, “A Theopoetics of Practice,” 9.

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heterogeneity indicates the limitations of a ‘taxonomy of transcendence’ that separates out immanence and transcendence, and instead recognises the presence of the sacred in what has been deemed too worldly, too impure, too mundane, too unsettled for use in practical theology.71 For Walton, this poetic practical theology is an approach that recognises ordinary everyday life as “scattered with marvels”.72 It is in this practice of creative making that both practical theology and the wider world may be engaged in transformation as an ongoing process. As I explore further in chapter five, responsiveness to lived experiences of marginalisation is not developed through translating them into the existing dominant forms of speech and recognition, but by reimagining and refashioning the ways of making connections and framing meaning in theological and public discourse.73 Poetic approaches envision alternative ways of relating to each other, society, and the divine, reshaping our social imaginary through a “metaphoric construction” that “enables human beings to engage in transformative action in the world as they create new conjunctions that empower them to apprehend existence in fresh ways”.74 However, it is crucial to ask: on whose terms have such refashionings and reimaginings of the world been deemed transformative? This is not making as an inscribing meaning on inert objects, rather, I advocate for a theological making alert to the performative influence of bodies, texts, matter, histories, and cultures with which the practical theologian works and re-works. Poetic attention to questions of representation and meaningmaking are not abstract debates, rather our constructed representations performatively influence embodied, relational everyday life. Attention to the constructed nature of our representations refuses terming them as ‘just’ representations as this would ignore where “descriptions of bodies, worlds, and their co-constitutions are creative renderings with material effects”.75 Rather, as I highlighted in the previous chapter, recognising the performative nature

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Walton, “We have never been theologians,” 223. Walton, Writing Methods in Theological Reflection, 183; “A Theopoetics of Practice,” 21; quoting Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life: Living and Cooking, ed. Luce Giard, trans. Timothy J. Tomasik. (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 213. Chopp, “Theology and the Poetics of Testimony,” 61. Walton, Writing Methods in Theological Reflection, 144, drawing on Paul Ricoeur, “Word, Polysemy, Metaphor: Creativity in Language,” in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdés (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1991). Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 157.

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of social discourses enables an understanding of the influence of our representations and images on material relations, and vice-versa. However, poetics does not offer an easy programme or replicable method for constructing meaning and enacting transformation. I am not suggesting this passionate ambivalent approach as an alternative methodology that becomes an established, secure place from which to act upon external research objects, particularly as methodologies “can no longer be treated as a set of universally applicable rules or abstractions”.76 Rather, I am seeking to articulate an approach that is responsive to the revelatory potential in lived experiences that cannot be tamed; poetics is a disruptive, broken language, through which we may “discern the irruption of an unmanageable transcendence”.77 As Walton argues, poetics is not only a means of “employing linguistic gestures to change the idioms of culture”, but poetics also “opens up a terrifying revelation”.78 I want to offer this approach not as the setting up of an alternative system for practical theology, but an orientation toward otherness in the midst of encounter, toward the unnameable in the midst of daily life. In this way, poetics as a mode of “knowing, being, and acting in the world”, is one that is open to enacting transformation, but one in which the practical theologian and their theological methodology also “risk being transformed”.79 Imaging Making with Heterogeneous Sources I have been arguing for a poetic approach that takes theology as a creative bricolage with heterogeneous sources, a making with and through the complex fragments of lived experiences and their relation to ongoing legacies of colonialism and marginalisation. In order to illustrate this process of making, I draw on the literary writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and Helen Oyeyemi as their engagement in multiple genres, cultures, and histories demonstrates this working with heterogeneous sources. Both writers also offer compelling images of poetic construction when entangled in complex power relations, whether in Anzaldúa’s reflections on her writing process, or in Oyeyemi’s fictional characters enacting their own processes of writing and making. Although practical theology has not developed a sustained engagement with literature, the relationship between theology and literature offers a generative 76

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Yvonna S. Lincoln, Susan A. Lynham, and Egon G. Guba, “Paradigmatic Controversies, Contradictions, and Emerging Confluences, Revisited,” in The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, Fifth Edition, ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 2018), 109. Walton, Writing Methods in Theological Reflection, 162. Walton, Writing Methods in Theological Reflection, 162. Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 4.

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way of thinking about this poetic process of constructing theologies and representations of lived experiences. Turning to literature may enable reflection on the strategies of authorisation within practical theology, and on the economic, personal, political, and spiritual elements of writing, as “how we write says much about what we believe and the power we savour or squander when we turn to crafting words”.80 Furthermore, literature can question what theology has made certain and secure, providing a suitable strategy for what I have been arguing in this chapter.81 Gloria Anzaldúa’s work shifts between languages and genres, between theorising and reflecting in her construction of texts that are at once deeply personal and political. Her writing exemplifies her working out of the “Borderlands” as a life-long project of examining personal and political conditions of moving between “multiple, often conflicting worlds” from her own experience as an indigenous queer Chicana woman.82 She states that “being a writer feels very much like being a Chicana, or being queer—a lot of squirming, coming up against all sorts of walls. Or its opposite: nothing defined or definite, a boundless, floating state of limbo where I kick my heels, brood, percolate, hibernate and wait for something to happen”.83 Anzaldúa uses strong, organic metaphors for linking her processes of writing and transformation: pregnancy and birthing; wounds and healing; grass growing slowly but with enough force to push past obstacles.84 She suggests that “cracks in the discourse are like tender shoots of grass, plants pushing against the fixed cement of disciplines and cultural beliefs, eventually overturning the cement slabs”.85 However, she also uses metaphors that link the geo-political and the bodily in describing the writing process—for example, the well-known bridge image she develops across her work: “her body, a crossroads, a fragile bridge, cannot support the tons of cargo passing through it. She wants to install ‘stop’ and ‘go’ signal lights, instigate a curfew, police Poetry. But something wants to come 80 81 82

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Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, “Getting it Write: On the Craft of Academic Writing,” Pastoral Psychology 65 no.6 (2016): 804. See Heather Walton (ed.), Literature and Theology: New Interdisciplinary Spaces (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011). AnaLouise Keating, “From Borderlands and New Mestizas to Nepantlas and Nepantleras: Anzaldúan Theories for Social Change,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge IV (2006), 6. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Third Edition (San Francisico, California: Aunt Lute Books, 2007), 94. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 93–95; Gloria Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark = Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015), 93. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 73.

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out”.86 This process of making, birthing, transforming, is both a construction of texts—theoretical and poetic—and also making herself: “my soul makes itself through the creative act. It is constantly remaking and giving birth to itself through my body”.87 Anzaldúa refuses the colonial taxonomies that separate out the sacred and the artistic from everyday life. She explains that her indigenous culture did not split “the artistic from the functional, the sacred from the secular, art from everyday life”, rather the “religious, social and aesthetic purposes of art were all intertwined”.88 She describes the feelings of dislocation and “double-ness” in attending the opening of an Aztec exhibition at Denver museum; seeing everyday objects displayed behind glass as art, implying that “Aztecs and their culture have been dead for hundreds of years when in fact there are still ten thousand Aztec survivors living in Mexico”.89 Reflecting on the process of historical and cultural reconstruction through imaginative acts despite “history, language, identity and pride” being continually erased, Anzaldúa asks herself what it means to enter the museum as “this queer Chicana” wondering if she will find her historical indigenous identity.90 This sense of double-ness increases with the sensationalised and exoticised images, as she reflects that though “I, too, am a gaping consumer, I feel that these artworks are part of my legacy; my appropriation differs from the misappropriation by ‘outsiders’”.91 In the text Anzaldúa constructs, she reflects on where the museum pieces recalled in her mind contemporary artworks by Chicano/a and other border artists who reconstruct and keep alive indigenous images, language, and culture, and “connect their art to everyday life with political, sacred, and aesthetic values”.92 In this, she notes where these border artists work against the erasures and clear categorisations of the dominant culture. I am drawn to Anzaldúa’s descriptions of her writing processes as intimately connected with her experiences of chronic illness. Anzaldúa’s experiences of chronic illness and pain were part of her understanding of this Borderlands or mestiza agency in which “writing is thus a process of incorporating and dis-corporating” different elements, forming a fluid, nonunitary subject.93 She 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 96. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 95. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 88. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 48. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 48. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 50. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 53. Suzanne Bost, Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 86. See also Mayra Rivera, “Unsettling Bodies,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26 no.2 (2010): 122.

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reflected in an interview that in creating a “textual self”, this also changed her “historical” self: I’m kind of creating myself as I go along, mostly through the writing and the speaking. In order to do this I have to take myself apart and then put myself together… and it’s very painful, this dismemberment, burial, and then having to look for all the hidden parts of you that have been scattered throughout. And when you reconstitute yourself, or when I reconstitute myself, it’s a different me that I reconstitute, and that’s where the transformative aspect comes in. But also it’s like tearing apart your innards, your entrails, and it’s physically painful, and psychologically painful.94 The view of the body emerging in Anzaldúa’s work is one that is not passive, static or abstract, but balances “shifting foundations with material specificity”.95 However, Anzaldúa felt that many commentators overlooked this sense of the spiritual, poetic, embodied practice in her writing.96 What I am particularly interested in here is the attention to the body as part of this spiritual practice that Anzaldúa offers in her work, and where such attention offers interventions into received cultural understandings of the body. Commenting on Anzaldúa’s practices of writing and creating whilst in touch with “pain, anger, despair, depression”, Rivera notes that the “difficult process of staying in one’s body requires not only rewriting received scripts but also shifting consciousness through daily practice—‘enacting spiritual activism’”.97 Experiences of “pain, difficulty and failure” cannot be equated or reduced to “victimhood or fatalism”.98 Such complex, nonunitary subjects “have the ability to experience several things at once, and thus hold together pain and joy, failure and hope” and thus, states Rivera, to “creatively transform those experiences”.99 As I discuss in chapter five, transformative practices do 94 95 96 97

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Ann E. Reuman, “Coming into Play: An Interview with Gloria Anzalúa,” MELUS 25 no.2 (2000): 15. Bost, Encarnación, 91. Bost, Encarnación. Rivera, “Unsettling Bodies”. Rivera, “Unsettling Bodies,” 122; quoting Gloria Anzaldúa, “now let us shift… the path of conocimiento… inner work, public acts,” in This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, ed. AnaLouise Keating and Gloria Anzaldúa (London, New York: Routledge, 2002). Rivera, “Unsettling Bodies,” 122. Mayra Rivera, “Thinking Bodies: The Spirit of a Latina Incarnational Imagination,” in Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy, ed. Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 218. Rivera, “Unsettling Bodies,” 122.

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not entirely resolve such tensions or move us out of embodied realities, but affirm the complexities of corporeality as the grounds of transformation. In sections of her later work, Anzaldúa writes in the second person to engage the reader in this embodied process of writing. She details her everyday struggle with chronic health conditions, alongside regular walks at the edge of the sea, the feelings of waking from sleep, episodes of depression, and also the intense cultural and spiritual longings to construct a symbolic system that can “change the reader’s sense of what the world is like”.100 She reflects on applying what she has learnt about her body and chronic illness to writing, summarising: “you’ve learnt that writing about writing is more about life than it is about writing; that writing mirrors the struggle in your own life, from denial to recognition and change; that writing illumines your fears and dreams. All these insights are precious because you wrestled them out of the granite walls of your creative block”.101 In her earlier work, Anzaldúa describes looking back over the book she has nearly finished writing and seeing the “mosaic pattern” emerging, through the “numerous overlays of pain, rough surfaces, smooth surfaces”, seeing the “hybridization of metaphor, different species of ideas… full of variations and seeming contradictions”.102 She considers this as “an assemblage, a montage”: the whole thing has a mind of its own, escaping me and insisting on putting together the pieces of its own puzzle with minimal direction from my will. It is a rebellious, wilful entity, a precocious girl-child forced to grow up too quickly, rough, unyielding, with pieces of feather sticking out here and there, fur, twigs, clay.103 Anzaldúa’s reflections on the embodied process of writing image this transformative struggle as ambivalent and multi-layered, reclaiming and re-forming from multiple materials. As such, it offers a generative image for poetic practical theology as a working with complex embodied experiences, drawing on hybrid sources and recognising the sacred and spiritual in the material and everyday. I now turn to the work of Helen Oyeyemi as her writing offers vital images for the complexity of meaning-making in the face of oppressive cultures. Engaging this literature alongside theology provides a “renewing challenge 100 101 102 103

Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 96. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 115. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 88. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 88–89.

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to theological certainties”.104 Throughout her fiction, British Nigerian writer Oyeyemi weaves together heterogenous sources through metafictive and revisioning strategies that expose the gendered, racialised, and colonial dynamics in literary traditions and cultural narratives. Her work blends multiple gothic, fairytale, and fantasy genres interpreted through postcolonial and feminist lenses, and, by crossing multiple genres, her work draws the reader’s attention to how knowledge is constructed in these different genres. Her 2011 novel Mr Fox retells the Bluebeard fairytale, infused with references to Gothic literature, Yoruba culture, and Egyptian cosmology in order to address patriarchal and colonial legacies that legitimise violence against women. Set in 1930s New England, the novel opens with writer St John Fox receiving an unsettling visitation from his imaginary muse, Mary, who protests the violent deaths he constructs for the women in his stories. St John retorts by claiming the fictive nature of these representations, stating it is “ridiculous to be so sensitive about the content of fiction. It’s not real. … It’s all just a lot of games”.105 However, Mary condemns the “horrible kind of logic” he builds in his stories to justify violence against women: it was because she kept the chain on the door, it was because he needed to let off steam after a hard day’s scraping and bowing at work, it was because she was irritating and stupid, it was because she lied to him, made a fool of him, it was because she had to die, she just had to, it makes dramatic sense, it was because ‘nothing is more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman’, it was because of this, it was because of that. It’s obscene to make such things reasonable.106 As the gothic genre “lends corporeality to the ghosts of the colonial past as well as materiality to the often-ambiguous condition of the postcolonial present”, Oyeyemi uses the character of Mary to lend corporeality to the uncanny effects of literature and representation.107 Oyeyemi then stages a ‘storytelling game’ between Mary and St John, using these stories as devices for exploring questions of power, obedience, and violence in different eras and global locations. These stories revise themes in the

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Anna Fisk, Sex, Sin, and Our Selves: Encounters in Feminist Theology and Contemporary Women’s Literature (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2014), xvii. Helen Oyeyemi, Mr Fox (London: Picador, 2011), 5. Oyeyemi, Mr Fox, 120. Diana Adesola Mafe, “Ghostly Girls in the ‘Eerie Bush’: Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl as Postcolonial Female Gothic Fiction”, Research in African Literatures 43 no.3 (2012): 23.

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Bluebeard fairytale, originally recorded by Charles Perrault, in which a young wife is murdered by her husband as a consequence of her supposed ‘disobedience’ in entering a forbidden chamber and discovering the bodies of his previous wives. Following in a tradition of feminist retellings such as those by Angela Carter, Nalo Hopkinson, and Margaret Atwood, these stories question where Bluebeard and similar cultural narratives focus on female disobedience as the moral of the tale, rather than on the murderous husband, highlighting that what has been offered as ‘reasonable’ explanation is in fact ‘obscene’. For example, the story “what happens next” images a girl whose father forces her to recite newspaper clippings detailing women’s murders, quizzing her about the causes of their deaths: namely disobedience to men. Later, after her father’s imprisonment for the murder of her mother, she reflects that what she really learnt was the pattern that women know their killers, have asked for help, but are told ‘it won’t happen’. Through this metafictional storytelling game, Oyeyemi’s novel indicates the impact of cultural and literary representation on socio-material realities, demonstrating where the “horrible logic” of blaming women for the violence against them carries through multiple genres and mediums, and cannot be written off as ‘just fiction’. Through the storytelling game, Oyeyemi images a plurality of authors and multiple exchanges of letters and notes, drawing attention to the construction of meaning as a site of struggle and potential transformation of gendered, colonial power dynamics. Previously marginalised characters are seen to gain agency through the act of storytelling, and Mary gains materiality and autonomy through the storytelling game. Yet, this is not an easy or direct process. In the story “be bold, be bold, but not too bold”, a young woman exchanges letters with a male writer, asking him to read her work, but he initially refuses, wryly commenting that he is reputed to be a “harsh destroyer of the feminine creative impulse”.108 Although he does eventually accept, she hears nothing from him and must go to his office to claim her work. When she arrives, he orders her work to be burned: The leather cover burned with a harsh sound like someone trying to hold back a cry between their teeth. Still I held the folder. … I watched words turn amber and float away. I liked these stories. … I’d worked hard on them. There was so much smoke in my eyes. But I held on.109 108 109

Oyeyemi, Mr Fox, 21. Oyeyemi, Mr Fox, 50.

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Suggestive of the ease with which those in power can deny women’s narrative realities and destroy their creative work, this also images the resolve of holding on to the remaining fragments. However, Oyeyemi also indicates the impossibility of forming wholeness from such fragments. The same young woman writer tears words from her typewriter: “when I touched the two halves together they didn’t even fit anymore”.110 In yet another story, a young boy is being raised by a woman who collects artistic impressions of body parts that, when assembled, will “create the suggestion of a woman, a woman who crammed the room from wall to wall”.111 The collector asks the boy to search for a heart that will complete the work, yet the boy “did not ever feel anything in the presence” of the art, knowing it to be “a collection, not a woman”.112 The boy finds a heart belonging to a girl who has placed her heart in a shrine because her heart is too heavy, too strong, too open, “inexhaustable”.113 The boy assembles the fragmented woman around the heart: “the gathered woman, scattered across sculptures and glass and photographs and scraps of paper, the gathered woman became complete and almost breathed. Almost…”.114 As criticism of Mr Fox has highlighted readers’ desires for greater connections between the stories, with the novel “Oyeyemi reveals and disrupts what she posits as a fundamental human need to order fragmentary experience into a structuring narrative, warning how such narratives limit and ensnare those who weave them”.115 Thus, whilst the storytelling game invites the reader to create connections between the fragmented stories, the reader—like the art collector’s son—is never quite allowed to believe in the illusion of wholeness. In engaging with Anzaldúa and Oyeyemi, I am developing images for practical theology as an ambivalent process of making that draws on heterogenous sources to construct bricolages, assemblages, or collections that enable transformation. In these writings, ambivalence emerges “less an absence of conviction, or presence of irreconcilable dividedness, than an excess of intensely held, complex commitments and emotions”, compelling rather than evading

110 111 112 113 114 115

Oyeyemi, Mr Fox, 36. Oyeyemi, Mr Fox, 181, 185. Oyeyemi, Mr Fox, 185. Oyeyemi, Mr Fox, 190, emphasis in original. Oyeyemi, Mr Fox, 191. Chloe Buckley and Sarah Ilott, “Introduction,” in Telling it Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi, ed. Chloe Buckley and Sarah Ilott (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2016), 17.

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political engagement and encounters with others.116 Bringing these texts into conversation with theological approaches in this chapter, I am enacting a making of my own through an interplay of heterogeneous sources. However, whilst it is impossible to take literature entirely ‘on its own terms’, there is the danger that I am plundering literature here to bolster my own argument about the ambivalent process of theological making, and as such presenting an all too harmonious whole.117 Thus, the process of making is entangled in power dynamics and it is crucial to consider my role as a white scholar in constructing from different sources, especially in relation to the experiences and writings of Black and Chicana women that are frequently erased, appropriated, and misrepresented by dominant cultures.

Risking Transformation So far in this chapter I have been critiquing dominant theological approaches in which too much is known in advance when lived experience is interpreted through pre-determined categories and containers. In contrast, I have begun to articulate a poetic approach that follows the cracks and chance fault-lines that “have the potential to point to another path, to signal radically new possibilities”.118 It is a way of being “differently productive” rather than following the “broad highways” of theological knowledge.119 This poetic making, a way of knowing, being, and acting in the world, risks being transformed. Without an approach that risks being altered, refashioned, or transformed in the process of research, I suggest practical theology potentially remains “looking for what it has already found”, propagating “a form of attention that will carry on finding what it already knows, what it has already known”.120 An approach that sees practical theology as “tracing the sacred” recognises that “when we do theology, we travel the realm of the sacred, trying to understand what is happening there, and letting ourselves be affected by what and whom we encounter”.121 116 117 118 119 120 121

Alyson Cole, “Precarious Politics: Anzaldúa’s Reparative Reworking.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 45 no.3/4 (2017): 88–89. Fisk, Sex, Sin, and Our Selves, 2. Kwok Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, 30. Walton, “A Theopoetics of Practice,” 18. Highmore, Michel de Certeau, 19. R. Ruard Ganzevoort, “Forks in the Road when Tracing the Sacred: Practical Theology as a Hermeneutics of Lived Religion,” Presidential Address at the International Academy of Practical Theology, 2009, 6. Available at: http://www.ruardganzevoort.nl/pdf/2009 _Presidential.pdf. Accessed 29th Dec 2020.

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Practical theology benefits from this participative, spiritual, self-implicating understanding of risking transformation. Recognising that we cannot be completely distanced from our subject, “risking transformation is part of what it means to truly interpret and understand our subject”.122 How might we recognise the transformations ‘risked’ when immersing ourselves in researching with different communities in ways that “challenge our well-worn understandings”?123 Elaine Graham’s articulation of practical theology as a performative discipline highlights that reflecting on practice is not simply in the service of better technical skills for creating change, but that theological practices and encounters can “disclose new realities and perspectives on human experience and Divine reality”.124 In this way, understandings of practical theology and transformation are generated and reshaped through specific and concrete ‘disclosive’ practices and encounters. I have also suggested that such an approach is embodied and ambivalent, multiply implicated in relations of power and privilege, aware of the pains and misrecognitions in processes of constructing practical theologies in relation to lived experiences. In light of this, I suggest three areas of for engaging in lived experiences in practical theology that enable a responsiveness to power dynamics and an openness to risking transformation. Relationality and Complexity Firstly, I am advocating for attention to the relationality and complexity of lived experiences as a source of critical knowledge. In critiquing objectivist and abstracted knowledge claims, feminist epistemologies have argued for situating knowledge from particular locations or standpoints, although such moves can create essentialised views of gender and race.125 However, feminist standpoint theorists have articulated a move away from ‘perspective’ 122 123 124 125

Claire E. Wolfteich, “Animating Questions: Spirituality and Practical Theology,” International Journal of Practical Theology 13 no.1 (2009): 137. Wolfteich, “Animating Questions,” 137. Elaine Graham, Transforming Practice: Pastoral Theology in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Mowbray, 1996), 10. Nancy Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. Sandra Harding (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). Sandra Harding, “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is ‘Strong Objectivity?’” The Centennial Review 36 no.3 (1992): 437–470. Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986). Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, 14 no.3 (1988): 575–599. Patricia Hill Collins, “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought,” Signs 14 no.4 (1989): 745–773. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist

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as pure experience toward an emphasis on action, praxis, and community in seeing an epistemological standpoint as “achieved rather than obvious, a mediated rather than immediate understanding”.126 Patricia Hill Collins argues that standpoints are not individualistic but refer to “historically shared groupbased experiences”, emphasising in her work that Black feminist standpoints engage both the commonalities of group outlook and also where the different interactions of “class, region, age, and sexual orientation” produce “different expressions of these common themes”.127 Sheppard reflects that such an epistemological grounding is essential in womanist practical theologies, stating that “[p]articularity—who we are and where we stand in relation to each other, along with the effects that social structures have on our lives and on the communities around us—informs us and is a source of knowledge”.128 The ‘margins’ are an example of a site where critical, resistant, alternative knowledges are constructed, although the term can become abstracted from material reference. As highlighted in Anzaldúa’s work, locations such as the “Borderlands” are at once material and epistemological, recognising the interrelatedness of the sacred, social, and bodily, of art and everyday life. Developing her own argument that the margins are a site of “possibility” more than deprivation, bell hooks comments that the margins are not mythical, but come from lived experiences that nourish critical resistance.129 Postcolonial theology is influenced by Spivak’s notion of the margins as sites of critical engagement, and Kwok articulates that practical theology will benefit from Spivak’s call to be placed in relationship to and learn from the margins, cultivating a “new cultural imaginary by training the imagination through literary and aesthetic education” that enables forms of thinking central to practices of justice.130 Spivak sees the possibilities of a pedagogical engagement with the

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Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (London, New York: Routledge, 1991). Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender and Culture (London: Turnaround, 1991). Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint,” 39. Patricia Hill Collins, “Comment on Hekman’s ‘Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited’: Where’s the Power?” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. Sandra Harding (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 247, 105. Phillis Isabella Sheppard, Self, Culture, and Others in Womanist Practical Theology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 6. hooks, Yearning, 150. Kwok Pui-lan, “Changing Identities and Narratives: Postcolonial Theologies,” in Complex Identities in a Shifting World: Practical Theological Perspectives, ed. Pamela Couture, Robert Mager, Pamela McCarroll, Natalie Wigg-Stevenson (Zurich: LIT, 2015), 14.

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margins, a “training in the imagination to learn to listen to the voice of the other”, resulting in seeing the margins not as a fixed location, but a “deconstructive space that upholds its ‘irreducible singularity’ and alterity”.131 Recognising standpoints or locations for knowing is not to give way to essentialism but requires recognising the complexity and relationality of such positions. Spaces of critical resistance occur not in seeing locations as a “unified, fixed, essentialized space”, but as spaces of “multiple, contradictory, paradoxical hybrid positions”.132 Multiple intersections of power and privilege influence how we engage with our own and others’ experiences. Recognition of intersectional identities cannot emerge through “adding” additional “ethnographic categories”; rather, as Rivera argues, the experiences of “postcolonial characters”—for example, those articulating queer and Borderlands standpoints—“offer us a critique and alternative understanding of subjectivity under multiple, mutable multidimensional force-fields of power and allegiance”.133 Although I am suggesting the need to address multiple axes around gender, class, race, disability, and global location, such aspects of another’s experiences are not always immediate or transparent to us, nor should we make them so through our theologies. Rivera explains her perception: “as if looking through wide-angle lenses, I try to see each face and body in the web of relations in which persons become—a web that extends beyond our range of vision, through the world, and throughout history”.134 Such a perception treats marginalised others’ experiential knowledges less as Althaus-Reid’s notion of the “botanic garden” to visit, and more as the “garden of forking paths”, the unending labyrinth in which others’ multiple, relational, and unfolding experiences defy our analytic charting.135 Attending to the complexity and relationality of our own and others’ subject positions emphasises the need to engage with others who are differently located to us. Addressing my own power and privilege cannot be done in isolation but must be addressed in relation to and with others: “because power relations are co-constructed, dismantling and re-constructing them must be 131 132 133

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Yahu T. Vinayaraj, “Spivak, Feminism, and Theology,” Feminist Theology 22 no.2 (2014): 149. Namsoon Kang, “Theology from a Space where Postcolonialism and Feminism Intersect,” Concilium 2013 no.2: 66. Mayra Rivera, “Margins and the Changing Spatiality of Power: Preliminary Notes,” in Still at the Margins: Biblical Scholarship Fifteen Years after Voices from the Margin ed. R.S. Sugirtharajah (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 124. Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 100. Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 117; drawing on the Jorges Luis Borges short story of the same name.

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practiced with others who do not share your social location”.136 However, this should never be a demand for the experiences and labour of those from less privileged social positions; particularly where white people often demand that people of colour educate them about experiences of race and racism, seeing others’ experiences as products for their own benefit and consumption. This negotiating with multiple others in critical engagement, “listening to others, especially those we have oppressed or have the potential to oppress” is a praxis that can develop alternative, resistant, and transformative possibilities.137 Fragments Secondly, I am proposing attention to fragments. In theological discourses, discussions of ‘theological fragments’ have emerged from different locations; whether responses to postmodern critiques of overarching grand narratives, or from postcolonial and queer theologies that affirm selves and histories as fractured and multiple.138 These offer different programs for engagement with fragmentation—for example, Duncan Forrester emphasised theological fragments as a way of starting with the concrete and particular for “witnessing to the truth” in fractured political times.139 From a different perspective, feminist theologians such as Catherine Keller have explored the notion of selves as fractured and fragmented within webs of relation; yet, as Kwok notes, feminist theological engagement in fragmentation does not always adequately engage with power dynamics, given that “not all the fractured selves are positioned equally”.140 Here, I take ‘fragments’ as what is has been considered insufficient, insignificant, or in-credible to knowledge-making in dominant theological systems. In the previous chapter, I discussed the difficulties of telling and listening, and where trauma theologies attend to language and histories as fractured, opaque, and interrupted. Such jarring fragments have often been judged as insufficient for making theological knowledge. Thus, although marginalised people may have been represented in academic theology and theory, their own self-representations through stories, song, poetry, and art have not been

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Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 22, emphasis in original. Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination, 74. Duncan Forrester, Theological Fragments: Explorations in Unsystematic Theology (London: T&T Clark International, 2005). Nicola Slee, Fragments for Fractured Times: What Feminist Practical Theology Brings to the Table (London: SCM, 2020). Forrester, Theological Fragments, 4, 11. Catherine Keller, From A Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986); Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination, 188.

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included as their “knowledges have been ruled out as nondata: too fragmented, or insufficiently documented for serious inquiry”.141 Yet, as these fragments indicate the limitations and instabilities of theological claims to totality, they gesture toward “radically new possibilities”.142 However, working with fragments requires resisting the desire to shape such fragments into a total system of explanation. Although poetic practices of bricolage advocate for making with and through fragments, shards, and scraps, these fragments question the creation of a seeming harmonious whole. Making and re-making with fragments is not about creating an “intertextual technique of pastiche”, but instead involves recognising the disruptive and interruptive quality of creative expressions of lived experiences that ultimately resist closure.143 Above, I offered Oyeyemi’s image of working with multiple fragments whilst also resisting the lure of believing that they can form a whole; such torn edges cannot fit back together. In this way, working with fragments may also include challenging where writing conventions are based in the “logic and order” of “Western androcentric and hierarchical patterns” by proceeding with a “fragmentary way of reflection”.144 Working creatively with the scraps and fragments is not to place emphasis on the individual “imagining subject” as reshaping an overall framework, nor to articulate fragments as pieces that retain meaning through their origin in an overall system in which the fragment is recognised as a ‘detached part’ of system’s claim to totality.145 For example, Forrester’s vision for theological fragments retains an emphasis on the fragments’ source in the “quarry” of Christian narrative, failing to recognise where such jagged theological fragments may themselves be the source of social and cultural wounds.146 One possibility, then, is in recognising the significance of fragments as gesturing toward persons, communities, and practices as existing in their own right, in their particularity, as theologically significant. Althaus-Reid suggests seeing fragments not as “insufficient” but as “integridades”, which refers to a sense of the fullness of the fragment in itself, honesty, and confronting “a social, economic or theological order which is imposing and powerful”.147 141 142 143 144 145 146 147

Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination, 30. Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination, 30. Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, 76. Marcella Althaus-Reid, “In the Centre There Are No Fragments,” 367. Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination, 30. Althaus-Reid, “In the Centre There Are No Fragments,” 265. Forrester, Theological Fragments, 17. Althaus-Reid, “In the Centre There Are No Fragments,” 265; Walton, Writing Methods, 160. Althaus-Reid, “In the Centre There Are No Fragments,” 367, emphasis in original.

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Drawing on an example of three Indian women “speaking back” to colonial theology in India in 1913 as recorded in a missionary article, Althaus-Reid notes that such examples are not “loose pieces but whole structures of praxis in themselves”.148 However, she also notes that such examples are often “rejected or assigned to oblivion” as these fragments announce their “unfittingness” and “incompatibility”, and, as such, the instability and impermanence of the system.149 She identifies sexuality, poverty, and race analysis as examples of “incompatible fragments which allows us to act and reflect theologically in a different, alternative way”.150 In this way, fragments or integridades point toward and represent the different, toward “an Otherness in itself, belonging to a different kind of evaluative and symbolic structure”.151 What this might mean is that, in working alongside communities, I aim to recognise their practices of everyday life as a significant praxis in its own right, rather than seeking to relocate and name such fragments within existing theological paradigms. This is not to suggest that resonances and connections cannot be made, but to resist seeing that such practices only have meaning through integration into a “higher sacred frame”.152 This raises significant tensions in my role as researcher, and in chapter six I critically analyse practices of reflexivity and collaboration that I have performed here for engaging with lived experiences. Furthermore, such fragments may be fragile, shifting, plural, and impermanent, considered ‘incompatible’; in other words, leaving us wondering what to ‘do’ with such pieces that do not ‘fit’. Yet it may be in this discomforting, disruptive, and unruly way that practices of sharing lived experiences—both the activity of sharing and what is shared—signal toward alternative ways of relating to one another, to society, and to the divine. Particularity and Alterity Thirdly, I am suggesting attention to the particularity and alterity of others encountered in research. As I have been gesturing toward in this chapter, strategies of interpreting and representing lived experiences are entangled in questions of encountering and construing the otherness of persons and communities. The paradox here is that the “encounter with the ‘Other’ presupposes a larger reality beyond the present and immediate”, yet this “encounter with

148 149 150 151 152

Althaus-Reid, “In the Centre There Are No Fragments,” 373. Althaus-Reid, “In the Centre There Are No Fragments,” 373. Althaus-Reid, “In the Centre There Are No Fragments,” 374. Althaus-Reid, “In the Centre There Are No Fragments,” 365–7. Walton, Writing Methods, 176.

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the ‘beyond’ is only possible and is forever grounded in the immediate”.153 In dealing with questions of otherness, theologians have frequently engaged Emmanuel Levinas’ work on “the Other” as an ethical approach that connects “human encounters with human ‘others’ and the encounter with the divine ‘Other’”.154 Levinas suggests that in encountering “the face of the Other” we recognise their vulnerability and difference, resulting in an ethical summons of responsibility to the Other. Yet, in this encounter, something escapes our knowledge of the Other, as there is the “gleam of exteriority or transcendence in the face of the Other”, which “exceeds all categories, pre-delineations, and anticipations”.155 What is particularly relevant here is this sense of encountering others in ways that do not “grasp the other, or turn the other into a theme or thing”.156 However, there are problems for locating this Levinasian Other in particular social relations.157 Drawing on traditions emerging from the Hebrew Scriptures, Levinas uses the figures of “the poor”, “the stranger”, “the widow”, and “the orphan” as examples of this Other. Yet, Levinas erases their specificity, as these figures “do not have a referent in real being—the force of figuration is precisely the undoing of the possibility of reference as such”.158 In this way, questions arise about how these somewhat abstracted figures of the Other that Levinas associates with transcendence come to be named as ‘other’ by their communities. Defining ‘the poor’, ‘the stranger’, ‘the marginalised’ as ‘the Other’ can reinforce objectification, making these experiences appear as essential or natural positions rather than as products of socio-economic systems. There is a danger in linking particular lived experiences and transcendence in ways that create too definite an identification between the ‘others of history’ and ‘otherness’ as alterity. 153 154 155

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Elaine Graham, Transforming Practice: Pastoral Theology in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Mowbray, 1996), 206–7. Bennett et al., Invitation to Research, 53. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 24. John Drabinski, Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 1. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 140. John Caputo offers a critique of Levinas from a different perspective to those discussed here, arguing that the face-to-face encounter Levinas offers envisions a “pure” ethical encounter apart from the complexities of political relations. In contrast, Caputo argues that a purity of relations is not possible and that our obligations to one another arise in the midst of political relations. Caputo, Against Ethics. Sara Ahmed, Differences That Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 60, emphasis in original.

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Rivera appraises Enrique Dussel’s liberationist reading of Levinas, affirming his attention to the concrete socio-political significance of otherness in Latin America. However, she questions where Dussel suggests that although ‘the Other’ is not currently comprehended by the system, this will change through practices of solidarity and communication, and also critiques Dussel’s argument that liberation ethics “adopts as its own the alterity of the victims”.159 Rivera argues that such slippages in Dussel’s work indicate where this identification between “the poor” and the Other can result in appropriating the Other as a way of constructing authority and certainty.160 Defining the Other through a status or category, especially one adopts for oneself, fails to acknowledge the disruptive ethical claim of alterity. This raises the challenge of being attentive to the particularity of lived experiences arising from particular socio-economic conditions, and also to the alterity of those encountered. Alterity and particularity are not in tension; they should not be imaged as opposing poles of ‘not known’ and ‘known’, or even ‘distance’ and ‘proximity’. Rather, I want to suggest an approach in which both emerge as aspects of our encounters with others. As I have been arguing above, there is a tendency in practical theology for only those from positions of difference to have specific, gendered, raced, disabled, embodied bodies. This can result in seeing particularity as a property of speech or body of ‘the other’ that can be made fully present or ‘real’ to us.161 In contrast, Ahmed offers particularity as a way of naming how we encounter others. This requires thinking about gender and race not as “something that this other has (which would thematise this other as always gendered and racialised in a certain way)” and instead considers “how such differences are determined at the level of encounter”, in as much as this immediate encounter is impacted by “broader social processes, that also operate elsewhere, and in other times, rather than simply in the present”.162 Ahmed suggests asking “what are the conditions of possibility for us meeting here and now?” as this encourages us to consider the histories that have made this encounter possible—in all its complex power dynamics—but also entails asking “what

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Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 75; quoting Enrique Dussel, Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion, trans. Eduardo Mendieta, Camilo Pérez Bustillo, Yolanda Angulo, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ed. Alejandro A. Vallega (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), 218, emphasis in original. Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 75. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 156. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 145, emphasis in original.

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futures might it open up?”.163 In other words, paying attention to the conditions that make encounters with others possible also enables attention to how such encounters might transform future relations. This entails thinking about conditions such as the privilege that enables me as a funded researcher to meet others who are volunteers testifying to their lived experiences, and where middle-class whiteness often demands to be ‘taught’ by others about their experiences in order to ‘see’ race and class more clearly. Yet it also necessitates thinking about how such an encounter might open futures of more collaborative knowledge-making practices. Feminist and postcolonial articulations of relational transcendence orientate divine transcendence away from images of a distanced, separate deity and instead consider transcendence as relationality through irreducible difference and alterity. Modifying Levinas, Rivera proposes: “Transcendence designates a relation with the reality irreducibly different from my own reality, without this difference destroying this relation and without the relation destroying this difference”.164 Engaging Levinas’ sense of the “gleam of transcendence” encountered in the face of the other, Rivera extends concepts of transcendence to human beings and the cosmos. She argues that the transcendence of the other is, again, not a “characteristic or location” but emerges as a “product of relations between irreducibly different beings”, in which the “in-finity of human beings springs from the intrinsic relationship between God and all creation”.165 Rivera questions the way in which apophatic theologies “seldom include pronouncements of an ungraspable cosmos; they usually assert the ineffability of God without extending that attribute to the world or other creatures”.166 Attention to this relational alterity recognises that we are shaped and know others—and the divine—through encounters in the social-material world, yet others remain ungraspable, irreducibly different. There is an excess that escapes us in any encounter. Our abilities to represent others in our theologies, even as we are shaped by these others, are limited. Yet, our representations and theologies often make others all too graspable—too easily known and voiced—precisely at the moment when we desire them to be truly ungraspable.

163 164

165 166

Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 145, emphasis in original. Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 82, emphasis in original. Rivera sees Levinas’ use of ‘alterity’ as ambiguous, perhaps referring to both the ‘Other’ and the ‘Holy Other’ and welcomes that ambiguity as part of her discussion, 60. Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 77. Mayra Rivera, “Flesh of the World: Corporeality in Relation,” Concilium 2013 no.2: 58.

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Concluding In this chapter, I have begun to construct an approach to practical theology as a process of making with heterogenous sources, responsive to the problems and possibilities in representing everyday lived experiences of marginalisation. Interacting with multiple sources from practical theology and postcolonial feminist theology as well as literature, philosophy, and cultural studies, I am affirming the theological and ethical significance of what has typically been deemed ‘outside’ the boundaries of ‘practical theology’ as a discipline. However, such interactions require attention to power dynamics in practices of interpreting and representing these lived experiences, otherwise there is the danger of diminishing such disruptive and disclosive expressions into predetermined categories and containers in which too much is known in advance. I have suggested attention to complexity and relationality, to fragments, and to particularity and alterity in encounters as ways of maintaining an ethical responsiveness to others in research, an approach that risks being transformed in the process.

Part 2 Creative Interventions into Austerity

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Tracing the Labyrinth In this chapter, I construct a path through the Connecting Stories project with PTC, tracing a route through the labyrinth layout of the exhibition alongside features of the collaborative, creative arts process. This path is comprised of six sections. Each section opens with an imagined impression of the exhibition written in the second person, alongside quotes taken from participant reflection booklets used to record their thoughts as they interacted with the labyrinth. This is followed by with one or more vignettes that document the development of the collaborative creative arts project with PTC, from the planning stages, through the creative workshops, the making of smaller creative pieces, and finally taking the exhibition down. These vignettes are composed from smaller ethnographic and autoethnographic fragments, creating movement through time or shifts in perspective. These have been constructed from notes taken in workshops and my research journal, alongside memories from childhood and adolescence, and reflections on the process of making the creative pieces. Through layering the text, I have aimed to refuse a completeness, signalling instead the multiple perspectives and ‘forking paths’ of a labyrinth that constituted Connecting Stories as a collaborative project and interactive installation. This ‘bricolage’ of fragments and vignettes, impressions and images, offers a sense of writing from within the labyrinth of encounters, a writing that is partial and contingent, communicating the complexity of meaning-making.1

1 Hannah L. Hofheinz, Implicate and Transgress: Marcella Althaus-Reid, Writing, and a Transformation of Theological Knowledge, Doctoral dissertation, Harvard Divinity School, 2015, 21. Available at: https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/15821954. Accessed 30th Dec 2020.

© CL Wren Radford, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004513181_005

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One In the middle of this space stand two tents, transparent enough to let light pass through, opaque enough not to disclose all they hold inside. They face one another, as if conversing. Sunlight floods from the clear windows and yellow panes, reflecting off the dark floor, setting slices of the tents glowing. You read on the covering: “my story is reality”, and “what I love about sharing stories is the solidarity, what I hate about welfare cuts is the thud”. There is more, unreadable from this distance, inviting you nearer. Yet, you cannot move closer directly, the tents are surrounded by concentric circles, gatherings of chairs facing inward, growing ever nearer the tents. There is no straight path; instead, you are to navigate this labyrinth.

… I came to connect; to celebrate; to listen; to learn. * I come to this ‘place’ every day and today I take the time to engage more intentionally with people’s precious, fragile, troubling, hope-filled stories. Feedback from PTC participants at the Connecting Stories event

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Figure 1

Tents with text written by commissioners

Figure 2

Connecting Stories, view on entering the exhibition space

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Finding Entryways The planning sessions always begin with a mug of tea. Even on the busiest days, there is always plenty of time for asking how people are, catching up with what’s going on in each other’s lives. This is not only typical of but is vital to PTC; a space for being together and hearing about the everyday things that are happening with people, setting the tone for how we work together. One October morning, the four of us on the planning group are meeting in the ‘wee room’ in the shared offices, with the comfy chairs and the good heating, the one that doubles as the stationary cupboard. Victoire comes in a little late, but, as always, there is time to make tea and ask how she is. “Yes. Good”, she says. She takes a deep, expansive breath and smiles broadly. “Very good. I feel that my joy is coming back to me.” In the previous sessions, Victoire has reflected on being a testifying commissioner, what it has been like to share her lived experiences of being placed in immigration detention and seeking refuge in the UK. These reflections guide our sense of how the project will take shape. In the first planning session, she stated: “Nothing would have soothed me. I needed people to listen. I was angry, I needed people to hear and feel that anger. I was able to express it in a safe place. Often, we want to put on a face and say, ‘it’s okay’, but it makes a difference to have space to be heard”. Here, on this autumnal morning, Victoire goes on to explain how she was always a happy, active person, but that the traumatic process of seeking refuge has cast a long shadow. “But… my joy is coming back to me”, she beams, clearly radiating this emotion. Later in that session, Victoire reflects further on opening up in PTC groups about her experiences, and on collaborating with a PTC staff member, Fiona, in bringing together her life story in a balanced way: it is “a hard story, but in the meantime, there is hope”. That morning, as we are considering the format of the sessions, another commissioner is also on our minds. They are a key part of PTC and a regular at commission lunches, Wednesday writing groups, previous workshops. A big character with a great sense of humour and the ability to turn a phrase, they have shared their experiences in speech and writing, around experiences of benefits sanctions, mental health, and homelessness. Recently they have been less able to attend, encountering recurring health problems, leading in turn to problems with housing, and again, further impacting their mental health. That morning we heard that they had been ‘sectioned’, detained in a psychiatric hospital under the Mental Health Act. These conversations infuse our planning of the project, after all these are not personal histories told in the past tense, but lives in flux. These are reminders that in dealing with everyday lived realities we need to consider that

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our existence in the everyday is a “permanent presence”—it is inescapable.2 Vantage points for telling are not from high up, distanced and paused, but are glimpsed in traversing the avenues and passageways of daily life. These conversations ground our sense of ensuring that participants’ involvement, their creativity and interpretations, are the focus of these workshops, not what is ‘recordable’ of their experiences. What does it mean for people to share from their ongoing experiences, from places of uncertainty rather than security, from the midst of struggles and marvels in the everyday? These conversations give shape to my questioning: how—in research and activist projects—are we valuing people’s knowing and interpreting of their everyday lives, whilst also making space for the shifting, the overwhelming, the not-known, the un-nameable within these lived experiences? On another morning, Kitty and I are chatting as she settles herself into the meeting room. We have talked a little before about chronic health issues being taken seriously; this morning she talks about being tried out on different medications over a number of weeks, and how it seems that the doctors don’t know what to expect from different treatments. She notes her frustrations at trying to be taken seriously as a woman living in poverty and describing herself as a woman who is “mixed race, including different immigrant heritages”. “There’s no ‘box’ for me on any forms”, she says. This influences how she feels about looking back on what she has shared with the commission previously, especially around navigating healthcare and disability benefits. We talk about my own experiences of being tried out on different medications over a prolonged period of time, and how confusing it is distinguishing between symptoms and side effects. It’s frustrating; as time passed the baseline ‘normal’ functioning of my body was lost, I felt distant and detached from myself. What’s illness, what’s side-effects of medication, what’s external stressors, and what’s ‘just you’; the boundaries become porous. Kitty agrees vigorously, exclaiming that I’ve expressed something she hadn’t been able to put into words. I am pleased, and grateful; that these experiences of not-knowing myself, my body, some of my own deepest moments of isolation—even from myself—can become a moment of connection.

2 Ada María Isasi-Díaz, “Mujerista Discourse: A Platform for Latinas’ Subjugated Knowledge,” in Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy, ed. Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 55.

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Pathless Forest A few weeks after these conversations, I’m sitting in a car park in Skye in the north-west of Scotland, overlooking a lone hitchhiker trying to get a lift off the island. My partner and I have travelled for an hour or so to buy hot, stonebaked pizza topped with local cheese; really for the pleasure of just being together, driving around the strange, jutting geography of the island. It’s only been in this space, away from our regular life, that we have started to talk, carefully, about what has been headline news for the past few weeks: powerful men in media and politics being found out as habitual abusers of women. We’ve had a few false starts, tiptoeing into what is both an overwhelming and everyday reality. Now that we are close to the mainland, I can receive phone signal, and pick up several messages directing me to an article by a prominent theologian coming to terms with the full details of his old mentor’s sexual abuse of over one hundred women.3 This theologian’s words bring immediate heat and tension into my body, and the coppery tang at the back of my throat peaks as his argument, even in recognising his old mentor’s abusive behaviour, essentially suggests “we can’t afford to lose this important voice from the theological canon”. The words are already forming in my head, they have been living in my bones for years; and I hear them echoed by multiple others: What about the women’s voices? How many women’s voices have been ‘lost’ from the theological canon? How many just from his actions—actions that not only misuse power but also reinforce it—reinforce the message you do not belong here. I don’t know how many hundreds and thousands of voices— of people of colour, of disabled people, of people in poverty, of LGBTI people, of women—how many have been ‘lost’ from the theological canon over the centuries, even in our last few ‘progressive’ decades? I don’t know how many are still being ‘lost’.

3 Stanley Hauerwas, “In Defence of ‘Our Respectable Culture’: Trying to Make Sense of John Howard Yoder’s Sexual Abuse,” ABC News, 18th October 2017. Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/religion/in-defence-of-our-respectable-culture-trying -to-make-sense-of-jo/10095302. Accessed 30th December 2020. Rachel Waltner Goossen, “Historical Justice in an Era of #MeToo: Legacies of John Howard Yoder,” Sightings 7th Dec 2017. Available at: https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/historical-justice-era-metoo -legacies-john-howard-yoder. Accessed 30th Dec 2020. Rachel Waltner Goossen, “Defanging the Beast: Mennonite Responses to John Howard Yoder’s Sexual Abuse,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 89 (2015). Available at: http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news5/2015 _01_Goossen_Defanging_the_Beast.pdf. Accessed 30th Dec 2020.

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I don’t know, but I know that being cast as ‘lost’ suggests there is only one map, one orientation, and I have often imagined walking in that vast pathless forest that is this ‘lost’ library of lives. We are not ‘lost’ when we remember it was never our job to keep citing the canons that abuse and destroy nor to prop up the structures that steal life. Womanist theologians have articulated this “making a way out of no way” and mujerista theologians have highlighted being “en la lucha”; these are daily, communal practices.4 It takes so much careful effort in the struggle just to get through some days, but when we find our way to and with those few others who know us, who know the struggle, there is much patience, joy, shared anger, love, and sheer bloody-mindedness to work with. I save up the kindness of others, like small precious pieces to gradually mend the damage, still doubting I can make something beautiful enough in return.

… I do not want to dwell on this moment because I do not want to lose myself again, but… after all the intrusive questions and suggestions about my body’s history; after all the aggressive statements about the veracity of my research interests; after all the disbelief that I could be both “disabled” and a “prizewinning student”; he tells me to speak up. “Speak up!” I had come here for help. His hands make absentminded origami with a bus ticket. “You swallow your words, you know, it’s terrible. But you are pretty… much too pretty to be disabled…” Yes, I think, I swallow my words because otherwise they will all tumble out at once and then there will be no going back.

… I am off sick from my new school. Definitely sick, not questionably so, I remember being glad that there was physical evidence to prove it. Mum stays off work that first day to look after me. We have just moved, back to the city I was born in. We are not yet in the new house, but living in a flat nearby, rented for some months while my father’s parents make the house ‘proper’. My grandmother carefully chooses the carpets

4 Monica A. Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008). Ada María Isasi-Díaz, En La Lucha = In the Struggle: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology, Tenth Anniversary Edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004).

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and colour schemes and oversees the workmen; where she finds nothing she likes, my grandfather designs and builds what is needed, namely the cabinets in the kitchen and a big bookcase with doors for hiding things. They measure and plan; drawing out the floor space, illuminating for us how each room is to be used. Everything will have its place; we wait like dolls to be safely installed. At our young ages, my brother and I are the reason not to be moved in yet; it is not ‘safe’ to be living in an un-finished house amidst the sawdust and wallpaper paste. But I think it might be to keep the new house safe from us, with our running, our dirty, clammy hands and our mess. My grandparents are generous with their newfound money and time, their careful attention to style; but this also comes with their rules about who and what is welcome here. Thinking back, my mother’s family are absent from my memories of this time. On this second sick day, when there is no more clearing up after me needed, it is my grandmother who takes over the duty—although she has never been called grandmother or granny or nanny or anything else that other people might use. I have been reading to myself most of the day; being quiet, which is seen as the same as being good. There has been the cool crunch of neatlysliced cucumber for lunch. Now out of books, I am allowed to be shown how to make something. She takes white paper, makes a few folds, drawing carefully around a template. After a few cuts with her black-handled sewing scissors, a row of identical pale women appears before me. I am not allowed to colour them in, instead we must name them in alphabetical order. A test. I recite, and she writes the names daintily along their skirts. Ann holds hands with Bea holds hands with Colleen holds hands with Denise holds hands with… I think twice as hard when it comes to my own letter, so I do not have to stand in this blank-faced line-up on the table-top. Later, I colour in the scraps, working with all that has been cut away to make these immutable figures.

… I fell ill both slowly and all at once; I am still ‘falling ill’. Like the snagged stitch that buckles and eventually unravels row after row. There is very little I can say precisely about the time in my early teens. There’s two weeks in bed before I’m told it can’t be that serious and to return to school. Then, bright lights, the pain intensifies. Life crumples. I live in a rest-less state, vaguely aware of the concert of other bodies moving in and out the house, punctuated by doctors’ surgeries, hospital waiting rooms, and endless tests. There are no visits from friends or family. Weeks and months and years drift by bunched up or stretched out or whatever it is that warps life out of shape.

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It’s another ten years before I have some sort of diagnosis; ten years for this pain to be taken halfway seriously by doctors. Even then, the diagnosis comes with no certainties or treatment, and many doctors uncomfortable with such a pronouncement. Because of this delayed and confusing diagnosis, other people like to fill in the gaps. It’s a parade of character faults, of having my body read by others, of “you’re making that up”, and “have you tried yoga?” whenever I mention it. There are circular logics about being not enough or too much of anything; typically, around bodies, fitness, food, and social life. Adding Christianity to the mix, there are the extremes of not having enough faith and not praying hard enough or being “religious and repressed”, suggestions that I probably believe God is punishing me.5 Some family members re-order this time, arranging the sequence of toppled events in our lives to decide this illness is just an emotional reaction to family dominoes that fell long after my own. So, I prefer to say as little as possible that is personal, aware of my voice becoming stoppered up again even in the process of sharing. And this chronic illness and the accompanying pain is ‘unseen’, so I get used to the assumptions about wellness that people make, the comments about how lucky I am to have so much time on my hands, and the refrain of “are you better yet?” I wear too much make-up to cover my aching, tell-tale skin and use humour as a mask for the pain (like the previous footnote). I miss too many birthdays and weddings and evenings out and just ordinary afternoons chatting over coffee to hold much of a life together. Isolation intertwines with the pain. And yet, I feel most isolated with others—feeling the barriers of deep shame and embarrassment at being this body, being this not-quite explainable self in public. And I write this lying down, lights off, curtains shut. I do not take lightly Anzaldúa’s words about remaining with the body in pain when writing; I write and erase and re-write these affirmations of Rivera’s that bodies hold together the contradictions of both pain and joy.6 For a long time, I only felt like half of that equation and struggled to remain with myself. I am learning now about the disruptive potency of joy, joy in the face of those who deny or seek to shame unruly bodies like mine, a joy that does not deny or erase the presence of pain.

5 I get into a lengthy argument with a psychiatrist assigned to assess me when he presses me for answering “no” to this last point. To be fair, it was his own fault for bringing up Job “being punished by God” to an undergraduate theology student equipped with a little knowledge and a lot of sarcasm. 6 Gloria Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark = Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015). Mayra Rivera, “Unsettling Bodies,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26 no.2 (2010): 119–123.

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… So, you can tell by now that I’m so used to not-talking about these things that I have to circle round these events and feelings, labyrinth-like as they are, before I can even start to find a way in.

Figure 3

Labyrinth/pathless forest

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Figure 4

Close up of text on the tents

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Two The path brings you closer at first but, offering no openings, only sends you further away, giving different views and angles on the tents and texts in the middle. You pass images, silent moments of action, evoking memories of collective efforts, progress made, and progress still to come. You glimpse at some words: At benefits appeal I felt as if I were on trial for benefit fraud rather than having my needs fairly assessed. I think assessment methods for disability benefit should not have a starting point of assuming the disabled person is faking it or lying… the government doesn’t understand what the life of a disabled person can entail. You see others here, walking the paths; from different directions navigating their own way through. Some stop, quietly taking everything in. There are those who have met other people on the way, coming from similar or different directions; some sit together, conversing; some slowing to walk round together, pointing out and discussing things that draw their attention. One man approaches another, and you hear: “it’s good to see you”. The reply: “it’s good to be seen”.

… These are stories from real life, they are connected, they are open, they point toward hope rather than despair. * All the input and the different issues, although there is a connection, there are so many different angles. * The maze is an excellent device/design—illustrating the difficulties of coming out of poverty—how complex and challenging (like climbing Ben Nevis in your flip flops). Feedback from PTC participants at the Connecting Stories event

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Figure 5

Commissioners meeting one another within the labyrinth

Figure 6

Frames display stories; film from commission events plays silently

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Welcome to Our World It starts with a bit of a panic. The room we’d planned to use—that’s had the heaters on for an hour—is no longer available. There’s been an incident in the neighbourhood and the police are here, big vans and hi-vis jackets, partly blocking the street, and also now keeping someone in that room. Other options are the big room—but it’s so cold we can’t ask people to sit in there, even with jackets on you feel in your bones the frost that decorates hedges and grass outside; we joke about needing a literal icebreaker for the group. So, we phone and ask if we can use the church room downstairs; it’s free but the AA will want in straight after us, so we have to be out sharp. We get in, turn on the heat, make the tea, set out the chairs, and, of course, turn the Christmas tree lights on. There are hugs and “it’s you!” as people gather. “Hello new granny!” Jane calls to welcome Sandra and we all congratulate her on the news. Other people don’t know each other and offer quiet introductions. Cards are exchanged and Christmas jumpers proudly paraded. Fiona welcomes everyone, and we are asked to introduce ourselves, our involvement with PTC, and what we like about the season. They are all women. I am the youngest in the group by about a decade. Some people can name the date they got involved, others just say “a while now” or “oh, forever!” People name who else in the room they were on a commission round with, or what they value about the kind of support and relationships they have developed through PTC. There are mixed feelings about the season, some love seeing their grandchildren, or the excited buildup; others are more reticent as they aren’t in touch with family, but find joy in other things: days in pyjamas, or the delicate white frost. For me, I’ve already been thinking on my journey from the station that morning of how I’m glad on freezing days like this for seeing my breath, proof that something inside me is still alive. As people share, there’s smiles and murmurs of understanding and agreement. A large gesture of someone’s arms and mug of tea goes flying in the excitement; we laugh together and reach to mop it up. I’ve laid out some tiny, colourful paper boats, reminding people of the invites they’ve received in the post (Figure 7). I encourage people to write sentences starting with “I want my words to…” or “I want my story to…”. I pick up on an image Jane used to give an example: “I want my words to open up like a flower”. Someone says “oh, I wish I had your way with words”, but I remind them I’m just listening to Jane. People start to write. I get the sense, with pen and paper in hand, that this quiet space may make some people feel uncomfortable. Most seem to get into writing, but it’s too quiet for some, and they start to chat to no one in particular, having got down all the thoughts they want to share right now. Sandra

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Figure 7

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Participant invites to Connecting Stories

says to me softly, “I don’t know what to say… I feel like I’ve maybe missed something, I haven’t told my story”. She tells me it’s hard to focus, that the words just don’t come. We talk a little, and she writes a little. Mary jokes to me “where’s yours? You haven’t been writing!” and I hurry to show her that I’ve been taking

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part too. I don’t want to ask the group to do something that I’m not also willing to take part in. I ask people to look over what they have written and pick a line to share. What people offer is moving and purposeful, and there are calls of acknowledgement and affirmation across the room. I invite people to write one of their sentences on the paper boats, and I suggest that what we’ve already done is to make something creative together, the individual boats and phrases making a larger piece.

… I want my words to grow, flower. I want my words to be a building block to add to all the others. I want my words to be heard and respected, reflect real life, inspire, be special. I want my story to give others the courage to share their stories because stories are empowering. I want my campaigns to inspire others to change society for the best. I want my words to be like a child of love and happiness, no sadness or tears. I want my words to reflect a situation, not a type of person; not that ‘poor’ person. I want my words to start and believe in themselves, I want my words to be heard. I want my words to enable others to speak out. I want my story to be something that outlasts me.

… We move on. I change the plan as we go along, responding to the feedback when I asked people how it felt to be writing in a large group. So rather than more individual writing, I suggest that people chat in pairs, responding to the prompt: Where I am now… Where I was… Where I am going… People turn to their partners and start sharing very quickly, so I join the pair next to me, just in time to hear Mary say:

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I was in hell. I am in purgatory. I hope I’m going to heaven. I couldn’t see it before, where I was, but I can lift my head up now and see where I want to go. Before, it was worse, it was awful… Having to be using foodbanks, that was hell, one of the worst experiences, it just robs you of all your dignity. But I’m climbing up now and I can lift my head up and see what’s above me. She talks about being proud of the campaigns she has been part of with PTC, the movement for food justice and dignity, that her experiences and her voice have made a difference, that people remember what she has said, because she talks about real examples, pineapples and cabbages and not being able to afford to travel to the shops where fruit and veg can be bought cheaply—and that people have acted on what she has shared. But I also hear her say: “it’s bad because you never know when things might get worse again”. She mentions later that “I can be really chatty and loud, but inside I can be dying”. I think of my own health issues; tentative progress some days, but never knowing when it will all come crashing down again, living with that fear every day but trying not to let that show. And on one of the papers that Mary leaves for me at the end, she has written: “I want a happy life with no more tears or worries”.

… I’m aware that conversations are being shared all around me. I overhear Kitty saying to Sandra, “don’t mind me, I’m probably gonna get a wee bit emotional at your story”. I see other pairs engrossed in conversation together.

… Shirley responds thoughtfully to Mary’s words, and she talks a little about herself too. Thinking about Mary’s ladder, and the stigma around poverty, her words flow: It’s not a one-way route Because if we get knocked back down again We should be wiser, stronger Forearmed in knowing that we aren’t alone And not accepting the word of others over our own. The so-called ‘superior beings’, we know now that What they have to say about us That’s not the last word on us.

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If you get knocked back down You can acknowledge that it’s outside your capability But you don’t have to be stuck. There are others, look for others It’s okay to say ‘I can’t deal with this’ And in saying that, You can help others too. I try to take down her stream of words, struck when she says: Sometimes you don’t want to look back on your story, It’s fine for others seeing it and it might help them But I don’t want to see it myself I don’t want to see it all spelled out.

… We take a break. A couple of people go out to smoke or refill cups of tea, but mostly people still continue these conversations. When we come back together, I ask people to write for four minutes on what they have heard or shared. Again, I can see that some people enjoy the focus, but others are distracted and quickly start calling to other people in the group. Mary jokingly yells, “your four minutes are up! Stop writing!” saying, “people will hurry up if you tell them that”. We all read out what we have written, what we have heard from others, and what we have felt. It’s clear these conversations have been meaningful, that we have all been listening to each other, and ourselves. Someone shares: “I feel heard”. There’s a moment of misunderstanding, but it leads to conversation— you never know what someone is going through based on the neighbourhood they’re from or how they look. As we have already started reflecting on what we have heard from others, I pick up the ball of wool, pressing the soft strands under my fingertips. You give your answer, and, holding on to the thread, throw the ball to someone else in the group, who does the same until everyone is holding at least one piece of thread and everyone is connected in a patterned web. It’s a well-known exercise in PTC; “ah, you know Fiona!” someone jokes. However, this is different: I ask people to throw it to someone else in the circle, and to say something this person has shared in the session that has impacted them. I begin, throwing the wool, talking about what I’ve heard and why it was meaningful to me… and it gets thrown on, and thrown on, criss-crossing the circle with connec-

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tions. There are so many moving things said. Recognitions that some people are going through a really hard time, but that they are still here, still supporting the movement and always asking after others. Fiona throws the wool to Sandra, saying: “I heard you when you said, ‘I don’t know what to say’ and I think that’s important, we don’t value that enough when people say that”. I am grateful that the listening and caring that happens here is always more than just one person, that it is collaborative, that it is about creating a space where people recognise each other, including that not-knowing. On and on we throw. There are moments of remembering what people have done in the past, cards and notes sent, connections between family members. People joke to each other, “you’re gonna make me cry!” but I think there are tears in a few eyes as it is. People name how important others are to them, to the movement, how important it is to have her voice, her experiences, her particular presence. We keep throwing, on and on, recognising that we all want to throw the wool to everyone. When we finally stop, we name some of those absent, as if we are throwing ever wider, out of the circle here today. We take photos of these thread connections, from our own different angles. And we talk about the gaps between the strands—the people who are missing, the things we think are difficult to talk about, the things that remain silent, even in groups like this. So, having unravelled, we try to bring it all back together. Kitty takes the wool away, wanting to crochet ‘webs of connection’. Fiona and I give out packs for everyone to take away to spend time reflecting and writing over the winter break, and, of course, there are also my ethics forms. Winding up a group can be hard, thinking about where we go next, and what as individuals we are returning to. There are always things outside the circle, beyond the connections we have made in that space that influence how we feel about stepping back outside; there are so many things I don’t know about what people are facing. There are the jokes I roll my eyes at about putting on weight at Christmas, but I also hear: “the worst thing is putting on weight from being put on steroids for my chronic illness… putting on two stone, but still not being able to afford to eat”. I take a moment. Kitty and I chat about how we think the session went. She likes the wee bags with notebooks, candles, and the reflective writing tips and is looking forward to using it. We talk about how it’s hard to find the mental energy for any kind of writing, especially when it is personal. I say that I’ve been trying, hesitantly, to do some personal writing about chronic illness, gender, and academia, but I’ve been finding it difficult. She puts an arm round my shoulders, and says with a laugh, “welcome to our world”.

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Three You step into the circle. Around the tents, at different times, you see people standing or sitting, taking in the text. Some read every part, carefully moving round the tents to take in each word; others glance briefly, perhaps there are too many words for them, or today they are feeling fragile, and this is a lot to take in. You see that the tents are made text, texts of lived experiences, hanging together, side by side. You see short, punchy quotes, alongside sections of reports testifying on specific issues; there are transcripts of performances, alongside poems and collective pieces, alongside interviews. You read personal pieces, about the asylum system, about benefits sanctions, about homelessness, about mental health, about disability assessments, about working alongside others in solidarity. You notice shared, collaborative pieces too; scripts with different voices and statements about the experiences and value of this way of listening and working together. Edges and corners of these words meet, overlapping and blurring the boundaries between them. Between the tents, you see words suspended, echoing in light and shadow and reflection: “nothing about us—without us—is for us”. In the gaps that form this phrase, you trace the curving, weaving strands of the names of commissioners: those who have listened and those who have testified.

… In all aspects of our lives, we should be paying attention to what’s not said as well as what is. The hidden stories not picked up by the media or official data—those of destitution, and those of organising to stop, mitigate and overcome hardship. * We need to hear all of the stories again and again, we can’t let them fade. We need to hear all of the future stories and ones that we aren’t particularly aware of. * The power of the circle—equal footing, people with lived experience of poverty at the heart, together building a just society with everyone. Feedback from PTC participants at the Connecting Stories event

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Figure 8

‘Nothing about us’ banner between tents

Figure 9

Varied text on tents

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A’ in a Guddle It becomes a joke between us that it snows every time we have a workshop. In January it is that grey slush stopping some buses and trains; in early February a light dusting; and then, in the dying days of February, blizzards engulf the whole country, blanketing it under thick white snow. I spend the days at home, in that uncertain daze of liminal time and refracting light, waiting to see what is revealed. The snow reduces our numbers, and other factors do too: some people get jobs; some are involved in other projects; some are caring for family members in hospital or are themselves housebound due to chronic illness. Yet, at each session, more and more emerges. People share lived experiences, both past and ongoing: about the pain and discomfort of illnesses, surviving violent and abusive relationships, caring for teenage children, loved ones in and out of hospital, what drew them into being part of the movement. More files and papers are found, with flip chart notes, handwritten words ripped from lined notepads, newspaper cuttings, or typed-up feedback forms and printed-out emails spilling from their cardboard folders. These remind people of things they have kept as mementoes, such as pebbles from cairns inscribed with commissioners’ names, or small cards with notes of important issues; these are produced from bags and coat pockets. And people keep bringing their own new writing and creative pieces that they have gone away and worked on, jotted down in notebooks, on scrap paper, on wallpaper remnants. The materials proliferate, becoming unmanageable, and I feel overwhelmed, getting stuck under so many words, and themes, and images, and notes, and clippings, and reports… I hadn’t imagined that we would try to pin down every meeting, every experience, every conversation, every interaction. I have written (in my ‘theory voice’) celebrating the very heterogeneity of lived experiences. They don’t sit still, experiences are lived; shared and shared again, resistant yet refracting with each new interaction, catching glimmers of another world. They stick with us, stick to us, catch in our throats. They get a’ in a guddle,7 and, when shared, come home with new threads attached. With this unruliness they disrupt the status quo. Yet… I hadn’t quite figured for the unruliness of lived experiences to be working in this way.

7 A’ is Scots for ‘all’ and guddle is Scottish term meaning ‘a complete mess’.

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Washing Line It is one of those snowy January mornings. I am covered in muddy slush from a passing bus as I trudge my way from the station to the PTC offices. Shirley arrived well before the session but sat in the café opposite to do some writing. She reads to us from her notebook, a piece about coming through the park that morning, seeing people pass by all bundled up, in the stillness and quiet of the park, a beautiful walk she doesn’t often get to enjoy. That morning, we pick up on theme of the threads of connection, recalling the woollen web made in that first session, and we look at ways of cutting apart words and stitching them together. Responding to the discussions in the first workshop, I made a ‘thread poem’ reflecting on the ambivalent possibilities of lived experiences: what can be shared and what can create connection, but also what can become constricting and needs unpicked. These words have been cut and stitched, the thread enacting the flow and tangle of the words. It is handed round the group, gingerly tangled and untangled, sparking ideas and discussion as people add their own readings to it. When I gently pack it away at the end of the session, I find that it has a light pink thread attached, entangled in the dark teal strands; it becomes part of the piece.

Figure 10

Thread poem: a’ in a guddle

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Figure 11

Washing line poem

Shirley takes to threading needles and stitching together, working away quietly. At the end of the session, she wants to take her work away and bring it back when it is finished. A week or so later I receive it back, handed through the PTC offices, in an old A4 envelope with a plastic window. It is fragile and beautiful. Against the grey-blue background, she has made a washing line of teal thread, with tiny words in greens and dark reds dangling from it. As I lift the paper, the words swish and sway, flipping themselves between readable and unreadable. She has picked out words from the piece she has written; all save one: ‘guddle’, a strand of the thread poem echoed in her own response. When things feel tough, rather than steeping in it, and hiding away with it on your own, like your own special parcel to carry, But, get out and experience the strangers in and out the various parts of the day; look for the individual, the incidental goodness in each one, and the parcels they may carry with them. Treasure as a gift the little uplifting things they may reveal without knowing. And see the same in yourself.

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… I come back to this washing line again and again. I love the delicate knots of fine thread, the evocation of ordinary, daily tasks, and I find the piece a good reminder of engaging with others in the midst of personally challenging times. It is perhaps crucial in the kind of solidarity PTC seeks to engender, recognising the “parcels” that others, like you, carry; both the tough parts of life, and also the goodness. I see a theological gloss in the word “stranger”—a description of an encounter with ‘the other’—but also in the materiality of the piece, the fragility of the thread, the swish and sway, the knots tying together “tough”, “gifts” and “revealed”. These all bring to my mind Rivera’s argument that a theology of wonder in response to God’s glory entails an “enduring attention and responsiveness to the glory that manifests itself in the world. It implies a “disposition and activity” of passionate engagement, indeed of true com-passion, with the beauty and the pain, with the joy and suffering of the world”.8 “Experience the strangers in and out of the various parts of the day”. The creative piece suggests looking out for the “incidental goodness” that may be “revealed” in and through others, that everyday life is “scattered with marvels”.9

… In the workshops, Shirley often advocates for seeing past our perceptions and assumptions of other people. She often reminds us to think about the gifts and creativity and goodness in communities that are labelled as ‘deprived’. In the first workshop in December, she wrote: “I want my words to reflect a situation, not a type of person; not that ‘poor’ person”. In the last stretch of the project, I get caught up in what feels tough in my own life, and I hang on to my ‘own special parcel’. In one session when we are all tired and on-edge, I find myself trying to explain what I’d like the group to write for a collaborative piece: a few sentences on experiences that are often overlooked or misunderstood. Shirley asks for clarification. I offer an example, but I feel that I am pushing too much, and in the wrong direction, asking the group to write ‘about’ poverty in a reductive way, pressing for personal details. She starts to write but wants to take it away to think more about what to say. I feel that I have betrayed the fragile ambiguity of what she has been trying to convey, the reflective quality in everyday life she is encouraging us to uncover. 8 Mayra Rivera, “Glory: The First Passion of Theology?” in Polydoxy: Theologies of the Manifold, ed. Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider, 167–81 (Routledge: New York, 2010), 170. 9 Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life: Living and Cooking, ed. Luce Giard, trans. Timothy J. Tomasik (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 213.

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Four You are here. Somewhere at the midpoint, the balance, the turning point.

… I turn through the few empty, unfilled pages in some of the booklets, not bothering to take notes, unable to record these silences. research journal

Figure 12

Light and shadow in the space between the tents

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Silences I heard her when she said, “I don’t know what to say”. And later, when she said, so softly, “I’ve been at her bedside in hospital… and I was thinking… ‘Where’s my web now? Where’s my threads, all those connections?’”

… Sometimes it’s too hard. Sometimes the words just don’t come.

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Five You turn, stepping out, thinking on what the printed tents enclosed. Multiple experiences, rich in detail; a great distance contained in a small space. Handwritten poetic lines etched with emotion. Experiences yet to be told, wound tightly in tall spools and tiny bobbins, waiting for the right moment to unfurl and be shared. Also experiences that cannot be told; light glinting off the silences and spaces held in recognition of the things that refuse telling, that are too large, too small, too different to be put into words. Perhaps something resonates with you; the white noise that you have learnt to tune out, that oceanic thunder inside. You blink this back. You hold in your hand a booklet, a life story, the text of the title softened and traced in shadow, the teller anonymous. You move slowly out of the circle, starting to return the way you came, and find a quiet place in the labyrinth to sit with this particular documented experience, amidst a host of living experiences.

… Ongoing contemplation, reflection, times of silence, space, times to have conversations in groups and individually with others— the power of encounter as people, humans searching for equality, justice, realising best of who I/we can be together in our world. * Struck by the immense creativity and generosity of people sharing precious stories, personal, of real struggle. That both paint hope as present. * How some stories begin to form, clear, hopeful, confident visions of a future, fair society a real belief that it can be this way if more people are nurtured by PTC and others to believe in themselves and their part in society. Feedback from PTC participants at the Connecting Stories event

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Figure 13

Text on the outside of the tent; life story booklets inside

Figure 14

Waiting to be told

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A Cord of Three Strands Victoire has been unable to make the workshops recently as she has started work, facilitating writing sessions for women with experiences of seeking refuge. She has said that she sees our workshops like training, giving her ideas and experience for running her own writing sessions. I am glad that she has this job, yet I miss her presence in the groups, her enthusiastic, expressive input. By chance I find her name on a lending ticket in a university library book; a bookmark of where she has also been reading womanist theology.

… In the workshop where we are using spools of thread, Victoire narrates a piece about her experiences. She holds up a single strand of thread to us, saying: “I am trying to break it”—SNAP!—“and I can”. (Mistaking her meaning, I reach for some scissors.) “Now I have two threads together and it is harder to break them”— SNAP!—“but I can still manage”. We have all become enthralled in her performance. “Now, I take three threads together, and I am trying and trying and trying”, her fingers tense with effort, “but I just cannot break them”. She bears them aloft for us to see, unbroken. She explains that she was thinking about the biblical passage “a cord of three strands is not easily broken” (Eccl. 4.12) and about the three things that kept her going through what she names as the “anxiety and trauma” of the process of seeking asylum. She names her daughters, studying, and sharing her experiences with PTC as these three things that sustained her. Over the next few months, drawing on sections from the existing life story that she and Fiona worked on and what she has shared in planning sessions, we bring together a piece, working in the French that was the common language for her multi-lingual family in West Africa, and in English, the majority language of where is now her home. The text loops and braids, holding torn pieces of gold and petals like slivers of sunlight. Extending beyond the final words, the piece carries the fragments on, the story unfinished: there is yet more to come.

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Figure 15

A cord of three strands

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There was much violence and danger I was afraid to go back home My daughters have been the reason that I stayed strong. I was afraid for my life I wanted them to be proud of me the day we would be reunited. I opened up my heart, told the Border Agency the whole story They told me everything I said was a lie Studying has always been one of my drivers. I could not work but I could study. It’s like being told you are nothing now no-one can help you Studying gave me the opportunity to get involved with PTC where I did my placement. Studying gave me the opportunity to learn English and study in one of the best universities and to learn lots of skills. Studying kept me busy. I was so angry I needed to be heard I needed people to hear and feel that anger Telling my story gave me the opportunity to share my wound. I was at a point where I needed to speak, to open up about it. It gave me the opportunity to be trusted and to trust. Now I enable other people to share their story Hearing other people’s stories inspired me, made me question where I was and decide to help, to get more involved. My joy is coming back to me

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Root and Branch Mary has brought in a piece, for which she bought felt-tip pens specially. She has drawn a large tree on leftover wallpaper, roughly-textured like tree bark. It curls itself up into a scroll again, smelling of cigarette smoke. The tree is lively greens and browns, branches and roots stretching out, looking like it has grown in the face of rough winds. She has written some words, and in other places she has cut out and stuck down words from reports. Mary says she wanted to make the whole tree from words, but that it would have taken too much time and been too much given her arthritis and the painful, gradual loss of sight in one eye. I am delighted that she has taken the time to make this, but I’m also not sure how to respond, what to ‘do’ with it. She’s also cut out the words form the collaborative piece “I want my words to…” written by the group in the first session; I had printed over a photo of the paper boats and given it to everyone in the group. It feels a bit odd, perhaps, to see the words from it extracted and stuck on. Yet, why should I be the only one who gets to bring in responses that I’ve worked on at home? Why does the ‘wholeness’ of what I give back to people matter, especially when in my own research I am free to extract words and quotes to make my own meaning? And, at a practical level, when I have access to printing at home to generate and copy as many neat, readable words as I wish when my own hands can no longer manage to write. Why do I pause at others taking materials—words and meanings—and re-making them, transforming them? Isn’t this what I hope to encourage?

… At home, I look back over what Mary has shared, in writing and in discussion. I notice that like the tree, much of this conveys a sense of growth, or perhaps progress. I take a moment, remembering she is not a puzzle to be solved.10 In the second workshop, when we were all playing with thread, she knew exactly what she wanted to make: a ladder. The first rung is “Hopeless, Isolated, no future”, stepping up to “Join Poverty Truth Commission”. This then moves through “participating in society”, “self-esteem rising”, “included in society” and up to “empowered—hope in the future”. The final three rungs read “tell my stories—happy”, “happy—social included” and “have future to look forward to”. I remember that in the first workshop she talked about climbing up out of hell; perhaps this is the ladder she has been using. 10

Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 50.

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I feel troubled by personal progress narratives in some anti-poverty work, their linearity and simplicity, and I sense that resistance in myself now. I think back to the interviews and workshops where we discussed concerns over “conversion” style testimonies that involve “sensationalist approaches” where an organisation becomes the focus point in “fixing” a “broken and dysfunctional person”.11 I remember those planning group conversations about how people might feel about looking back over experiences they have documented, especially if it contains an optimistic future about an individual’s life that does not come to fruition. Yet, reflecting further on Mary’s explanations of her pieces, I think her work challenges my own discomfort, raising questions about the nature of change involved in activism, rather than advocating for an atomistic conception of personal progress. In talking about the tree, she described how the growth of some branches can be stunted or they can die, and that there are times of falling away and needing to grow back again. She named “poverty” as being the trunk of the tree, saying “everything in my life, good and bad, comes from poverty”, and indeed she has cut out and stuck the word “poverty” right onto the trunk. There are other pieces she has worked on too, describing her activism with food justice projects—beginning with her own ongoing experiences of food insecurity through to her role in producing the ‘Dignity in Practice’ report in March 2018, a project funded by the Scottish Government and run by Nourish Scotland and PTC. This has been a long-term, intense commitment over different working groups and commissions, bringing this issue into a national conversation.

… Mary is keen to develop the tree image, describing herself as a “bit of a treehugger”, and she brings in another stretch of leftover wallpaper, this time from her bedroom, depicting birch trees in browns and golds. Copying the print onto fragile paper, I layer these images with text from a talk she gave entitled “my vision for the future of Scotland”. It’s a short, bold speech, covering areas of health inequalities, food and fuel poverty, welfare reform and employment, all part of creating a more equal and just society. She ends the talk recognising that people might say it is “unachievable” but argues that if alone she was able to achieve change to policy through her NHS 24 campaign—through which

11

17th May 2016 Transcript, 10.

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Figure 16

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mobile phone charges to the NHS non-emergency number were abolished— then how much more can be achieved by more people working together.12 Layering this text with the bedroom wallpaper—invoking a personal space—I hope to evoke a sense of the personal and the political as inseparable. I ask Mary if she is familiar with the phrase “the personal is political”. “No”, she says, “but of course it is”. On the other side of the many-folded incline are inserts, detailing the different projects and reports about food justice that she has been involved with, the text in and around images of lichens we have gathered for it: lichens are often indictors of the health of a tree’s surrounding environment. Suspended on copper wire at different intervals are leaves, gently nodding in the draft, echoing the upward movement from “hopeless, isolated, no future”, through “self-esteem rising” into “have future to look forward to”. These copper threads can be shaped to arc upward or curve down, although it is uncertain if the wire strands will respond to these attempts; on any given day, the leaves trace their own trajectories.

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In the UK, the National Health Service provides a 24-hour phoneline for non-emergency situations.

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Fear of the Brown Envelope The idea had existed between us for a while. We had the notion of using this everyday object that has become such a source of anxiety and fear, a representation of the impact of welfare cuts and assessments, but it hadn’t seemed to go anywhere. That was until Shirley brought in a stack of brown envelopes, with their roughly torn openings and blank, empty windows. Some had been her uncle’s—she was sorting his possessions after his recent passing—some were her own. Even ‘unworked’ this small stack of eight had a quality to them, making tangible something of the emotions surrounding welfare assessments. In discussion, Shirley and I figure out a way to use them. I take them home, and bind them, using a deep-red multi-stranded thread. In this process, I catch my finger and rip open the skin; a tiny drop of red blooms on the corner of the first envelope. I am horrified at being careless, at staining something that Shirley has carefully collected. But, after a moment, I recognise that it fits quite well with the colour of the thread, and the tea-mug stain already on the front; and how the anxiety of the brown envelope has also become so much a part of life for so many people. When I apologetically point out the mark to Shirley, Sandra comments “well, that’s what it feels like, they bleed you dry”. In the last session as a group before the exhibition, we work on the text for the inserts. Shirley has felt a little stuck trying to figure out what to write, so invites the rest of the group to help, passing the bound envelopes round the circle. I ask them all to write down the emotions and thoughts they have when a brown envelope arrives, and once they’ve finished get them to sort these into an order for the eight inserts. These move from the initial feelings of anxiety and fear (“oh no the brown envelope”; “I cannae face opening the thing”; “what is this about?”), to concern over the impact (“how am I going to manage?”; “I can’t fill this form in” ), to the damaging physical and mental health impact in the days afterwards (“I’m made to feel like I’ve done something wrong”; “it damages my health” ) to the expectation of receiving a response or a verdict in the next brown envelope and the whole cycle starting again (“I dread the response”). As the group opens out into more general sharing around these experiences, I take down some brief notes. Back home, I work with blank welfare forms, such as for Carer’s Allowance or Employment Support Allowance, using a white paint to cover the form, leaving the text just visible. I fold these pages and stitch round the edges. In red ink, I stamp the eight phrases on the eight sheets, so that they will be visible through the transparent window of the envelope. I write on the inserts in pencil, detailing some of the experiences and comments they shared. These include general comments such as, “assessment, decision, appeal, outcome, reassessment, it’s a never-ending cycle” and “it’s complex and threatening lan-

Tracing the Labyrinth

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guage, you don’t understand it” and “you don’t feel trusted”. There are also very personal examples, such as, “I’m a carer for my mum, so I get her brown envelopes too. She’s 86. I feel like shouting ‘LEAVE HER ALONE’ it feels like they are blaming her, it feels like she’s robbed somebody”. Another reads: “I’d gone to the advice centre to check that the form was filled out correctly. They said it was, but it still came back saying it was wrong. And what proof do you have that you’ve done that?” Finally, I use red ink to print in small letters on brown paper, similar to that of the brown envelopes. Fear, panic, gut-wrenching, lost, shamed, sick, dread; and a series of exclamation marks and stars, suggested by a participant to represent their “anger beyond words”. Tearing and stitching, I attach these to the inserts so that they hang lightly at the ripped edges of the envelopes, naming the tangible emotions that are right at people’s fingertips as they open these brown envelopes.

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Six You see a few others are here still, heads bent closer to each other, deep in conversation, or sitting alone with their thoughts. Again, you turn, retracing steps, backwards and forwards; where you have been now shaping where you are going. During this time, the light has shifted with the arc of the sun, illuminating different sections, casting others into shadow. As you pass you take in more text, wondering if you had missed this on the path inwards, or if you are just now seeing it afresh, seeing the layers of creativity, compassion, humour, anger, and courage, as the path before you unfurls back into the world.

… This creative space—connecting stories, is continuing to move and be shaped by many lives who have, and who maybe are part of this journey shaping change… So much gratitude and pride and deep inspiration in this space honouring, bringing to light the lives of people. * New commissioners will add to the already very rich source of experience and informed archive. But it will become an archive without a new injection of passion and anger. * PTC is not stagnant, and the movement has to keep moving and shaping and changing lives. Feedback from PTC participants at the Connecting Stories event

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Conversations in the labyrinth

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Encountering one another in the labyrinth

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Experiences Don’t Sit Still And so, with everything else bagged up and boxed away, chairs dragged and stacked, on that bright May day, we tear down the tents. Fiona and I work quietly, run dry of conversation from the past two days. My body nags me about how hectic it has been. But why tear them up? At a practical level, there’s nowhere to keep them. For the past week, we’ve been shuffling them between meeting space and offices—we’ve laughed at me peering out from inside the tents as I crab-walk them through corridors—upturning office tables stacking chairs on desks to lock them away overnight. This, too, is political—I’ve already spoken about the challenges of finding and heating suitable spaces when working in a shared office and community building. And this creating-curating group, as we have come to be known, has given up so much extra time for this, on the basis of it being short-term; organising exhibitions is not what they signed up for. The tent frames stand empty, exhausted, silent. We tear apart the cloak-like garment of printed text. They can’t be stored well, or even packed away. This translucent paper will retain the memory of being folded and crushed; it cannot pretend to be new again. Even after two days of this exhibition there is a restlessness to these words; the tracing paper they are printed on trying to warp and curl in the exposure to light and heat, creating small ruptures and gaps. Ephemeral material leads to ephemeral art; some pieces are not meant for solidity, for permanence. As I tear, the printed texts come apart not at the old joins along the straight lines, but in different ways: words from one piece ripping apart and re-attaching themselves to another piece, creating different readings, new resonances I had not seen before. We save some of these newly created, jaggededged sections, setting them to one side. It reminds me of the process of putting the tents up, documented experiences that I was familiar with catching me again when placed in juxtaposition. Something inside me tugs at this suggestion that more people could have seen them, that there could have been more reach, more impact. But no, ‘reach’ and ‘impact’ are not the same as connection, as change. And tearing up this warping paper is not the same as destroying these experiences, these encounters. The details are recorded, stored; photographs detail the exhibition. But more than

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that… these vantage points are ephemeral, transient, dynamic; experiences are shared from the ongoing everyday realities of lives in flux. The exhibition was made for this space, for this time, performed in and through the creative, interpretive capacities of these women, of this community. Yes, it could happen again, in another space and time, but not as a replica or repeat, rather as a re-making, a re-creating.

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Chapter 4

Disrupting Austerity Cultures of Judgement and Disbelief In this chapter, I examine austerity in the UK as a specific context in which sharing lived experiences takes place and I examine two forms of creative intervention into austerity. The preceding chapter took a path through the labyrinth of collaborative research, documenting the lived experiences shared by PTC members in the Connecting Stories exhibition and reflecting on the process. Here, I explore further the political and material conditions from which the creative representations in Connecting Stories emerged, the conditions that PTC seek to change by sharing their lived experiences. I argue that many of the lived experiences detailed in this research point to cultures of judgement and disbelief, in which people’s experiences of marginalisation are routinely treated with suspicion or seen as lacking validity. Drawing on the collaborative research with PTC alongside wider academic discussion, I demonstrate the impact of these cultures on people’s access to material resources and on how their particular experiences are responded to in public spaces. I then move to reflect on two artistic-activist practices that engage lived experiences of marginalisation in ways that draw attention to injustices and offer spaces open to multiple lived experiences, inviting those responding into positions of collaboration rather than judgement. I discuss Liz Crow’s 2015 mass-sculptural performance Figures, which aimed to intervene in austerity in the UK, before focusing on Connecting Stories. Finally, I consider three features of creative interventions as disrupting cultures of disbelief and judgement.

Austerity Cultures of Judgement and Disbelief Throughout PTC’s work, themes such as ‘stigma’ and ‘dignity’ and ‘stories’ sit alongside topics such as welfare cuts and assessments, asylum and refuge, and benefits sanctions. In Names not Numbers, the report of the third commission (2014–2016), the commissioners note similar experiences across different sites, stating: Job Centres, Borders Agency [sic] and other public services are too often exhausting, distressing and completely lacking in dignity. Targets-driven

© CL Wren Radford, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004513181_006

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and disbelieving cultures of enforcement and punishment lead to many people feeling they have been stripped of their dignity and left with nothing.1 The report goes on to state the need to change cultures, changing from “enforcement, punishment and suspicion to assistance, support and belief” articulating that, as well as public services, “all of us” need to consider the values and approaches we take in responding to those with experiences of poverty.2 This recognises the social and cultural factors at work in how those responding may interpret others’ experiences, both in specific sites such as Jobcentres and the Border Agency, and also in public and political contexts where such testimonies may be shared. I suggest that much of what has been shared and documented in the research with PTC is participants’ articulation of cultures in which both their lived experiences and their ability to ‘speak credibly’ about their lived experiences are met with judgement and disbelief. Here, I draw on three examples from the research with PTC to explore these cultures of judgement and disbelief: welfare cuts and assessments; refugee experiences; and testimonial spaces. These examples illustrate where cultures of judgement and disbelief impact access to material resources, and also the ways in which these cultures shape how people’s experiences are understood and responded to in public spaces. In other words, this highlights the material and discursive nature of austerity politics in the UK, and necessarily, also the material and discursive nature of activism under austerity.3 By referring to cultures in the plural, I aim to be responsive to where multiple, shifting discourses overlap, often reinforcing one another: discourses around immigration, race, colonialism, welfare, disability, class, sexuality, and gender. As I noted in chapter two, oppression and marginalisation occur in multiple, overlapping axes, resulting in specific experiences for different people in facing structural injustices. Discussing these concerns in relation to each other enables a view of how specific forms of oppression result from the intersections of these different axes, allowing understandings of the particularity of a person’s experiences.

1 Poverty Truth Commission, Names not Numbers, Report 2016. Available at: https://static1 .squarespace.com/static/5d72d9ffd7ef2750a4da336b/t/5d7f7e4c408816140377e565/15686365 13073/Poverty-Truth-Commission-names+not+numbers.pdf. Accessed 29 Dec 2020. 2 PTC, Names not Numbers. 3 Akwugo Emejulu and Leah Bassel, Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain (Bristol: Policy Press, 2015).

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Welfare Cuts and Assessments Over the past decade, successive UK governments have enacted austerity policies that have implemented “the deepest and most precipitate cuts ever made in social provision”.4 These cuts have disproportionately impacted Black, Asian, and minority ethnic women, white women, and disabled people.5 Here I focus on two areas of austerity cuts: firstly cuts to disability benefits through changes in assessment to the out of work benefit for people with impairments and chronic illness; secondly the two-child limit to tax credits and the exemptions to this known as the ‘rape clause’. Disability Assessments In August 2017, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities reported that cuts to disability benefits have created a “human catastrophe” for disabled people in the UK.6 Various disability benefits were targeted under austerity cuts, including Personal Independence Payments which supports the costs of daily living for disabled people. Broader austerity measures also had a greater impact on disabled people. For example, the ‘bedroom tax’—in which people deemed to have more rooms than ‘needed’ had housing benefits reduced—targeted disabled people who might require more space for sleeping arrangements separate to a partner or to have a carer sleep in a spare room. Here, I focus on the Work Capability Assessment for the Employment Support Allowance which is an out-of-work benefit for disabled people. Introduced in 2008, this is commonly referred to as the ‘fit for work test’. Depending on the outcome of the assessment, claimants may be told that they face no barriers to working, or are sorted into different levels of financial support, which often depend on claimants taking part in mandated employability skills activities. Disability theorists critical of the impact of these assessments argue

4 Peter Taylor-Gooby, The Double Crisis of the Welfare State and What We Can Do About It (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), viii. 5 Philip Alston, “Statement on Visit to the United Kingdom,” United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, London, 16 November 2018. Available at: https://www.ohchr.org/documents/issues/poverty/eom_gb_16nov2018.pdf. Accessed 30th Dec 2020. Women’s Budget Group and Runnymede Trust, “Intersecting inequalities: The impact of austerity on Black and Minority Ethnic women in the UK.” Available at: https:// wbg.org.uk/analysis/intersecting-inequalities. Accessed 30th Dec 2020. 6 Benjamin Kentish, “Government cuts have caused ‘human catastrophe’ for disabled, UN Committee says,” The Independent, 25th August 2017. Available at: https://www .independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/government-spending-cuts-human-catastrophe-uncommittee-rights-persons-disabilities-disabled-people-a7911556.html. Accessed 30th Dec 2020.

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that they have functioned as a way of redrawing and ultimately shrinking the ‘disability’ category so that disability benefits can only be accessed by a newlydefined ‘truly disabled’ group of people.7 These cuts have been accompanied by the political and media rhetoric that enforces a binary between those who are considered ‘genuinely disabled’ and those who are said to be ‘faking it’, part of the ‘skivers vs strivers’ narrative surrounding welfare cuts.8 The use of mechanistic, functional criteria in the assessments to determine a person’s status as ‘disabled’ assumes that ‘disability’ is a concrete, predictable, stable category that can function as a catch-all term for incredibly diverse conditions and impairments.9 Evidence from claimants who have undergone these assessments indicates that claimants’ experiences of their own capabilities, bodies, and lives are dismissed in the face of ‘objective’ observations by an assessor.10 For example, the assessments involve an interview about the claimant’s daily life alongside tasks that measure the functional capability of claimants, such as their ability to pick up a pound coin from a table or lift their arms above a certain height. Yet, when claimants report pain levels to the assessor these are often not recognised; those who refuse to attempt a task due to pain are considered to be ‘uncompliant’ and fail the assessment, in other words, they are found ‘fit for work’. Thus, those with more “complex, hard-to-quantify impairments (chronic, fluctuating and lifelimiting conditions), struggle to fit these mechanistic criteria”.11 In this way, 7

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Chris Grover and Karen Soldatic, “Neoliberal restructuring, disabled people and social (in)security in Australia and Britain,” Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research 15 no.3 (2013): 217. Kayleigh Garthwaite, “Fear of the Brown Envelope: Exploring Welfare Reform with Long-Term Sickness Benefits Recipients,” Social Policy and Administration 48 no.7 (2014): 782–798. Alan Roulstone, “Personal Independence Payments, Welfare Reform and the Shrinking Disability Category,” Disability & Society 30 no.5 (2015): 673–688. Tracy Jensen, “Welfare Commonsense, Poverty Porn and Doxosophy,” Sociological Research Online 19 no.3 (2014): 277–283. Emma Briant, Nick Watson, and Gregory Philo, “Reporting disability in the age of austerity: the changing face of media representation of disability and disabled people in the United Kingdom and the creation of new ‘folk devils,’” Disability & Society 28 no.6 (2013): 874–889. Roulstone, “Personal Independence Payments, Welfare Reform and the Shrinking Disability Category,” 675. Deborah Stone, The Disabled State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984). Liz Crow, “Scroungers and Superhumans: Images of Disability from the Summer of 2012: A Visual Inquiry,” Journal of Visual Culture 13 no.2 (2014): 174. Roulstone, “Personal Independence Payments, Welfare Reform and the Shrinking Disability Category”. Tom Griffiths and Terry Patterson, “Work Capability Assessment Concerns,” Journal of Poverty and Social Justice 22 no.1 (2014): 59–70. Chris Grover and Linda Piggott, “Employment and Support Allowance: capability, personalization and disabled people in the UK,” Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research 15 no.2 (2013): 170–184. Crow, “Scroungers and Superhumans,” 174.

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the assessments set up a rigid category of ‘disability’ that deliberately refuses to recognise the complexities of embodied lived experiences. In the previous chapter, I noted the story of a PTC testifying commissioner who felt that their assessment had the “starting point of assuming the disabled person is faking it or lying”, and they noted that “the government doesn’t understand what the life of a disabled person can entail”. This is echoed in the testimony of another PTC testifying commissioner, Jane. Having attended the initial Connecting Stories workshop, Jane was keen to participate further but unable to do so due to ongoing health concerns. However, she had previously written up her experiences of a disability assessment for speaking at an event, and—with her permission—this text provided a way to include her experiences in the exhibition and this research. In relating her experiences of a “humiliating” disability assessment, Jane describes her chronic, fluctuating condition: “one day I can be OK, and then the next my feet are too sore to walk, and I feel so unwell I have to get helped home”. This is not something that other people notice: “people look at the face, but they don’t always see the pain inside”. Jane relates taking x-rays of her spine along to the assessment, but the assessor stated, “I don’t need to look at that”; Jane then pointed out to the assessor her damaged vertebrae on the x-ray. Ultimately, Jane was found ‘fit for work’: In the letter there’s nothing about the x-rays I brought in, nothing about my back at all. It said I was sitting quite comfortably during the interview, that I didn’t look in pain… What fully got me was it said, ‘she was a very smartly groomed lady’. That really hurt me. I’d got that jacket out of a charity shop and felt good in it… And she was judging me for being smart. This highlights the assumptions made about disability, and disabled people. Liz Crow argues that political and public discourses shape perceptions of “disability”, creating a “picture in the mind” for assessors and the public of what it is to be “disabled”.12 This is reinforced through media reporting, with the notion of a ‘visually identifiable’ disability affecting this “picture in the mind” of assessors and the public. In a study of UK media coverage of disability, young people with ‘identifiable’ impairments were described as “brave” and “inspiring”, whilst people with mental health conditions, chronic pain, and

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Crow, “Scroungers and Superhumans,” 174.

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unseen illnesses were considered “greedy fraudsters”.13 In the absence of ‘identifiable’ impairments, disability is unrecognisable to neighbours and assessors. This means that those with impairments are often “scared to be seen managing to get about”—or to look smartly groomed—“as if this is somehow a criminal activity, proving we were cheats all along”.14 As Crow summarises: “it’s a system that is entwined with that public/private divide, judging a group of people on their public presentation and therefore failing to meet their needs”.15 These assessments are therefore an example of two interrelated elements of cultures of judgement and disbelief: frameworks for understanding embodied experiences have developed out of a straightforward mechanistic understanding of bodies, and therefore bodies and lives with illness, pain, and complexity do not register in these systems. As a result, people’s accounts of their own lived experiences are questioned and denied precisely because these categories and containers cannot hold such fluctuations and contradictions. Family Cap and Rape Clause The two-child limit on tax credits was announced in then-chancellor George Osborne’s 2015 budget, and came into force on 6th April 2017. This sees benefits payments for children limited to the first two children in a family if the third child was born after April 2017, often referred to as ‘the family cap’. The exemptions to this include multiple births, kinship care, and children conceived as a result of rape or coercion, known as ‘the rape clause’. By November 2019, around 76,000 families were subject to the cap, the majority of these being single parents.16 Campaigners against the family cap noted the likelihood of a disproportionate impact on communities where larger households

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Emma Briant, Nick Watson, and Gregory Philo, Bad News for Disabled People: How the Newspapers are Reporting Disability, (Strathclyde Centre for Disability Research and Glasgow Media Unit, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, 2011), 53. Merry Cross, “Demonised, impoverished and now forced into isolation: the fate of disabled people under austerity,” Disability & Society 28 no.5 (2013): 722. Lucy Burke and Liz Crow, “Bedding Out: Art, Activism and Twitter,” in Disability and Social Media: Global Perspectives, ed. Katie Ellis and Mike Kent (London: Routlege, 2017) Available at: http://www.roaring-girl.com/work/bedding-art-activism-twitter. Accessed 30th Dec 2020. Ruth Patrick, Aaron Reeves, and Kitty Stewart, “COVID-19 and low-income families: The government must lift the benefit cap and remove the two-child limit,” LSE Blog, 12th May 2020. Available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/covid19-children -welfare/. Accessed 30th Dec 2020.

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are more usual, including some Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities, religious communities, and refugee families. Although I focus this discussion on the rape clause, it is important to be clear that this is not to suggest that the family cap should remain without the rape clause. The process of claiming this exemption involves a form—with the title in large bold letters—requiring claimants to fill in their own details, those of the child, and a statement to declare they are not living with the biological parent. The final part of the form is a third-party professional declaration, to be completed by a healthcare professional, a registered social worker, or a support worker from an approved organisation, typically women’s support and rape crisis centres. Here, the third party professional is required to tick boxes to confirm that the “claimant’s circumstances, as described by them are consistent with…” either “it being likely that the claimant conceived through an act by another person to which the claimant did not agree by choice” or “it being likely that the claimant conceived through an act by another person to which the claimant lacked the freedom or capacity to agree by choice”.17 The form also details various further options surrounding control and coercion. In asking the claimant to state that they are no longer living with a controlling or abusive partner, there is a failure to understand various pressures—including financial pressures—women face when leaving domestic situations, especially in the wake of austerity cuts to survivor’s services. As a result, the form, and subsequent financial support, rests on the third party professional’s declaration of the consistency of the claimant’s statement concerning the circumstances in which the child was conceived. Official figures suggest that by mid 2020, around 900 women have had to disclose that their child was conceived as a result of coercion or rape.18 The requirements of the rape clause put pressure on people not only to disclose traumatic experiences in a format and at a time not chosen by them, but also to narrate their experiences in a particular way in order to be believed and thus receive support. The ‘believability’ of accounts must be put into context of how survivors’ narratives are received in the UK and are shaped by cultural views about sexual assault. Typically, when survivors of rape come

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Department of Work and Pensions, “Support for a child conceived without your consent form,” 3. Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/ system/uploads/attachment_data/file/810750/form-ncc1-support-for-a-child-concievedwithout-your-consent-0619.pdf. Accessed 30th Dec 2020. Patrick Butler, “Data shows 900 women in UK affected by benefit cap ‘rape clause,’” The Guardian, 17th July 2020. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jul/ 17/data-shows-900-women-in-uk-affected-by-tax-credit-clause. Accessed 30th Dec 2020.

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forward, they face re-traumatisation in being met with doubt and blame, with their account being “categorized within the mad, the untrue, or the incredible”.19 Survivors’ own actions, appearance, dress, behaviour and sexual history are often recounted in ways that blame them for what happened, and often construct sexual assault and coercion as the act of strangers rather than those known to or living with survivors. Furthermore, the accounts from survivors may not fit standard notions of ‘believable’ accounts. Tara Roeder notes that survivors “who choose to make their stories public… will find themselves under intense pressure to tell clear, concise, and coherent accounts of the violence they have undergone”.20 Set in this light, the policy assumes that such trauma can be straightforwardly narrated: that stable, transparent accounts can be easily produced and agreed upon, and ultimately it risks belief and support resting on a person’s ability to disclose trauma in these particular ways. Alongside the cultural discourse surrounding sexual assault, it is also important to place the family cap and rape clause in the context of austerity discourses surrounding gender, family, and work. The apparent justification for the family cap is seen in then-Prime Minister Theresa May’s statement that was echoed elsewhere: “We believe that people who are in work have to make the same decisions as those people who are out of work, so that people who are on benefits should have to decide whether they can afford more children, just as people in work have to make such a decision”.21 This places those in work against those receiving benefits, despite analysis at the time showing that the majority of those who claim child tax credits are in work.22 Again, images of in-work poverty do not surface in political and media discourses. As a result, statements about the financial responsibility of having a child evoke the stereotypes about the ‘benefits mum’: the image of a mother, typically a single mother with several children, ‘living off’ child benefit. Jensen and Tyler offer an analysis of the “benefit brood”, which they see as a “cultural figuration of disgust aimed at families that are deemed to have become ‘excessively’ large as a result of over-generous welfare entitlements … parents are regarded

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Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray, “Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation?” Signs 18 no.2 (1993): 267. Tara Roeder, “‘You Have to Confess’: Rape and the Politics of Storytelling,” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 9 (2015): 18. Theresa May, Parliamentary debate 26th April 2017, Hansard Volume 624. Policy in Practice, “The impact of the two-child limit to tax credits,” Briefing Paper, 2017. Available at: http://policyinpractice.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Limiting -Child-Tax-Credits-to-Two-Children_PIP_Briefing-Paper_April2017.pdf. Accessed 30th Dec 2020.

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as almost pathologically fertile in their desire to secure greater amounts of welfare payments by having more and more children”.23 The family cap and rape clause demonstrate the need for an analysis of class and gender in understanding power dynamics in situations of testimonies of lived experience. It highlights the overlap between cultures of what Jensen and Tyler term “anti-welfare commonsense” in stigmatising those who are seen to “rely” on benefits to raise their children, and also patriarchal cultures that perpetuate myths of women being to blame for sexual assault.24 The result is a site of judgement over survivors’ experiences in the wake of trauma. It also highlights where lived experiences can be demanded from those in positions of marginalisation, problematising how lived experiences are often positively positioned as building relationships and creating change. Thus, whilst PTC have campaigned around the rape clause, they have not asked people to speak from experience on this issue, and in my research I did not ask for lived experiences on this issue to include here. The Asylum System and Refugee Experiences The UK asylum system operates as form of judgement over refugees’ lived experiences in determining who can access forms of safety. Since the 1990s, the asylum system in the UK has moved from a focus on extending rights to and ensuring the safety of refugees to a focus on prevention in which asylum seekers are portrayed as “deceptive and undeserving individuals and as potential threats to the social, cultural, and economic security of the state”.25 UK immigration policy has thus taken an increasingly strong approach to detention and deportation alongside a “persecutory regime of welfare disentitlement and social exclusion for those who have managed to gain access”, resulting in increased destitution amongst asylum seekers.26 As part of this ‘hostile environment’, asylum seekers have been labelled as a ‘drain on society’ and framed through explicitly racist and anti-immigration messages that create the figure of the ‘bogus’ asylum claimant. In constructing a discourse of the “bogus asylum seeker as a figure of hate”, an uncertainty is introduced: “how can we

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Tracy Jensen and Imogen Tyler, “Benefits broods: The cultural and political crafting of anti-welfare commonsense,” Critical Social Policy 35 no.4 (2015): 479. Jensen and Tyler, “Benefits broods.” Olga Jubany, Screening Asylum in a Culture of Disbelief: Truths, Denials and Skeptical Borders (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 8. Roger Zetter and Martyn Pearl, “The Minority within the Minority: Refugee CommunityBased Organisations in the UK and the Impact of Restrictionism on Asylum-Seekers,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 26 no.4 (2000): 675.

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tell the difference between a bogus and a genuine asylum seeker?” which is swiftly converted “into the possibility that any of those incoming bodies may be bogus”.27 As such, all those seeking refuge are met by what commentators term a ‘culture of disbelief’ in the determination system, where it is assumed that refugees are lying about their status of being refugees until they are able to prove otherwise.28 The UK asylum system is premised on the basis of this determination scheme: the notion that people claiming refuge are not ‘true refugees’ and are deemed ‘asylum seekers’ until the government can determine whether they ‘deserve’ to have refugee rights and protections extended to them. The ‘proof’ largely rests on the person’s ability to perform an ‘authentic’ and ‘believable’ narrative of persecution and/or forced departure. This narrative is scrutinised to assess the coherence and plausibility of the account, and assessments are carried out; for example, in comparing accounts of torture or sexual violence to medical examinations or through ‘forensic listening’ that aims to determine the geographic origin of a person’s language and accent.29 As “asylum seekers are treated as a suspect group, the conditions of hearing are structured around a lack of belief in their credibility”, meaning that these “conditions of hearing such testimonial speech within this culture of disbelief are suspicious at best, if not hostile”.30 Responding to this pervasive ‘culture of disbelief’ and rising anti-immigration and racist attitudes in the UK, many charities and humanitarian campaigns attempt to intervene through circulating narratives of refugee trauma and victimhood.31 Paradoxically, this approach attempts to address refugee treatment “by situating their appeals within the language of the law which they nevertheless contest”.32 This reinforces notions of deserving/undeserving 27 28

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Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 79 no.22 (2004): 122. Alison Jeffers, “Dirty truth: personal narrative, victimhood and participatory theatre work with people seeking asylum,” Research in Drama Education 13 no.2 (2008): 218. Nando Sigona, “The Politics of Refugee Voices: Representations, Narratives, and Memories,” in The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, ed. Elena FiddianQasmiyeh, Gil Loescher, Katy Long, and Nando Sigona (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 374. Sigona, “The Politics of Refugee Voices,” 374. Jubany, Screening Asylum in a Culture of Disbelief. Anika Marschall, “‘To Speak the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth’: About Political Performances of Listening,” Platform 11 (2017): 67–87. Sarah Gibson, “Testimony in a Culture of Disbelief: Asylum Hearings and the Impossibility of Bearing Witness,” Journal for Cultural Research 17 no.1 (2013): 8, 5. Jeffers, “Dirty Truth,” 219. Sigona, “The Politics of Refugee Voices,” 372. Imogen Tyler, “‘Welcome to Britain’: The cultural politics of asylum,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 9 no.2 (2006): 196.

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immigrants, and of a consistent, standardised ‘refugee experience’ rather than drawing attention to the variety of political circumstances which give rise to a plurality of diverse refugee voices and experiences.33 Narratives of victimhood are also problematic in their denial of the critical capacities of refugees, resulting in framing refugees as ‘dependant’ rather than equal partners in practices of political solidarity.34 The previous chapter detailed sections of Victoire’s story, including her experience of telling the UK Border Agency of her claim to refugee status: “I opened my heart, told them the whole story. They told me everything I said was a lie”. In sharing these experiences, and in what she shared in the planning of Connecting Stories, Victoire described the impact on her physical and mental health due to this denial of her experiences, of being placed in a detention centre, going through the asylum system. As a woman of West African origin, once having been granted ‘leave to remain’ she also encountered structural racism in seeking housing. Furthermore, during PTC’s fourth round, commissioners testified to experiences of seeking asylum, encountering destitution, racism, housing issues, and deteriorating mental health in the process. In this commission, and the Denial of Dignity event mentioned in chapter one, it was recognised that many of these experiences could not be shared in public by those in the asylum system as this may negatively impact the outcome of their cases. This raises questions about prioritising face-to-face practices of sharing lived experiences, highlighting where this may be damaging or unhelpful for those sharing in public, as I explore further in chapter six.

Testimonial Spaces Cultures of disbelief and judgement impact how lived experiences are understood and responded to when people share their experiences at public events or with policymakers. I noted above how political and media rhetoric shapes public perceptions of being ‘truly disabled’, ‘the deserving poor’, or a ‘real refugee’. In chapter one, I quoted from Rhiannon, an anti-poverty activist, and her comments on experiencing stigma: we’re just examples of the millions of people in poverty out there, who walk past papers like the Daily Mail and see words like feckless parents

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Sigona, “The Politics of Refugee Voices.” Sigona, “The Politics of Refugee Voices,” 372. Jeffers, “Dirty Truth,” 220.

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or feral children, scroungers, skivers, and you think “that’s me they are talking about, that hurts, how dare they”. But they dare, because we’re poor, and we don’t have the voice of the media behind us. So, they can get away with calling us what they like.35 Rhiannon went on to give an example of speaking at a public event where a man told her that she could not be living in poverty because her shoes were polished, and she wore silver rings.36 She commented: that anticipation that we should wear sackcloth and ashes and rags and have dirty faces stained with tears and that proves we’re in poverty. We don’t give up our dignity to anybody. We carry our dignity and everybody we feel we represent, we carry theirs with us too, and we don’t allow other people to take that away from us.37 Similar to appearing “smartly groomed” at a disability assessment, public perceptions of poverty can result in a person’s experiences being denied and disbelieved because they are judged not to conform to the image of what living in poverty should look like. PTC commissioners also gave examples of situations in which those in power did not always ‘listen well’ to commissioners’ lived experiences, even when aiming to be sympathetic or supportive. In chapter one, I noted the example of a testifying commissioner being told “I’ve heard that story before” when sharing their experiences, indicating where those with power and privilege can treat people’s experiences simply as information for their own academic or policy research. Additionally, commissioners discussed sharing their experiences of benefits assessments or school uniform grants and being met with responses that “there must be a mistake in the system” or not having applied for the “right” grants, alongside suggestions of information and support services. Testifying commissioners explained that sometimes those in positions of power made suggestions along the lines of “budgeting skills” or “cookery classes”, suggestions stemming from the assumption that people are in poverty because they lack skills or mismanage money, rather that due to structural inequalities. In these situations, those in positions of power might be reminded that they are not there to ‘fix’ people. These indicate that the

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19th May 2016 Transcript, 22. 19th May 2016 Transcript, 26. 19th May 2016 Transcript, 27.

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position of ‘listening’ can be dangerously aligned with notions of judging the experiences being shared. Such positions fail to recognise the everyday creativity of grassroots communities in surviving, struggling-against, and speaking out about these experiences. These examples demonstrate where practices of sharing lived experiences need to address existing dynamics of power and privilege, otherwise inequalities and assumptions can be reinforced. Disability theologian Sharon Betcher identifies the “politics of compassion” in which the responsibility and desire to help is conceived of as the power to judge, fix, and cure others, particularly “disabled and colonised others”.38 Such seemingly ‘benevolent’ acts typically judge others’ situations and needs “without having to encounter their own implication in the social patterns that assign the problem to these others”.39 Betcher suggests the need to “theologize redemption without emplotting the redemptive encounter as the remediation of defect, remediation that hides the power to judge”.40 Similarly, trauma theorists discuss situations in which the responses of the listener can serve to further stigmatise or silence those sharing their experiences. What can look like compassion or empathy can be a defensive action causing a listener to avoid fully engaging with a witness and their experiences.41 Rosanne Kennedy and Tikka Jan Wilson critique how trauma theory, informed by the psychoanalytic relationship between “patient and analyst”, can locate the witness in the subject position of “passive victim” and the reader as “knowledgeable expert” who analyses the testimony for signs of trauma.42 They argue that whilst this approach has been “effective for accessing the testimonial insights of aesthetic texts”, it is less useful for approaching “voices often excluded from the Western category of ‘literature’”, such as testimonies from the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal people.43 Kennedy and Wilson con38 39

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Sharon Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 108. Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement, 107. Quoting Sherene Razak, Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 138. Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement, 110. Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992). Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Rosanne Kennedy and Tikka Jan Wilson, “Constructing Shared Histories: Stolen Generations Testimony, Narrative Therapy and Address,” in World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time, ed. Jill Bennett and Rosanne Kennedy (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Kennedy and Wilson, “Constructing Shared Histories,” 121, 125.

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sider that these testimonies need to be read as making political claims and actively intervening into power relations between the narrator and the listener/reader, challenging “the reader to imagine herself in the ethically and politically complex position of the bystander or potential collaborator”, a much more “compromising and unsettling” position.44 Such a position requires the listener/reader to consider their own situated location in these ongoing cultures of judgement and disbelief, and recognise the resistant, embodied everyday knowledges of those sharing.

Judgement and Disbelief as Social and Material Drawing on the experiences shared in this research, I have outlined the operation of cultures of judgement and disbelief in areas of disability benefits, the asylum system, and testimonial spaces. These indicate both a distinction between those in power who are often in positions to judge marginalised experiences, and also the construction of a binary of ‘deserving/undeserving poor’; these elements reinforce one another. Both of these elements are at work in the ongoing treatment of the Grenfell community following the events of the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017 in which 72 people lost their lives. The “disconnect between poverty and wealth and bodies of power and powerlessness was thrown into sharp relief” when it emerged that the Grenfell Action Group had made the Kensington and Chelsea Council aware of the dangerous living conditions in the building in November 2016, with residents feeling that their concerns were not listened to nor acted upon.45 These power discrepancies have continued into the public inquiry into the events, the location and format of the inquiry serving to make survivors and residents feel intimidated and unimportant, especially when there are significant delays in residents being rehoused. As the inquiry goes on, it has been discovered that many of the files relating to the cladding refit of Grenfell—which is thought to have exacerbated of the spread of the fire—had been lost by the building firm, unavailable for evidence in the inquiry.46

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Kennedy and Wilson, “Constructing Shared Histories,” 129, emphasis mine. Tracy Shildrick, “Lessons from Grenfell: Poverty propaganda, stigma and class power.” The Sociological Review Monographs 66 no.4 (2018): 792. ITV News, “Grenfell files ‘lost forever’ after laptop wiped, inquiry hears,” 14th September 2020. Available at: https://www.itv.com/news/london/2020-09-14/grenfell-files-lost -forever-after-laptop-wiped-inquiry-hears. Accessed 30th Dec 2020. BBC News, “Grenfell Tower: Police to look into ‘binned’ refurbishment records,” 20th October 2020. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54616117. Accessed 30th Dec 2020.

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In a sequence of poems on Grenfell, Roger Robinson highlights the passing of blame between politicians, local council, and contractors. He writes: Meantime its tenants are left to grieve in sterile hotels, with nothing to bury but ash, and survivors walk like zombies trying not to look up at the charred gravestone. People still cry. Nobody took the blame.47 Robinson’s collection A Portable Paradise reflects on how legacies of class, race, and colonialism in the UK have resulted in continued misrecognition and harms to the British Caribbean community and other marginalised communities. He explores how such political relations influence what it means to speak of theological notions of hope, promise, and paradise; notions related to ideas of hope for transformation that are explored in the next chapter. For example, the collection reflects on the promises made to the Windrush generation who arrived in the UK as British Citizens but were denied jobs and housing, and they and their families continue to have their citizenship denied because the legacies of colonialism and racism influence the British social imagination. However his poetry also suggests the notion that paradise, as advised by his grandmother, is to be concealed on your person so it cannot be taken from you.48 In an interview, he states, “I thought I’d look at the utopian idea of paradise, which is so important in this country, and then it began to mean a lot of different things—hope for my son, and the paradise that was denied to the people of Grenfell who had come looking to build theirs here and died because they weren’t in a position to do so.”49 His poetry also includes fragments of prayers of those in situations of desperation, including his own prayers for his prematurely-born son, and the prayers of the people of Grenfell. In arguing that notions of deserving and undeserving poor have always been racialised and constructed through histories of colonialism, Robbie

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Roger Robinson, “Blame,” in A Portable Paradise (London: Peepal Tree Press, 2019), 14. See “Windrush” and “Portable Paradise” in A Portable Paradise, 27, 81. Claire Armitstead, “Interview: TS Eliot prize-winner Roger Robinson: ‘I want these poems to help people to practise empathy,’” The Guardian 16th January 2020. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/16/ts-eliot-prize-winner -roger-robinson. Accessed 30th Dec 2020.

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Shilliam considers where the Grenfell fire brought together various factors around the notion of ‘undeserving poor’. Grenfell was home to a multi-lingual, multi-faith, multi-racial community of people, many of whom were also disabled. Access to social housing in the UK remains racialised, with Black, Asian, and minority ethnic people more likely to be in overcrowded and poor-quality housing, such as Grenfell.50 Shilliam argues that the multi-racial, multi-faith nature of Grenfell was part of what led to the labelling and assumption of ‘undeserving poor’, despite the majority of residents being in work, despite Grenfell being home to internationally recognised artist Khadija Saye who died in the fire, and despite Grenfell residents engaging in community activist traditions of “informed and articulate critical citizenship”.51 This labelling and stereotyping of Grenfell residents continued in the surfacing of a video online of a group of men burning an effigy of Grenfell Tower on Fireworks Night in 2018, their laughter and racist, mocking comments clearly audible. Natasha Elcock, survivor and chair of Grenfell United suggests that misconceptions present in the mocking comments in the video, such as the idea that “those in social housing don’t pay rent” or there being an “amnesty for illegal immigrants”, are perpetuated by stereotypes around class, race, religion, immigration, and disability. She notes, “I feel like we have been fighting this judgement from day one. Although we’d rather focus on justice and change, our fight is also about being treated with dignity”.52 Calling for the need to move away from moralising and romanticised views of those experiencing poverty, Shilliam seeks a focus on the resistances created by those who have been “punished as undeserving but who have refused such a system of classification”.53 These events and policies demonstrate where cultures of judgement and disbelief determine both access to socio-economic resources—safety, money, food, shelter—and also discursive assumptions about who counts as a ‘credible witness’ with valid experiences. In this way, material and discursive elements shape one another, highlighting that “social myths and stories may seem abstract and immaterial, but they constitute bodies as much as the material elements that nourish or poison their flesh”.54 However, this also shows 50 51 52

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Robbie Shilliam, Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit (Newcastle: Agenda Publishing, 2018), 170. Shilliam, Race and the Undeserving Poor, 171. Natasha Elcock, “I survived Grenfell. There is enough pain, we don’t deserve to be mocked,” The Guardian. 6th November 2018. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2018/nov/06/grenfell-bonfire-video. Accessed 1st Jan 2021. Shilliam, Race and the Undeserving Poor, 181. Mayra Rivera, “Flesh of the World: Corporeality in Relation,” Concilium 2013 no.2: 54.

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the challenges of sharing lived experiences as a basis for change, illustrating where narratives are often demanded from people in situations where they are treated with suspicion and judgement—whether at the Border Agency, in Jobcentres and disability assessments, or at public events and public inquiries. Practices that aim to be transformative of inequality and oppression therefore need to account for where they are also shaped by such cultures of judgement and disbelief: for example, in sharing lived experiences in ways that aim to relocate certain people and groups into the ‘deserving poor’ and ‘valuable citizen’ categories rather than actively working against the ‘deserving/undeserving’ binary. It is in recognising the influence of such cultures that it might become possible to enact disruptive interventions through sharing lived experiences in ways that challenge the norms of austerity cultures of judgement.

Art-Activism as Creative Interventions Here, I explore artistic-activist practices that shape spaces open to multiple lived experiences and invite listeners into positions of collaboration rather than judgement. I focus first on artist-activist Liz Crow’s Figures (2015). Crow’s work is relevant here as her creative practices, including academic publications, have contributed to the disability movement’s critique of the impact of austerity on disabled people, as outlined above. I then move to discuss Connecting Stories, the collaborative project with PTC, for which Crow’s work served as an inspiration as the planning group discussed this work and its impact. Figures In March 2015, Liz Crow began Figures by excavating mud from the banks of the River Avon in Bristol. Using this clay, she sculpted 650 figures over eleven days and nights on the foreshore of central London, moving with the tides of the River Thames. The figures represented people impacted by austerity, with 650 being the number of constituencies in the UK represented in the Westminster Parliament. The figures were toured in a mobile exhibition in the days preceding the 2015 general election, and, on the eve of the election, the figures were returned to the Bristol foreshore, raised into a cairn and burned through the night, until the incoming tide doused the flames. During the making and firing stages, 650 “stories from austerity” were read out. These were short fragments describing a range of experiences surrounding austerity: the impact of benefits cuts, the bedroom tax, and sanctions. The burnt figures were then

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gathered and ground to dust, and on the state opening of parliament these ashes were scattered back into the waters. Aiming to “make visible the human cost of austerity” and urge action against it, the piece integrated various material, narrative, and performance elements.55 Crow argues that “where Figures takes place through the clay and landscape, the narratives and the reading aloud, the performance and conversations, people can connect to its ideas through that range of media and activity”.56 As with Crow’s other performance pieces such as Bedding Out (2012–2013), conversations with the public were a central part of the performance, from a small group of men sleeping rough on the foreshore, to well-dressed city workers and local shopkeepers, and Crow notes that her presence in making the figures drew people in.57 Whilst these conversations were hoped for, they could not be scripted or entirely anticipated, resulting in an open-ended performance: “what exactly was ‘accomplished’ by Figures would be determined by the multiple and unexpected ways that people interacted with it as it unfolded”.58 Integral to Figures is the creation of tension between the universal and specific nature of the figures, narratives, and performance. The simple sculptured figures, which bear similarity to those in Anthony Gormley’s Field (1991), were intended as the “everyperson”, as Crow notes there were no “readable” signs of gender, ethnicity, or impairment.59 Whilst I recognise Crow’s purpose in this, I remain critical of the notion of being able to remove these aspects of how we see each other and ourselves. Crow explains that in choosing the 650 stories to read out, she wanted to have a broad range of experiences so that it was possible to take those stories to anybody and have them find some link to themselves. Even if they aren’t directly affected by austerity, they should

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Images, text, and audio from Figures are available at: http://wearefigures.co.uk. Accessed 29th Dec 2020. Liz Crow and Keren Zaiontz, 2016. “The Aesthetics of Austerity: A conversation with Liz Crow.” Public 53 no.1 (2016): 11. Available at: http://www.roaring-girl.com/work/aesthetics -austerity-conversation-liz-crow/. Accessed 14th March 2019. Crow and Zaiontz, “The Aesthetics of Austerity,” 8. Lucy Burke and Liz Crow, “Bedding Out: Art, Activism and Twitter,” in Disability and Social Media: Global Perspectives, ed. Katie Ellis and Mike Kent (London: Routlege, 2017). Available at: http://www.roaring-girl .com/work/bedding-art-activism-twitter. Accessed 30th Dec 2020. Robert McRuer, Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 202. Crow and Zaiontz, “The Aesthetics of Austerity,” 10.

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be able to find some level of representation of their own experience. It’s another way to open as many doors as possible for people to approach the subject.60 Yet, whilst Crow wanted a broad range of experiences in these 650 stories, she also makes clear their connection to particular individuals. She states: “each individual figure is rooted in a specific narrative taken from traceable stories in the public domain”.61 During the exhibition stage recorded responses also indicate visitor’s ‘readings’ of specific experiences into the clay figures; for example, one person wrote about a specific figure reminding them of their grandmother, for whom they were a carer and their concerns about the impact of austerity on receiving carer’s allowance.62 These specific experiences— whether those read out loud, those documented by the public, or those in the many conversations—enabled Figures to serve as a record of the “cumulative impact of austerity, not so much in statistical terms, but through flesh and blood”, a memorial of “events already in progress” whilst also attempting to “arrest that process”.63 Navigating the presentation of lived experiences of austerity in Figures was crucial to the piece, especially due to media and political stigma highlighted above. Keen to offer counter-images to the labelling of disabled people as “scroungers” and “frauds”, Crow recognised the need to challenge certain other cultural narratives such as those of “disabled person as victim”.64 Discussing Crow’s work, Lucy Burke explains: The circulation of tragic stories such as that of former solider David Clapson who died, alone and hungry from diabetic ketoacidosis, having had his benefits stopped entirely for missing two Jobcentre appointments is evidence of the impact of sanctions upon people who are already in a structurally vulnerable position (The Guardian 03/08/14). However, these stories necessarily foreground individual tragedy, victimhood and despair to make this point rather than fundamentally challenge the neoliberal ideological framework that produces people with additional needs as a drain on limited resources, deserving (i.e. tragic) or undeserving and so on.65 60 61 62 63 64 65

Crow and Zaiontz, “The Aesthetics of Austerity,” 10. Crow and Zaiontz, “The Aesthetics of Austerity,” 10. McRuer, Crip Times, 204. Crow and Zaiontz, “The Aesthetics of Austerity,” 11. Crow, “Scroungers and Superhumans,” 170. Burke and Crow, “Bedding Out,” 62.

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In contrast, Crow suggests constructing different images to question those of “fraud” or “victim”, such as those of “ordinary disabled people”—images that reflect dignity and worth. Images of communities campaigning and protesting against austerity show “skills and strategies amassed, abiding compassion, organisation and resilience” alongside “imagination and humour, alliances built, agendas shaped, the bearing of witness and the feeding of courage”.66 For Crow, these images of a community of campaigners “tell a different story, to question the imperative of conforming to an impossible image”.67 I see in Figures a theological element, particularly in the movement from sculpting through to firing and scattering the clay. Making the figures from earth, returning them as dust—“for dust you are, and to dust you will return” (Gen. 3.19)—emphasises the fragility of all created life and embodied experience. Yet, the specific experiences highlighted throughout Figures indicate where particular political circumstances are creating conditions in which certain bodies and lives are being made more precarious, more fragile than others. A direct statement emerges through Figures, drawing attention to the particular experiences of marginalisation under austerity whilst not reducing those lives to being defined by these experiences. McRuer summarises: “the beauty of Crow’s 650 figures, to me, lies in their haunting abstraction and the ways in which they both represent and can never fully represent the lives of those whose stories are included in the performance”.68 In this way, the piece speaks to the ungraspable excess, the irreducible alterity encountered in others. Engaging these fragile, unpredictable encounters—through the materials and the landscape, the narratives and the conversations—enacts transformation. Crow identifies the promise of “dwelling space activism”, defining this as “a space that supports and nurtures change, it’s a space where you practice the change you want to see”.69 This requires performing “the values that you’re working toward even as you work towards them”.70 However, Crow recognises the ambivalent nature of “dwelling space activism’” in the sense that, whilst offering potential for change, there are huge demands placed on individuals in working against oppressive socio-material conditions. She notes her realisation that “impairment-wise… my own art-activism places me outside the dwelling space because the extreme demands it makes upon me” and she reflects that this is “a paradox I’ve yet to resolve”.71 66 67 68 69 70 71

Crow, “Scroungers and Superhumans,” 178. Crow, “Scroungers and Superhumans,” 176. McRuer, Crip Times, 210, emphasis in original. Crow and Zaiontz, “The Aesthetics of Austerity,” 9. Crow and Zaiontz, “The Aesthetics of Austerity,” 9. Crow and Zaiontz, “The Aesthetics of Austerity,” 9.

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Connecting Stories Connecting Stories—as referring to the planning group, the creative workshops, and the exhibition, the focus of chapter three of this book—reflected on the practice of sharing lived experiences in the context of austerity. It aimed to offer a creative intervention into how lived experiences of poverty were being misrecognised and misinterpreted by political leaders and the wider public by materialising an alternative way of presenting and engaging with PTC members’ experiences. In doing so, Connecting Stories reflected much of PTC’s values and practices in sharing lived experiences for social change. In the planning group, I asked the participants whether the Connecting Stories project should be part of my academic research or not, making it clear to them that the unusual funding to be a “researcher-in-residence” meant that if they did not want the project to be part of my academic research, the resources and my time would still be available. Fiona, Kitty, and Victoire discussed their feeling that it was important for Connecting Stories to be part of scholarly research because they agreed that academic systems of research and knowledge-making needed to learn from and with commissioners and their approaches to grassroots activism. Furthermore, as a collaborative project, it reflected the connections between collaboration and creative arts-based research approaches, emphasising that the “deep listening” and respect between research collaborators is what facilitates the development of artistic pieces.72 Vital to PTC’s work is cultivating spaces for people to share their everyday lived experiences. In particular, the cups of tea at the beginning of sessions, the ‘icebreakers’, and the welcomes that invite people to share how they are feeling all create an informal, relational setting. I witnessed the importance of this in sessions such as the Mutual Mentoring scheme for civil servants, where those in positions of power were inducted into this way of working, but also in writing workshops and commission lunches where people were already familiar with one another and with PTC’s work. These practices set out a way of encountering and being together that is continued through the rest of the session. In the previous chapter, I indicated where Kitty and Victoire shared their current experiences in these elements of the planning meetings, whether in struggling with chronic illness or in stating “my joy is coming back to me”. These practices that set the tone for the sessions are easily overlooked, they can be thought of as mundane, too obvious, or ‘not the point’ of meet72

Laura Brearley and Treahna Hamm, “Ways of Looking and Listening: Stories from the Spaces Between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Knowledge Systems,” in Creative Arts Research: Narratives of Methodologies and Practices, edited by Elizabeth Grierson and Laura Brearley (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2009).

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ing together and sharing experiences. However, as will be explored in the next chapter, it is these often-overlooked practices that are crucial for transforming cultures: in this case, shaping spaces in which people are recognised and treated with respect. Beginning with everyday lived experiences enables a focus on the complexity of commissioners’ lives. Over a cup of tea at the beginning of one of the Connecting Stories sessions, Mary shared her recent issues with a broken washing machine; it was simply what had been happening in her life rather than a response to a particular question or prompt. I asked her to return to this when we were making pieces for the exhibition. She scribbled down some words into sparse beats, the economical language lacking a narrative ‘I’ in her telling. I transferred these words to pages of a creative piece, echoing the simplicity of the words in black and white: Crohn’s Disease & Osteoporosis—2 Hot Washes A Day Eats Up My Electric Washing Machine Broke In tears after phoning social fund Treated Disrespectfully Not seen to Count as Disabled Told to try hand washing Cannot due to arthritis MSP helped to fight case on medical grounds New Machine!73 Although I do not want to betray the powerful simplicity of her words, I suggest this is an example of what I noted in chapter two: a fragment of theological praxis in its own right. The fragment is at once ordinary, disruptive, and disclosive—as so many lived experiences of the everyday are. As I noted in chapter one, Mary’s experience invites consideration of the complexities, concerns, and choices of everyday life that can easily be overlooked as a site of theological and political reflection. As Isasi-Díaz states, those of us with resources overlook events such as a broken washing machine as a site of theological reflection precisely because we “often go through the day without having to think much about how to… pay for doing the laundry”.74

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MSP stands for Member of Scottish Parliament. Ada María Isasi-Díaz, “Mujerista Discourse: A Platform for Latinas’ Subjugated Knowledge,” in Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy, ed. Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 52, emphasis mine.

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Broken Washing Machine

What might it mean to reflect theologically and politically from such a fragment? It might mean acknowledging where embodied experiences challenge existing perceptions of ‘disability’ as a theological and political category, particularly where such frameworks cause people with experiences of ‘unseen’ or ‘invisible’ disabilities to be treated as lacking credibility. Whilst I share some of these experiences with Mary, it is important to note that class privileges mean the impact of such embodied experiences are different; whilst I experience food, heating, housing, and laundry as challenging, I mostly have the resources to manage. This creative piece reflects the overlapping, complex, and fluid nature of embodied experiences of chronic conditions: the impact of Crohn’s in needing two hot washes a day, and the suggested ‘solution’ of hand washing being unsuitable due to osteoporosis. Mary’s experience here is also indicative of how austerity demands that bodies and health are often required to fit stable categories, as neither condition nor the overlap of the two are seen as ‘disabled enough’ to qualify for support. This highlights where interactions between poverty and chronic health conditions are often unrecognised by dominant systems, precisely because they are treated as different categories. However, this creative piece also highlights Mary’s experience as an activist in taking steps to resolve the issue. Connecting Stories also reflected PTC’s practices of holding open spaces for a plurality of experiences around various aspects of poverty, refusing the

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notion that poverty is one ‘single issue’. The exhibition reflected this variety of experiences: for example, the tents at the centre of the labyrinth included a range of experiences in different textual forms, from short fragments of pieces like the above, to longer life stories, transcripts from performances, poems, and sections from reports, offering a kaleidoscope of experiences that cannot be reduced to being ‘about’ mental health, homelessness, asylum, kinship care, welfare cuts, or foodbanks. The placement of these lived experiences together, within the labyrinth, invited a way of reading these words with and through one another. Together, these experiences formed a substantial, if temporary and moveable, place of shelter or meeting together in the form of the tents. As such, the format sought to reflect not only the content of people’s experiences, but the ways of meeting and being together as a movement. Furthermore, when focusing on a particular issue—for example, welfare cuts and assessments—the plurality of experiences of commissioners is held together, showing both the impact on a range of different people, and also where this community is listening to and supporting one another. In discussing the process of making the piece Fear of the Brown Envelope, I noted where the creating-curating group talked about their different experiences around benefits assessments, naming the similar emotions around fear, panic, shame, and dread that became stitched to the envelopes. Yet the inserts of the piece held various experiences discussed by the group, indicating where experiences of benefits assessments were different; for example, someone who has become injured and their impairment means they can no longer work has a different experience than someone who has a long-term chronic illness. The piece aimed to hold together points of connection and also differences in experience, reflecting the creative and collaborative sharing taking place in the group. In being made from the everyday objects of the brown envelopes that contain these benefits forms, the piece provided a point of connection that would be familiar to many people whilst also consistently highlighting the particularity of experiences around welfare cuts and assessments. In this way, the significance of the piece resides in its materiality, in making with and re-making the everyday object; recognising the fear and dread this object symbolises for so many people, yet also gesturing to where shared action as a community can be transformative. The Connecting Stories exhibition encouraged interaction and collaboration from those moving through the labyrinth, enabling participants to trace their own threads of meaning. In the previous chapter I noted the labyrinth as a space where people could adapt and improvise their own paths: going alone or in pairs; stopping to sit and chat with others; choosing to read as much as

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Fear of the Brown Envelope insert

possible on the tents or not reading at all. The feedback booklets provided the opportunity for the audience to ‘talk back’ to these creative pieces, and I have noted some of these responses in the previous chapter to indicate participants’ interpretations and the connections formed between different elements of the exhibition.75 One of these short comments from a testifying commissioner indicated their reading of the design of the labyrinth or maze as illustrating “the difficulties of coming out of poverty” and connected this with one of the texts that appeared on the tents: “coming out of homelessness is like trying to climb Ben Nevis in your flip flops”. As this reading of the labyrinth as being like “coming out of poverty” was not one the group creating the exhibition had intended or considered, this highlights the strategies of meaning-making in interpreting the material element of the installation through their own experience and others’ words. This indicates the importance of creating ‘open-ended’ pieces that can evoke multiple meanings, and also shaping spaces that welcome multiple

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Christine Sinding, Ross Gray, and Jeff Nisker, “Ethical Issues and Issues of Ethics,” in Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues, ed. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra L. Cole (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2008), 463.

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ways of relating to and interacting with the pieces. In seeing how people responded to the exhibition, I recognised that by having a collaborative “creating-curating” group, we had also shaped a space in which there were multiple ‘routes’ into the pieces: some viewers preferred to focus on reading texts, others on looking at photographs, and yet others on the physical elements of interacting with the labyrinth and handling small creative pieces like Fear of the Brown Envelope or Broken Washing Machine. Some people wanted to talk to others and give their feedback verbally; others preferred to reflect quietly through the booklets. In this way, Connecting Stories reflected where artistic methods invite both ‘makers’ and ‘viewers’ to be present to a wider range of embodied ways of knowing and to “enter into, stay with and feel what they know” recognising that much of this is “ineffable”.76 In the feedback session, Sandra reflected on how the exhibition had created a space that brought out deeper conversations with others, as she had ended up speaking with another person about death, dying, and grief, a conversation she felt she would not normally have had. On

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Courtney Goto, “Reflecting Theologically by Creating Art: Giving Form to More than We Can Say,” Reflective Practice: Formation and Supervision in Ministry 36 (2016): 86.

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hearing this, Shirley and Mary commented that the exhibition, much like the workshops, couldn’t be “too planned”, precisely because it was about hosting a space in which people were encountering and responding to the creative pieces and one another. However, I noted a difference in the interactions with the exhibition between the first and second days. On the first day we welcomed people who had been commissioners, who were already familiar with the context of PTC’s ways of working. People warmly greeted those they knew and were introduced to those they did not, and everyone met together for lunch and discussion in the midst of the installation. Over lunch, people were asked to comment on their impressions of the exhibition, and most responded with a sense of the creativity of the community, and a sense of hope. There were tears that day, but also a lot of laughter and energy, thoughtfulness, companionship, and solidarity. The second day, we welcomed people from the local community, funders, members of the Scottish Government, and some friends and colleagues. These visitors were less aware of PTC’s work, and often needed an introduction to provide context. The room was overwhelmingly quiet; those who had arrived in pairs walked the labyrinth alone. I saw many people moved to tears and wondered whether—even though we had attempted to convey these relationships and senses of joy and hope as resistance—without the context of the laughter and interactions, the exhibition was overwhelming for others to view. People felt unsure whether they could laugh at the jokes and sarcasm in much of what they encountered and needed to be reminded that they could pick up and interact with items. This raises questions about the challenges of creating spaces in which viewers can be addressed as bystanders and potential collaborators in the political claims of those sharing their experiences. These issues are reflected on further in chapter six.

Creative Interventions in Cultures of Judgement and Disbelief The sharing of lived experiences—as may be practised by activists, artists, journalists, or practical theologians—takes place within these cultures of disbelief and judgement. Although my discussion here is specific to austerity in the UK, I suggest the need to trace in other contexts these forms of material and cultural inequality that shape how other’s lived experiences are responded to and interpreted. As I noted above, even when aiming to address these cultures by sharing lived experiences, this can reinforce the listener or reader as being in a position to ‘judge’ this story, a judgement often based on whether it

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conforms to social narratives and images of what it is to be ‘truly disabled’, in poverty, seeking refuge, or a survivor of sexual violence—‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’. In this way, it is crucial to reflect on how such practices are entangled in the material and discursive aspects of cultures of disbelief and judgement, even as they aim to address socio-economic inequality. As Sharon Betcher suggests, we may be able to offer “pivotal interventions” into this “politics of representation” by questioning the material efficacy of particular symbols and discourses around “who counts”.77 Here, I note three features of the interventions of Figures and Connecting Stories that engage with lived experiences; these features will inform discussions of transformation in the next chapters. Firstly, both Figures and Connecting Stories foregrounded the everyday meaning-making practices of those struggling against injustice. In the first chapter, I highlighted the challenges of those in power determining the meaning of lived experiences apart from the interpretive capacities and practices of grassroots communities. Connecting Stories focused on collaboration, highlighting how activist and academic practices could be situated in the meaning-making processes and everyday experiences of the commissioners. Furthermore, the exhibition itself encouraged viewers to make meaning through connecting the various elements of the exhibition; in facilitating conversations within the installation, and through the feedback booklets. Similarly, Crow’s Figures foregrounded practices of meaning-making in relation to everyday experiences by seeking to hold open multiple routes for people to approach the subject through the different narratives, and by encouraging public engagement in conversations and responses to the touring exhibition. Through this attentiveness to meaning-making capacities in the everyday, creative interventions call into question where cultures of judgement and disbelief deny that those sharing their lived experiences are credible witnesses. By attesting to communities in which people work together to shape and create meanings—in activism and art, in caring for others, in sharing experiences—these poetic interventions disrupt where cultures of judgement and disbelief frame particular individuals and communities as lacking the skills and wisdom to discern and shape the meanings of their experiences. Focusing on meaning-making portrays those sharing their experiences as engaged in this creative work, aware of the political and cultural significance both of their experiences and also their actions in sharing their experiences. Additionally, foregrounding activities of meaning-making highlights where

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Sharon Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 11.

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those responding to others’ experiences are engaged in the process of constructing meaning, influenced by these wider cultural images of disability, poverty, race, gender, immigration, and sexuality. In this, I suggest the need for creative interventions that enable those listening or viewing to be more attentive to their interpretive actions, to where they are taking positions of judgement or the more unsettling and active position of “potential collaborators”.78 However, I also want to suggest that in disrupting cultures of judgement and disbelief, creative interventions recognise where such meanings cannot be made ‘fully present’ to us, but exist in the gaps, silences, and losses. Throughout this book, I have gestured to where experiences cannot be straightforwardly voiced and narrated, made easy for us to ‘handle’. In chapters one and two I noted the importance of poetic attention to what is fragmented, silent, or impossible to know completely. In drawing on Glissant’s poetics, Rivera articulated a responsiveness to “loss and opacity, interruption and silence” recognising that “not-knowing” is not an excuse for indifference, but that we can “sense” what we do not know through poetic practices.79 In the previous chapter, I highlighted where commissioners felt it was impossible to voice their thoughts and experiences, and noting myself, “some days it is just too hard, some days the words don’t come”. I have, at various points in this work, aimed to hold space for these silences, the massive unanswerable questions that are both overwhelming and part of everyday reality; perhaps with less success given the need for demonstration, argument, analysis in academic texts. In an exhibition full of words and images, we also made sure that we marked these silences, although somewhat appropriately there are no photographs documenting the large glass jars with ‘unwritten’ pieces of tracing paper catching the light and creating uncertain shadows. I also suggest that Liz Crow’s Figures, whilst hosting proliferating narratives and conversations, also gestures toward the fragmented and uncontainable through the performance of sculpting, firing, and scattering; evocative and powerful actions that resist assimilation into overarching austerity narratives. A second feature of creative interventions is in holding open a space for the plurality and particularity of voices and experiences. These disrupt where cultures of judgement and disbelief offer limited, stereotyped images of what it is to be ‘in poverty’, ‘disabled’, or a ‘refugee’, rather than recognising where

78 79

Kennedy and Wilson, “Constructing Shared Histories,” 129, emphasis mine. Mayra Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015), 2.

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complex interactions of different aspects of people’s embodied lives and political situations result in multiple different experiences. In chapter two, I discussed how practical theologies often recuperate the disruptive and revelatory nature of lived experiences through abstraction into categories and containers, thus ignoring the political circumstances in which certain bodies become more ‘fragile’ or more ‘vulnerable’ than others. The plurality and particularity of creative interventions refers to both the range of experiences and expressions of those experiences within a community such as PTC, to the relationality and complexity of any individual’s experiences. As I highlighted in discussing Anzaldúa’s work in chapter two, this recognises bodies as being complex, dynamic, and multivalent—“holding together pain and joy, failure and hope”—rather than seeing the “undeniable effects of patterns of social discrimination” that result in pain and difficultly being reducible to “expressions of victimhood or fatalism”.80 The creative transformation of these experiences is not in resolving the complexity and tensions, but in addressing where social structures create systems of inequality that stifle and harm particular groups and individuals, which I explore further in the next chapter. In discussing Figures, I highlighted where the piece provided a platform for multiple, different, and particular experiences of austerity. Central to the piece was the engagement with the invited yet numerous and unpredictable conversations with the public as they unfolded. I also highlighted Crow’s articulation of putting forward the image of the activist community in order to challenge public perceptions of the disabled person as a victim, and this community contains multiple experiences, expressions, skills, and relationships. Connecting Stories held together the different experiences of commissioners in their planning, creating, and curating of the project, alongside the many specific creative pieces arising from commissioners’ everyday experiences, such as those of Jane and Mary included in this chapter. Additionally, the previous chapter held open a space for multiple experiences, from those in the curating-creating group to other commissioners and those interacting with the exhibition, aiming to keep alive the contradictions and ambivalences in these experiences. Finally, creative interventions are performative and ongoing, constantly being re-made. Creative interventions are not a model for providing certain change but require continual engagement with others to shape alternative cultures counter to those of judgement and disbelief. This is highlighted in Crow’s 80

Mayra Rivera, “Thinking Bodies: The Spirit of a Latina Incarnational Imagination,” in Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy, ed. Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 218.

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performance of “dwelling space activism”, which involves modelling the values and desired change; for example, in being a space of conversation and treating others with dignity. Furthermore, the movement through excavating, sculpting, firing, and scattering indicated this ongoing nature of making and re-making, suggestive of a refusal to settle, and of continued engagement with the vibrant, agential materials, narratives, landscapes, and persons involved in the performance. In a similar way, PTC and Connecting Stories create a space in which those who are sharing their experiences are trusted, treated with dignity, and invited to shape further the work of the community. In moving through four commission rounds and additional work beyond this, PTC has sought to widen the conversation, mindful of the dangers of presenting a homogenous community rather than one welcoming of a variety of experiences. This is particularly important as, in the UK, political commentators often seek to portray different communities as at odds with one another: for example in the construction of the idea of the ‘white working class’ that ignores working class people of colour, or in framing refugees and immigrants as competing with communities that also experience poverty and hardship.81 In seeking to create a community in which all of these experiences are shared and responded to in their differences and commonalities, interventions can be made into these cultures of judgement.

Concluding In this chapter I have drawn on participants’ articulations of their experiences of cultures of judgement and disbelief, and the harms caused by the denial of complex, embodied experiences that hold together joy, pain, creativity, and vulnerabilities. Such denials impact access to support services and physical safety, to housing, food, and access to participating in local communities and in wider political processes. I have offered Liz Crow’s Figures and Connecting Stories as artistic and activist forms of ongoing, creative interventions that disrupt these cultures of judgement through foregrounding meaning-making and holding open spaces for plural, particular experiences. This research has aimed to reflect the shifting, fragile, and ongoing nature of engaging with lived experiences, which I expand on in chapters five and six. Acknowledging this feature disrupts where cultures of judgement and disbelief state closed and final conclusions on people’s complex and shifting realities. 81

See Gurminder K. Bhambra, “Brexit, Trump, and ‘methodological whiteness’: on the misrecognition of race and class,” The British Journal of Sociology, 68 (2017): S214–S232.

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In articulating these cultures of judgement and disbelief, I suggest that practices of sharing lived experiences in activism and research are not separate to these cultures but are shaped by them. Theological and political practices of sharing lived experiences take place in the midst of things, in the middle of cultures that influence who and what we consider to be credible witnesses and reliable evidence. Rivera notes, “we arrive too late. The Other has already been repeatedly encountered, named, and represented, and so have we”.82 Existing images of what it is to be ‘disabled’, ‘experiencing poverty’, ‘a real refugee’ influence how we respond to others—even if we ourselves share similar aspects of these experiences—and our actions to counteract such images may result in perpetuating notions of who is ‘deserving’ or notions of ‘victimhood’. Yet, this is not the end. Such systems are not as closed and final as they may claim. There is the potential for interrupting cultures of disbelief and judgement by enabling spaces for multiple experiences to be shared in all their contradictions—their creativity, pain, and joy—returning such systems to their limits. 82

Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 102.

Part 3 Theological and Political Disruptions

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Transformations in the Everyday Troubling ‘Transformation’ Practical theology is deeply engaged in discussions of transformation. ‘Transformation’ is often taken to suggest an intensive, more complete form of change, encompassing the personal, social, structural, political, and spiritual. Commenting on articulations of the transformative aims and focus of practical theology, Claire Wolfteich notes that many practical theologians “understand transformation as a critical aim of practical theology and even its distinguishing characteristic in the academy”.1 In making this argument, Wolfteich highlights key figures in the field, including Don Browning’s definition of practical theology as “critical reflection on the church’s dialogue with Christian sources and other communities of experience and interpretation with the aim of guiding its action toward social and individual transformation”.2 She also quotes John Swinton and Harriet Mowat’s statement that “the focus of the practical theological task is the quest for truth and the development and maintenance of faithful and transformative practice in the world”.3 However, Wolfteich is interested in exploring where practical theology itself can be transformed by being immersed in different communities to “challenge our well-worn understandings”.4 I suggest that, in engaging with PTC’s practices of sharing lived experiences, there is the possibility of challenging such “well-worn” understandings, including those of transformation in practical theology. Discourses of transformation require a questioning of who and what is being transformed, and on whose terms. Beaudoin and Turpin argue that as “one finds almost everywhere in practical theology invocations of ‘transformation’ as nearly a default language for the aim of practical theology”, the “notion

1 Wolfteich, “Animating Questions: Spirituality and Practical Theology,” International Journal of Practical Theology 13 no.1 (2009): 136. 2 Don S. Browning, A Fundamental Practical Theology: Descriptive and Strategic Proposals (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 36. 3 John Swinton and Harriet Mowat, Practical Theology and Qualitative Research (London: SCM Press, 2006), 25. 4 Wolfteich, “Animating Questions,” 137.

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must be handled with care”.5 They critique the emphasis in white theology on transformation as having “agency to bring about progressively better practice in the future” as this means that certain “seemingly intractable problems” are not acted upon because of this demand for “guaranteed productive outcomes in our lifetimes”.6 Beaudoin and Turpin contend that understanding transformation as relatively short-term future improvement can contrast with “other meaning systems that might focus on survival, harmony, balance, or beauty within current reality” and “deflects attention in white practical theology from dealing with chronic situations”.7 These meaning systems can emerge from different communities’ historical and contemporary experiences. For example, Delores Williams’ Sisters in the Wilderness offers a womanist interpretation of the narrative of Hagar that focuses on “survival and quality of life”, which she sees as a contrast to Elsa Tamez’s focus on liberation in the same text.8 The research on which this book is based has taken place over a turbulent time in UK and world politics. Over the last few years, issues of poverty and austerity seem to have been pushed to the peripheries of dominant political and public debate in the UK, despite indicators such as the rise in foodbank use and increased child poverty levels suggesting that these are everyday realities for a growing number of people.9 Universal Credit—a replacement to a number of benefits, paid monthly rather than weekly—continues to be rolled out, despite evidence of its overwhelming disadvantages to those experiencing poverty.10 Anniversaries of the months and years since the fire at Grenfell 5

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Tom Beaudoin and Katherine Turpin, “White Practical Theology,” in Opening the Field of Practical Theology: An Introduction, ed. Kathleen A. Cahalan and Gordon S. Mikoski (Maryland and Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 256. Beaudoin and Turpin, “White Practical Theology,” 256. Beaudoin and Turpin, “White Practical Theology,” 256. Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993). Philip Alston, “Statement on Visit to the United Kingdom”. United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, London, 16 November 2018. Available at: https://www.ohchr.org/documents/issues/poverty/eom_gb_16nov2018.pdf. Joseph Rowntree Foundation, “UK Poverty 2018: A comprehensive analysis of poverty trends and figures.” Available at: http://www.jrf.org.uk/report/uk-poverty-2018. Accessed 30th Dec 2020. Mandy Cheetham, Suzanne Moffatt, and Michelle Addison, “‘It’s hitting people that can least afford it the hardest’ the impact of the roll out of Universal Credit in two North East England localities: a qualitative study.” Available at: http://www.gateshead.gov.uk/media/ 10665/The-impact-of-the-roll-out-of-Universal-Credit-in-two-North-East-Englandlocalities-a-qualitative-study-November-2018/pdf/Universal_Credit_Report_2018pdf.pdf ?m=636778831081630000. Accessed 30th Dec 2020. Trussell Trust, “The next stage of Universal Credit: Moving onto the new benefit system and foodbank use,” 2018. Available at: http://www.trusselltrust.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/The-next-stage-of -Universal-Credit-Report-Final.pdf. Accessed 30th Dec 2020.

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Tower have accrued, with delays to the inquiry and many survivors remaining in temporary accommodation. The hostile environment toward immigrants and refugees has intensified, with the detention and deportation of people who have been settled in this country for many years, particularly the Windrush generation. I had some hope that over the course of research specific issues raised here—such as the family cap and the rape clause—may have become irrelevant, with sustained activism and opposition leading to policy change; instead, they have become continuing features of the political landscape. These are not abstract debates, nor broad brush strokes that paint the ‘background’ to this research, but aspects of people’s ongoing, everyday lived experiences. Why, then, engage practices of sharing lived experiences in such times? In the face of such seemingly intractable problems and cultures of judgement, what transformations can engagement with such “fragile, troubling, hope-filled” lived experiences bring?11 Questions of change or transformation are not lightly answered, or even asked, in such settings. Throughout the collaborative research, we discussed the changes created by PTC’s ways of sharing lived experiences, but also the sensitivities surrounding such questions. In the initial reflective workshops, commissioners emphasised the need to deal with misconceptions about PTC being a “quick fix” to get individuals “out of poverty”, and instead recognising that the community created through PTC is itself evidence of the long-term working toward and enacting change. In our planning sessions for Connecting Stories, Fiona shared that after one of the large PTC ‘closing’ events a testifying commissioner voiced their feelings that the event had been very positive, yet they were also going home to a situation where they could not put milk in the fridge for their children. Fiona suggested that whilst this was not to deny the value of sharing lived experiences, this had stayed with her in reflecting on how PTC puts forward and explains their way of working. I sense in this that either rushing to defend the value of sharing lived experiences or arguing for a more ‘pragmatic’ approach that perhaps will “put milk in the fridge” obscures what is being offered about the painful realities of sharing lived experiences to create lasting social change. I am wary of setting out a ‘theory of change’ in place of being able to reckon with the complex, troubling experiences of surviving, struggling-against, and working toward change together.

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This phrase was used by a Connecting Stories participant in the reflection booklets, see chapter 3.

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Poetic Modes of Transformation So far in this work, I have been advocating for a creative and poetic practical theology as a process of making with and through marginalised lived experiences, articulating this as an approach of passionate ambivalence in chapter two, and seeking to enact such possibilities in representing the Connecting Stories exhibition in chapter three. In chapter four, I articulated where creative interventions into austerity cultures of judgement and disbelief focus on the meaning-making practices of grassroots communities and hold open spaces for plural and particular experiences. I also suggested the importance of recognising these as ongoing interventions rather than fixed endpoints. Here, I explore further how such interventions engaged with sharing lived experiences of marginalisation can create change in social and material circumstances. I examine how poetic approaches have envisioned the possibilities of change and transformation, drawing particularly on the work of Rebecca Chopp, Mayra Rivera, and Michel de Certeau. Each of these authors recognises the creative nature of these interventions, whether through everyday experiences of cooking, walking, or reading that demonstrate mundane inventiveness, or through literature, poetry, art, music, protest, and ritual.

Putting Cultures of Judgement on Trial In her work on the poetics of testimony, Chopp articulates that testimonies of lived experiences point to both who and what has been excluded from public discourse. She engages the term ‘testimony’ to examine how writers concerned with various experiences of oppression have shared their experiences, and considers testimony to include “poetry, theology, novels, and other forms of literature that express how oppressed groups have existed outside modern rational discourse”.12 Such testimonies reveal how exclusions have drawn divides between the personal and the public or political, a key theme in feminist and liberationist theologies. Chopp states the inseparability of the personal and political spheres, as when a person “testifies in and to the public space” about what they have experienced, the “categories of public and personal do not hold; the usual split between the subject and object has not been

12

Rebecca Chopp, “Reimagining Public Discourse,” in Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power, ed. Dwight N. Hopkins (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2007), 155.

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followed”.13 Sharing testimonies reveals the power structures in excluding certain images, narratives, and communities from public and political discourses. Chopp’s poetics of testimony is a call not simply to include these experiences within existing systems, but to change the frameworks that determine such exclusions. What is particularly useful about engaging with Chopp’s work here is that she argues that theological discourse itself must be transformed in order to adequately serve the lived experiences of marginalised and oppressed peoples. She articulates that, in being reshaped as a poetics of testimony, theology must “create language, forms, images to speak of what, in some way has been ruled unspeakable” in both theological and public discourses due to these discourses being fashioned through objectivity and reason.14 Chopp argues that, in modern theology, theology has taken itself as the judge: “modern theologians accept the modern mantle of judgement and, robed in various styles, become theorists who decide which witnesses are credible and true”.15 Theological theory thus rules the “jarring witnesses” to suffering as being outside the limits of credibility: “excluded into silence, into powerlessness, as irrational”.16 Reconfiguring theology as a poetic discourse in response to testimony, the courtroom is then reversed; it is the whole courtroom—“its procedures and power, and its own ability to speak credibly”—that is on trial instead.17 This poetic refashioning of theology must consider how to rework theory, language, symbols, codes, and images in order to be responsive to these lived experiences that have been ruled as lacking validity and credibility and thus out of bounds to modern reason. This metaphor of the courtroom draws attention to the way theologies cultivate modes of judgement over lived experience. In the previous chapter I outlined cultures of judgement and disbelief operative under austerity in the UK. Theological practices are not separate from such cultures, but deeply intertwined in the social-material discourses surrounding race, gender, disability, sexuality, work, family, immigration, and refuge. As I have been arguing throughout this work, and particularly in chapter two, the exclusions of particular communities and particular lived experiences in theology and society 13

14 15 16 17

Rebecca Chopp, “Theology and the Poetics of Testimony,” in Converging on Culture: Theologians in Dialogue with Cultural Analysis and Criticism, ed. Delwin Brown, Shelia Greeve Davaney, Kathryn Tanner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001),” 62. Chopp, “Theology and the Poetics of Testimony,” 61; Chopp, “Reimagining Public Discourse,” 156. Chopp, “Theology and the Poetics of Testimony,” 60. Chopp, “Theology and the Poetics of Testimony,” 60. Chopp, “Theology and the Poetics of Testimony,” 61.

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often reinforce one another. This position of judgement over lived experiences is retained in theological research as we seek to determine the credibility of evidence with which to shape theological meanings. It is a position that I have not been free from in this research: I have caught myself thinking about how readers might respond to specific experiences noted here and whether they will be found ‘credible enough’ to include in this research. What I am suggesting then, through Chopp’s poetics of testimony, is the need to put the courtroom of our theological practices on trial, in relation to their responsiveness to marginalised lived experiences. Chopp’s work is also productive in offering these alternative images that might help to shift us away from positions of judgement over lived experiences. She provides an illustrative move by enacting these shifts in metaphor in her own work, replacing the image of the courtroom with images of participation and negotiation. She argues for a theology that “continually engages in creating spaces, building bridges, and forming new discourses as practices of emancipatory transformation”, and in this change Chopp moves theological activity from a hierarchical sense of power and judgement to one that suggests connection, listening, and participation on more equal terms.18 For Chopp, responsiveness to lived experiences becomes a practice of “negotiating between what is and what can be”.19 Such a theology is, “more fluid and more multidimensional—more spiritual”, whilst also recombining theory, poetics, rhetoric, and hermeneutics.20 Thus what I am arguing for in ‘putting on trial’ theological research is the potential for refiguring our practices as spaces for collaboration with grassroots communities and foregrounding their creative and interpretive work. It is in this creative and constructive mode that theology can begin to enact wider social change. Chopp considers theological practices of listening to marginalised experiences and creating spaces that negotiate diversity and difference to be types of “cultural intervention”.21 These interventions can act to reshape “the social imaginary”—the basic presuppositions, metaphors, and rules that frame cultural operations.22 Black and feminist theologies offer examples of how theology as a poetics of testimony can reshape public discourse as they have combined art, literature, and music “with an ethical summons to be responsive to those who suffer”.23 In this way, Black and femi18 19 20 21 22 23

Chopp, “Theology and the Poetics of Testimony,” 67. Chopp, “Theology and the Poetics of Testimony,” 67. Chopp, “Theology and the Poetics of Testimony,” 68. Chopp, “Theology and the Poetics of Testimony,” 68. Chopp, “Theology and the Poetics of Testimony,” 57. Chopp, “Reimagining Public Discourse,” 155.

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nist theologies have challenged the exclusions and judgements formed about whose experiences are seen as valid in shaping public life. Drawing on these examples, Chopp suggests that theology should reshape the public sphere to be responsive to multiple and different voices, rather than seeking to “translate” these experiences into the existing dominant discourse. Reframing public discourse as “spaces where voices are spoken and heard”, Chopp sees this as a “multilingual” or “polyglot” space that recognises the validity of different ways of speaking and hearing.24 Drawing on feminist imaging of networks and roundtables of “diverse and complex voices, bodies and publics”, Chopp argues that this reshaping creates a public space that is a place of solidarity and valuing difference.25 This resonates with what I highlighted in the previous chapter as interventions into cultures of judgement holding open space for plural and particular lived experiences. However, Chopp’s articulation of this reshaping of the public rests on a communicative notion of public discourse. She draws on Jürgen Habermas and Nancy Fraser to identify the public as the “sphere of rational discourse in which citizens are free to debate matters of interest in the social order”.26 Although recognising Fraser’s critique that, ironically, the public as a place of free speech “creates and secures distinctions and calls into question the ‘public’ nature of it all”, even in discussing these exclusions Chopp maintains a focus on communicative notions of the public sphere.27 Her main reshaping of the public then comes through a multiplication of discourses in recognising the “polyglot” nature as enabling empathy and solidarity. Thus, although Chopp emphasises the need to recognise multiple forms of expression, including silences and fragments, there is a tension between this emphasis and the retained focus on speech acts as the primary mode of engagement in social and political life. In drawing on particular trauma theorists that see testimony to be a performative speech act, Chopp predominantly considers the testimonies in literary texts, suggesting that “oral narratives” of traumatic testimony are “texts to be read and that texts function as speech”.28 In this, Chopp’s 24 25 26 27

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Chopp, “Reimagining Public Discourse,” 159. Chopp, “Reimagining Public Discourse,” 162. Chopp, “Reimagining Public Discourse,” 151. Chopp, “Reimagining Public Discourse,” 151, quoting Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80. For feminist theological discussion of these notions of the public sphere, see Elaine Graham, Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Public Theology in a Post-Secular Age (London: SCM Press 2013). Elizabeth Anderson, H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination: Mysticism and Writing (London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 27.

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work does not make fully clear the materiality of discourse and the embodied nature of sharing lived experiences, which I explore further below. In Chopp’s work, it is the notion of transcendence in theological thought that needs reworking, and it is also the transcendent that is at work in these transformations. Agreeing with feminist criticisms of images of a distant, wholly other God cut off from social and personal existence, Chopp argues that attentiveness to transcendence in the poetics of testimony requires tracing the Spirit in the political, social, and material dimensions of life. What is important in Chopp’s work here is that she does not equate transcendence or the sacred with the testimonies of marginalised groups. As Rambo notes: As one responds to Chopp’s invitation, it is tempting to simply locate ‘God’ or ‘Spirit’ within these testimonies. To make the experience, the testimony, authoritative (in and of itself), runs the danger of ‘sacralizing’ testimonies. While this is a reversal of the courtroom, more is needed.29 Chopp names this transcendence as “radical alterity”, stating that it is “both the source and dynamics of transfiguration” in the world.30 Offering examples from feminist and Black theologies, she considers transcendence as “the spirit and power of transfiguration that vetoes the law of slavery, breaks the chains of classism, rewrites social customs that erase and deny women’s dignity through various practices of abuse and so-called protection”.31 Transcendence is then within the complexities of historical, material events but it is not something we control. Rather the transcendent is something that can “break in and open us to change and transformation”.32 For Chopp, the Spirit is traced not by “uncovering a depth of God’s presence or revealing a substance or essence of God, but through negotiating spaces of solidarity, connection, and new creation”, essentially in “forming new discourses and practices of emancipatory transformation”.33 Transcendence can be at work in and through social movements engaging in creative, poetic practices. Working with Chopp’s articulation is thus to connect the possibilities of reworking theological and public discourses with transformative change, and

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Shelly Rambo, “Theopoetics of Trauma,” in Trauma and Transcendence: Suffering and the Limits of Theory, ed. Eric Boynton and Peter Capretto (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 234. Chopp, “Reimagining Public Discourse,” 162. Chopp, “Reimagining Public Discourse,” 162. Chopp, “Reimagining Public Discourse,” 157. Chopp, “Theology and the Poetics of Testimony,” 67.

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to recognise this challenge to conceptions of what theological discourse looks like or does. Reshaped as a creative, constructive discourse responsive to lived experiences of marginalisation, theological practices may be able to offer “cultural interventions” by demonstrating alternative ways of relating to testimonies. Yet, these poetic practices cannot be “sacralized” or considered transformative in themselves; instead, they must lead to continued responsiveness to testimonies and ongoing reshaping of public spaces into places of solidarity and difference. Chopp’s work also signals toward transformation as taking place in historical, material events, although it is necessary to develop a clearer understanding of the materiality of political and theological discourses and disruptive interventions into such discourses.

Incarnational and Performative Interventions I turn to Rivera’s work here as it offers a generative focus on the embodied nature of lived experiences, and the inseparability of the social and material. In the previous chapter, I highlighted that austerity cultures of judgement and disbelief are deeply material. People’s bodies are judged and stigmatised based on social understandings of race, class, gender, and disability; such judgements also influence access to material resources such as housing, money, food, physical safety. What is relevant here is Rivera’s understanding of how interventions take place within these social-material cultures, working with the ambivalence of social relations that can be both helpful and harmful. Refusing the split of spirit/body and material/sacred, Rivera helps to name that it is precisely because these interventions are at once material, social, and spiritual in nature that change can occur, as we are shaped by embodied participation in particular communities. Furthermore, through her articulation of an “incarnational imagination”, the divine is deeply implicated in stigmatised and othered bodies, and thus also in the interventions arising from these communities. The transformative possibilities of creative interventions responsive to lived experiences rely on Rivera’s understanding of how people are constituted by these ongoing social-material processes. In chapter one, I noted Rivera’s engagement with Butler’s theory of performativity that articulates how bodies are shaped by the repetition of social norms, and also that social norms are reinforced or adapted through such embodied activities. Engaging with these ideas, Rivera develops a dynamic and provocative understanding of the incarnation that recognises the social, spiritual, and material aspects of flesh as part of these performative reiterations. Examining the imagery in the Gospel of

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John, Rivera emphasises the connections and continuous movement between bread, flesh, and word, and also between spirit and water. She argues that dismissing the images and metaphors of the text in favour of a stable message is to miss the impact of the text “which derives from the intricate relation between the most common material elements and the strongest metaphysical assertions”.34 Rivera suggests that by resisting the dichotomies of flesh and spirit, John’s Gospel “produces meaning by moving from one element to the next and back”, leading to her sense that flesh is “an element transformed as it is given”.35 From this reading, Rivera articulates her use of the term ‘incarnation’ to mean patterns by which social-material flesh is distributed, transformed as it is given, and transforms those who participate in these processes. These incarnations do not simply reproduce sameness, do not simply copy the law. They are interpretations shaped by the unique textures and rhythms of the body.36 Focusing on the transformative potential of these embodied practices therefore requires an understanding of the way processes of transformation are already underway in the most common material elements of everyday life. The images offered by PTC participants through washing machines, washing lines, trees and roots, bedroom wallpaper, brown envelopes, and braided threads all suggest ways of relating to and making meaning through these everyday material elements. Furthermore, this suggests where transformations are not entirely products of our own agency and activity. This articulation of the incarnation questions the split between spirit and flesh and the assumptions of the wholeness and stability of bodies. Engaging Latinx theological, theoretical, and poetic writings, Rivera explores in moving ways the experiences of rejected, fragmented, and multiple bodies as challenging theological emphasis on myths of “original wholeness, homogeneous subjectivity, unambiguous identifications, the illusions of purity and visual certainties”.37 In the previous chapter, I noted where disability assessments

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Mayra Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015), 22. Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 27, 25. Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 145. Mayra Rivera, “Thinking Bodies: The Spirit of a Latina Incarnational Imagination,” in Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy, ed. Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 222.

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and the surrounding political discourse on disability rely on the assumed stability and certainty of bodies that can be sorted into clear categories. Similarly, Rivera argues that theologies that separate spirit and flesh tend to distance the incarnation from “our ordinary bodies” and everyday experiences, resulting in the incarnation being seen as a “one-time event that proves the rule of an otherwise disembodied deity”.38 Yet, she is clear that “attending to the spirit in the flesh of rejected, disorderly bodies is hardly to dismiss Jesus’ body. Instead, we read his body—a material, finite, stigmatized, vulnerable body—as revealing the scandal of divinity in the flesh… the divine becoming flesh”.39 Rivera suggests this orientation to the incarnation as “the presence of the greatest mysteries in our flesh” requires an “openness to learn from real, finite bodies, to seek wisdom of body-words and their transformative power”.40 In this way, transformations become possible through attentiveness to the embodied experiences of people whose bodies do not conform to dominant categories and binaries, recognising the sacred is not just in ‘all flesh’, but in particular, stigmatised bodies. Interventions into harmful and excluding cultures need to offer alternative imaginings of bodies and relations emerging from the experiences of ordinary, disorderly bodies. Rivera variously uses the terms “affirmative practices” and “performative interventions” to describe these possibilities. However, she remains cautious, noting that these interventions may not “necessarily transform the operating norms of the broader society”; neither do they offer protection from the “negative forces” to which people are exposed in bias, abuse, and violence, nor will they provide material resources to those in poverty.41 This highlights where transformations cannot be easily assumed, and that discussions of change must remain open to questions such as those posed above about “putting milk in the fridge”. However, the creative force of such practices remains, in part through relativizing oppressive social norms, because these “demeaning images” of bodies will “compete with other images, rather than claiming universal validity”.42 Rivera thus suggests that it is difficult to consider how social movements emerge “without the communities that envisioned a different world in which their members could flourish”.43 Austerity images of ‘scrounger’, ‘fraud’, ‘benefits mum’, ‘bogus asylum seeker’

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Rivera, “Thinking Bodies,” 221. Rivera, “Thinking Bodies,” 221. Rivera, “Thinking Bodies,” 221. Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 149. Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 149, 148. Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 149.

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can be challenged through the creative, community interventions of Figures and Connecting Stories named in the previous chapter—images that do not seek to work with the category of ‘deserving poor’, but offer deep alternatives of the joy, laughter, pain, creativity, and wisdom in bodies and relations. These performative interventions and affirmative practices are deeply creative and imaginative. Rivera notes that through “painting or literature, ontology or theology, human creativity may strive to transform the world”.44 She considers Caribbean poetic writing as a form of these creative practices in which “‘shattered histories’, ‘shards of vocabularies’, ambiguous words and reassembled rituals” can be drawn into creating “imaginative spaces for the affirmation of corporeal possibilities”.45 Discussing the potential for transformation in creative works such as literature and art, Rivera persuasively emphasises the poetic materiality of all discourse, as the relational nature of our shared existence in the world requires recognising discussions about social norms and injustice not as “abstract debates” but as the ‘mechanisms’ by which societies enable “the flourishing of some bodies and stifle that of others”.46 As I have highlighted throughout this work, this is precisely because “descriptions of bodies, worlds, and their co-constitutions are creative renderings with material effects”.47 For Rivera, an example of such a creative, performative intervention is in Gloria Anzaldúa’s work, discussed in chapter two. Anzaldúa’s writing as a form of “spiritual activism” offers the image of holding together “pain and joy, failure and hope”, and to “creatively transform these experiences”.48 Performative interventions do not, then, entirely resolve such tensions but engage the complexities of corporeality and creatively rework these, affirming materiality as the ground of transformations. Creative, performative interventions are also inherently relational and spiritual. Noting that performative interventions might include “ritual practices of popular religiosity, artistic creations, social activism, critical writing”, Rivera reflects these are “emerging from and are limited by social and familiar bonds, lured and empowered by the movements of the spirit in the flesh”.49 Creative, affirmative practices are effective when performed in communities “to which I lend my body in order that it may be shaped by those visions—through

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Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 85. Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 148. Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 157. Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 157. Mayra Rivera, “Unsettling Bodies,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26 no.2 (2010): 122. Rivera, “Thinking Bodies,” 220.

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words, ceremony, ritual, and practices”.50 In the previous chapter, I noted Liz Crow’s notion of “dwelling space activism”, in which these alternative ways of relating are enacted. Through her articulation of incarnation and spirit-flesh, Rivera summarises: “theology-in-the-flesh also complicates and implicates the divine in these corporeal processes—the materialization of social relations, the enfleshment of the past in genes and memories, the transfigurations of corporeal wounds and social relations”.51 Such transfigurations take place within the ordinary and material; the work of transcendence is traced in and through creative poetic practices that are engaged in concrete, embodied sites; practices that emerge from and deepen our openness to encounters with the “quality of things in their irreducible singularity”.52 In the previous chapter, I noted the importance of recognising that interventions into cultures of judgement and disbelief are ongoing, requiring continual engagement in order to shape alternative spaces. Rivera’s writing in Poetics of The Flesh uses “participles in their progressive verbal form— becoming, abandoning, and embracing” which suggest to the reader “action as ongoing, interrupted, incomplete”, emphasising this continual nature of transformative interventions.53 Thus, Rivera’s writing generatively enacts her sense of transformation as also active, ongoing, and incomplete. She states: redemption is never accomplished once and for all: it takes place in the transient, finite events of our lives and in the midst of the ambiguities and potentialities of our social relations. Exposing social structures and practices that inhibit corporeal flourishing reveals possibilities for unsettling them, thus opening spaces where new relationships may emerge.54 In this, mundane, everyday life is seen both as the space in which oppression takes place and yet also where interruptions and transformations can occur. Rivera’s work is complex and creative, drawing on a range of theory, poetry, and literature, demonstrating poetic ways of making meaning through these different elements whilst providing a sense of the active, ongoing, incomplete work of redemption. As such, her writing enacts much of her argument 50 51 52 53

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Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 148. Rivera, “Thinking Bodies,” 222. Mayra Rivera, “Glory: The First Passion of Theology?” in Polydoxy: Theologies of the Manifold, ed. Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider, 167–81 (Routledge: New York, 2010), 177. M. Shawn Copeland, “What is Poetics?” Syndicate Symposium on Poetics of the Flesh, 19th Dec 2016. Available at: https://syndicate.network/symposia/theology/poetics-of-the -flesh. Accessed 30th Dec 2020. Rivera, “Thinking Bodies,” 218.

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about transformative possibilities working through words, bodies, relations, and spirit. What is particularly relevant here is her consideration that creative interventions require attention to alternative images of bodies, relations, society, and the divine emerging from the everyday experiences of excluded and stigmatised bodies. It is to this sense of the everyday, and to giving a fuller account of the practices of the everyday as potentially transformative, that I now turn.

Cultural Transformations in the Everyday Cultural theorist and Jesuit Michel de Certeau’s work has been influential in theology, spirituality studies, and cultural studies for understanding how those with limited power create change.55 In chapter two, I briefly highlighted his approach to poetics as a focus on the everyday and ordinary mundane practices that are often overlooked, and I return to his work here to discuss how he considers these everyday practices as transforming culture. His translated writing is somewhat complex, with specific terminology; however, this offers intriguing and persuasive imagery for his argument, and I aim to be attentive to this poetic aspect of his work here. For de Certeau, everyday cultural practices, such as cooking, walking, or reading, are fundamental to how culture is made and adapted, but he argues that such ordinary practices are unrecognised by certain analytic approaches. As these practices do not conform to predetermined social structures, they are difficult to apprehend as they “trace ‘indeterminate trajectories’” that “circulate, come and go, overflow and drift over an imposed terrain, like the snowy waves of the sea slipping in among the rocks and defiles of an established order”.56 “Institutional frameworks” theoretically govern these waters, but de Certeau argues they “tell us virtually nothing about the currents in the sea”

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Michel de Certeau’s work has been discussed in practical theology in Heather Walton, Writing Methods in Theological Reflection (London: SCM Press, 2014); Ted Smith, “Theories of Practice,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, ed. Bonnie J. MillerMcLemore (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); Claire Wolfteich, “Practices of ‘Unsaying’: Michel de Certeau, Spirituality Studies, and Practical Theology,” Spiritus—a Journal of Christian Spirituality 12 no.2 (2012): 161–171; and through discussions of Rey Chow in Courtney Goto, Taking on Practical Theology: The Idolization of Context and the Hope of Community (Leiden: Brill, 2018). In spirituality studies and theology, Philip Sheldrake and Graham Ward have offered significant contributions on de Certeau’s work. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988), 34.

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and are in fact being gradually eroded and displaced by the currents of these everyday practices.57 In order to make a discussion of these everyday practices possible, de Certeau “resorts” to a discussion of the distinctions between “strategies” and “tactics”.58 Strategies are linked to structures of power, relying on a “delimited place” of their own in order to manage targeted actions on those that are “exterior”; for example, businesses and their customers or scientific institutions and their research objects.59 The delimitation of space makes possible a “mastery through sight” in which “the eye can transform foreign forces into objects” that can be observed, measured, and controlled.60 In contrast, tactics have no such place of their own but operate in “environments defined by other people’s strategies”.61 Due to this, tactics make the most of opportunities, “poaching” and “surprising” by making use of the “cracks” and “chance offerings” that appear in systems of power.62 In this, we might think of people being asked to share their lived experiences in “strategic” sites of power such as welfare assessments, the Border Agency, or even theological research, and where this transforms their experiences into data to be measured and controlled. In taking examples of everyday practices of walking, cooking, and reading, de Certeau portrays tactics as a poetic making. As I explored in chapter two, this poetic making involves a combining of heterogeneous elements, making the most of what is at hand. His interest is predominantly in the activity of making—rather than the elements used—as this displays the skills, tricks, and wisdom inherent in creative bricolage.63 This character of everyday practices exhibits the intelligence and inventiveness of those in the midst of “everyday struggles and pleasures”.64 This resonates with my argument in chapters one and four, through Isasi-Diaz’s sense of lo cotidiano, for interventions to recognise that in sharing lived experiences it is more than information or data that is being shared, but also the creative work and critical interpretations of grassroots communities. Through these everyday poetic practices, ordinary people are enabled to make “innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and

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de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 34. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 35. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 36. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 36. Phillip Sheldrake, “Michel de Certeau: Spirituality and The Practice of Everyday Life,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 12 no.2 (2012): 211. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 37. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 35. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xx.

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within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules”.65 Although de Certeau’s articulation of tactics is often used to discuss resistance in consumer culture, two further sections in The Practice of Everyday Life enable a complex and compelling insight for this discussion on how culture is transformed, and also how embodied experiences can—or cannot fully—be represented in our texts and analyses. Firstly, describing the view of New York from above, de Certeau compares the “voyeurs” and “walkers” of the city. The voyeurs, perched on the summits of a city skyscraper, are lifted out of the city’s grasp in the knowledge of seeing the whole of the city. This totalising, panoptic vision offers strategic knowledge of the city, arresting vision in a “wave of verticals”.66 Below, the city walkers, the “ordinary practitioners of the city”, make their own use of the city passages and thoroughfares in an intimate yet unseeing knowledge, adapting multiple paths that shape “unrecognised poems”.67 Shifting between images of “city” and “text”, de Certeau articulates: “the networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other”.68 These city walkers go unrecognised by those above as the “certain strangeness” of the everyday does not “surface” in the voyeur’s totalising vision.69 City walkers elude the grasp of city planners, and these everyday ways of operating result in an “enormous ‘remainder’ that drowns” attempts at measuring and calculating culture: “an ebb and flow of muffled voices on the architects’ blueprints in their advanced stages of drafting”.70 Existing in the “delimited spaces” defined by institutional power, these everyday practices murmur their uncontainable excesses in these spaces: “a migrational, or metaphorical city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city”.71 Secondly, de Certeau discusses the “scriptural economy”, a term indicating the way Western modern disciplines rest on the ability to turn the voices and bodies of others—in all their complexity—into clear, precise, and readable

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de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xiii–xiv. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 91. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. 93. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93. Michel de Certeau and Luce Giard, Culture in the Plural (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 133–4. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93, emphasis in original.

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texts. As a “strategic” activity, writing requires the delimited space of a blank page “where all the ambiguities of the world have been exorcised”, and the subject is distanced and distinguished from the object of their writing.72 This is conveyed through the image of Robinson Crusoe dominating an isolated island, particularly in the practice of writing a diary, “a space in which he can master time and things”.73 Yet, on Crusoe’s island the footprint on the shore is a marking of the body on the text, an interruption and haunting by an “absent other”.74 For de Certeau, the footprint is an image of the body’s resistance to total assimilation in the scriptural economy, an escaped “cry” of “deviation” or “ecstasy”, and with it the “difference” of the body.75 In a tactical manner, this footprint or mark or cry alters the text or place, but does not establish a “delimited place” of its own.76 As Eduardo Alonso comments, this cry is “a sign that our conscription into the strategies which structure our daily lives is never without remainder”.77 Here, de Certeau’s understanding of the transformative nature of the everyday emerges in these gestures toward that which cannot be contained, as he indicates that he seeks to “hear the fragile ways” of the body, of what is “not remade by the order of scriptural instrumentality”.78 Frequently, de Certeau defines these cries as those from the “objects” of modern disciplines of ethnology, psychiatry, pedagogy, politics, and historiography that try to state their interpretation and mastery of the “voice of the people”: “of savage, religious, insane, childlike, or popular speech”.79 Relevant to my discussion is de Certeau’s critique of “the science of fables”, a way of presenting this “popular” voice in authorised language in which this “other” produces a meaningful voice yet does not truly know the meaning of what they say.80 Here, de Certeau critiques Pierre Bourdieu’s notion that the cultures and subjects studied exhibit a “cleverness that does not recognise itself as such”, that everyday practitioners cannot recognise the meaning in what they are doing and thus theorists are required to interpret.81 This echoes what I described the cultures of judgement: the sense that those in positions of

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de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 134. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 138. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 154–5. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 147–9. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 155. Antonio Eduardo Alonso, “Listening for the Cry: Certeau Beyond Strategies and Tactics,” Modern Theology 33 no.3 (2017): 382. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 131, 150. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 159. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 160. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 55.

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power and authority understand the meaning of another person’s everyday experiences better than the person who has lived and shared their experiences. Although this form of incorporating the ‘voice of the other’ is a strategic, institutional method, a tactical inventiveness can ‘borrow’ from this method of quotation. In quoting the other, tactical writing is “insinuating the ordinary into established scientific fields” and changes these analytic forms by “returning them to their limits”.82 In Alonso’s view, de Certeau models this tactical approach to popular voices in his writing by allowing “diverse voices to emerge in all their ambiguity through the substantial quotation of primary sources without attempting to resolve contradictions or heal conflicts, resulting in intellectual works that can confess their own limitations”.83 This is the “metamethodology” traceable in de Certeau’s diverse writings, a dedication to “encouraging heterogeneity and allowing alterity to proliferate”.84 However, de Certeau’s lists of those “others” that have been excluded from the production of discourse and now question the limits of that discourse—lists that point to the gendered, racialised, colonised others of history—indicate where de Certeau has taken on a “unifying myth of common otherness”, which functions as the smudged footprint in his own writing.85 This is a reminder of how terms like ‘marginalisation’, even as I use it here, can move toward a sense of essentialising or unifying the very heterogeneity of experiences that I seek to work with and through. In discussing interventions into cultures of judgement in the previous chapter, I considered where these interventions need to hold open space for plural and particular experiences. This approach of a dedication to the heterogeneity and alterity of these multiple experiences without erasing contradictions is then crucial for transformations in culture, although it should be recognised that even such practices cannot fully contain and represent others’ embodied experiences. These discussions of the city walkers and the scriptural economy indicate that the relationship between everyday practices and transformation is, for de Certeau, complex, poetic, and ambivalent. He locates his discussion in examples of everyday practices such as cooking and walking, yet he

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Meaghan Morris, “Banality in Cultural Studies,” in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (London. Indianapolis and Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1990), 34. Alonso, “Listening for the Cry,” 385. Ben Highmore, Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture (London, New York: Continuum, 2006), 8. Morris, “Banality in Cultural Studies,” 36.

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also gestures toward the strangeness, the cries, the unreadability, the remainder in these ways of operating, the excess that is not immediate to or contained within these named practices. There is the danger of mistaking in de Certeau’s work an advocation for specific practices as a “privileged site of resistance”—what de Certeau himself critiqued as a kind of “hagiographic everydayness”—resulting in identifying transformation as undertaking specific counter-cultural everyday activities.86 In this way, de Certeau’s work does not resolve the tensions between the need to translate fleeting everyday practices of resistance into particular political forms and the need to maintain an openness to the other. Instead, it “traces out, in an impassioned, evocative and elusive manner, the shifting and often occluded boundaries between the actual and the potential”.87 What I have resisted in this work is making an argument that practices of sharing lived experiences are necessarily privileged sites of political resistance, recognising that they can reinforce power dynamics when they do not adequately maintain this openness to otherness. The privileging of particular sites of resistance is a particular concern within theological readings that tend to reduce the complexity and ambivalence of de Certeau’s work to a single meaning, that of resistance to consumer culture. Examining discussions of strategies and tactics in the work of several contemporary political theologians, Alonso argues that each of these theologians appraises tactics—whether positively or negatively—for the ability to fuel Christian resistance to consumer culture.88 Alonso considers that these readings are themselves strategic as they reduce the subtleties and evasions in de Certeau’s work in order to identify or explain tactics.89 Furthermore, such readings rest on the assumption that the “central task of theology” is to “respond, resist, or reshape” consumer culture, a product of what was discussed in chapter two as the ‘boundaries and divisions’ in modern theology that denies the possibilities of God’s activity in the world and in contemporary culture.90 Contrary to this, de Certeau’s work offers the reminder that our theological models often fail to see “the resistance… just as we fail to understand life in the particular, because our untrained (or perhaps too trained) eyes cannot perceive its hidden ferment in the everyday and … because it cuts its fabric

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de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 5; Lois McNay, “Michel de Certeau and the Ambivalent Everyday,” Social Semiotics 6 no.1 (1996): 70. McNay, “Michel de Certeau and the Ambivalent Everyday,” 79. Alonso, “Listening for the Cry,” 392. Alonso assesses the work of Stanley Hauerwas, Luke Bretherton, Vincent Miller, and William Cavanaugh. Alonso, “Listening for the Cry,” 392. Alonso, “Listening for the Cry,” 392.

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from the same stuff the system is woven out of”.91 Thus, whilst everyday poetic tactics may offer “a kind of resistance”, “it is not a resistance we seek, identify, or create. It is rather a resistance that exists in the gaps, losses, and excesses that resist the full containment of the power apparatus (scriptural, theoretical, cultural), whatever our intentions”.92 In this, Alonso argues that tactics are hopeful cries that gesture toward the “incompleteness of strategic operations, and their inability to reduce human experiences into strategic structures”.93 Thus, where de Certeau’s work gestures toward transformation is in this remainder, the cry, this uncontainable excess that cannot be assimilated into structures of power rather than in stating that particular practices guarantee a form of resistance. This is not to advocate for a withdrawal or passivity but rather recognises that all activity takes place within the ambivalence of the world, of an everyday “scattered with marvels”, working from the glimpses afforded by walking the city street.94 Sheldrake argues that de Certeau’s discussion of everyday tactics “is not a disinterested observation but articulates an ethical imperative” that is “implicitly religious” in that “The Practice of Everyday Life does not merely note the existence of ‘other voices’ but seeks to make space for them to be heard”.95 Similarly, in considering de Certeau’s policy work as cut from the same epistemological and ethical cloth as his wider work, this ethical imperative is “dedicated to fashioning spaces more hospitable to the voices of others” and “is completely committed to siding with the unmanageability of the ordinary and the radical heterogeneity of the multitude”.96 In this way, rather than using de Certeau’s writings as a framework for identifying particular practices as ‘tactics’ and therefore as offering ‘resistance’, my interest here is in reflecting on how certain practices can tactically make space for others’ experiences to be highlighted in all their unmanageability and excess. A Return: Risking Transformation I shake loose the reclaimed fragments of the tents from the plastic bin-bag, where they have lain dormant since the exhibition. They are dull and lifeless, a flat grey day between seasons disclosing nothing of what has been or what will appear. Or perhaps I only project this, bleary-eyed and heavy-limbed as I am.

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Walton, Writing Methods, 182. Alonso, “Listening for the Cry,” 382, emphasis in original. Alonso, “Listening for the Cry,” 382. Alonso, “Listening for the Cry,” 394; Highmore, Michel de Certeau, 152. Sheldrake, “Michel de Certeau,” 211–2. Highmore, Michel de Certeau, 152.

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What remains

The pieces seem to hold none of the frenetic energy of making, nor that visceral, deconstructive power in tearing down. Yet they bear the marks of such moments. I trace my finger along uneven jagged edges, the scars and seams of opacity formed as the translucent paper has ruptured. This process of making, un-making, re-making contained a promise, a risk of transformation, a shift in understanding and being, not merely a wearing down of the same grooves. Somehow, even in their emptiness, they seem to gesture—to a somewhere else, a something else. They have a sense of the long linen strips to them, of the empty tomb. Something has happened here, in words and flesh and spirit, in silence, salttears, and laughter. Yet it remains elusive. It remains something else. For de Certeau, Christ’s empty tomb was the “foundational ‘rupture’” expressing spirituality as a “constant journeying onward with no security apart from the story of Christ that is to be (re)enacted rather than author-

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itatively proclaimed”.97 This meant refusing constituting spirituality into an established, definitive place of certainty and full presence, and rather continually engaging risky journeys; moments of deep longing and absence, but also catching glimpses of the sacred in all things. I have argued, in setting out my methodological approach in chapter two, for passionate ambivalence as a way of proceeding that “risks transformation” in the activity of making; recognising that in taking practical theology as “tracing the sacred” we must let ourselves and our practices be changed by what we encounter, rather than always looking for what we have already found. Such an approach remains a fluid practice, shifting and elusive, rather than becoming a fixed method for producing stable meanings. It remains an openness to being altered through encountering others in their alterity and particularity, an encounter that also shapes and alters these very forms of attending and encountering. It is an embodied making that implicates the divine in such everyday material practices. There are other fragmented things I may wish to place alongside these torn tent-scraps. Perhaps considered insignificant, insufficient, yet each a whole world in their own right. Fragments of encounters that have left me wondering what to ‘do’ with such disruptive pieces, this strange, disparate collection that even now escapes their conscription into this text. Sewing needles shattered mid stitch, still trailing thread. Handwritten notes, ripped pages, repeating phrases. Abrupt remarks and fragile utterances. Wallpaper drawings. Joy returning. Finding kindness. Clay dust, scattered. Absence, anger. Names. Bodies. Lives. It becomes a prayer of sorts.

Everyday Transformations as Social, Material, and Spiritual In engaging with the work of Chopp, Rivera, and de Certeau, I have developed an understanding of interventions as at once social, material, and spiritual, as being both imaginative and mundane. I have suggested that any practices of sharing lived experiences require intervening in the political and theological discourses that judge, exclude, and stigmatise particular embodied experiences. This must include addressing where such discourses also structure the performance of these practices of sharing lived experiences. For these creative

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Sheldrake, “Michel de Certeau,” 209.

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interventions to be transformative, they must be responsive to alternative images of bodies, social relations, and the divine emerging from particular marginalised experiences. Creative interventions require holding space for the specificity and heterogeneity in lived experiences, whilst recognising that the excesses and otherness of such experiences cannot be pinned down in our representations. In the previous chapter, I noted the ongoing and fragile nature of the creative interventions into cultures of judgement and disbelief. This is to recognise that such interventions are not a sacralised end point in themselves but require reworking in order to be continually responsive to the various formations and intersections of marginalisation. In the example of Connecting Stories, the image of taking down the exhibition suggests that an ongoing re-making of this conversation with others would be necessary in order to be an appropriate intervention in other settings, rather than fixing specific words and installations in any new context or location. Through drawing on these poetic approaches, I have aimed to emphasise the work of the Spirit as already underway in the ordinary materiality of the everyday, and that such transfigurations are ongoing and incomplete. Yet, this is also recognised as an encounter with unsettling, disruptive, ungraspable transcendence. Most clearly, these poetic approaches pointed to the sense of the sacred at work in the everyday, and where mundane, daily experiences of marginalisation are all too often overlooked in discourses of transformation. Throughout this work, I have aimed to focus on the complexity of lived experiences of marginalised communities, understanding that such lived experiences are at once social, material, mundane, and sacred. In the first chapter, I engaged with Isasi-Díaz’s articulation of lo cotidiano or the everyday, and her argument that lo cotidiano is central to understanding transformation. She argues that experiences enmeshed in and emerging from the everyday are powerful points of reference “from where to begin to imagine a different world”.98 This is not in opposition to addressing structural and systemic injustices, but to recognise that a structural focus often ignores how structural factors play out in and are shaped by the everyday events of people’s lives. Furthermore, transformations are worked in and through this mundane reality. For Isasi-Díaz, “redemptive reality” is not “something apart from our daily reality, it is our daily living, it impacts the situations we face day in and day

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Ada María Isasi-Díaz, “Mujerista Discourse: A Platform for Latinas’ Subjugated Knowledge,” in Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy, ed. Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 49.

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out”.99 In exploring the work of Rivera and de Certeau, I have further indicated where it is in the ordinary material practices of daily life that transformation may take place. It is precisely these everyday lived experiences of marginalised communities that have not surfaced in the analytic approaches of those in power; yet these everyday experiences testify not only the nature of marginalisation but also to where transformations are beginning to be enacted. What I am suggesting, then, is the need for practical theologies to notice the transformations in the everyday that are not always recognisable in academic and political models of change and transformation. A focus on the everyday is to recognise that cultures of judgement and disbelief that refuse marginalised groups as credible witnesses to their own experiences of oppression—and other cultures that reproduce inequality and oppression—are enacted or transformed in our everyday activities. Womanist ethicist Emilie Townes names the importance of what is termed the “everydayness of moral acts” in Christian ethics for resisting the cultural reproduction of evil.100 Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci, Townes develops a notion of the “fantastic hegemonic imagination” which uses “a politicized sense of history and memory to create and shape its worldview”.101 She considers that this “fantastic hegemonic imagination” produces images that impact how we see the world, ourselves, and others; images that are central to cultural operations harming, oppressing, and dealing violence at a structural and societal level. Townes’ own analysis focuses on stereotypes of Black women in the USA, articulating how these are both culturally reproduced and have an impact on material circumstances. In seeking possibilities of justice, she states that it is “what we do every day that shapes us and where both the fantastic hegemonic imagination and the challenge and hope to dismantle it are found”.102 Such acts are, for Townes, more critical than “those grand moments of righteousness and action”.103 She offers a poetic summary: the everydayness of listening closely when folks talk or don’t talk to hear what they are saying; the everydayness of taking some time, however short or long, to refresh ourselves through prayer or meditation; 99 100 101 102 103

Isasi-Díaz, En La Lucha = In the Struggle: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology, Tenth Anniversary Edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 4. Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 164. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, 21. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, 164. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, 164.

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the everydayness of speaking to folks and actually meaning whatever it is that is coming out of our mouths; the everydayness of being a presence in people’s lives; the everydayness of designing a class session or lecture or reading or writing or thinking; the everydayness of sharing a meal; the everydayness of facing heartache and disappointment; the everydayness of joy and laughter; the everydayness of facing people who expect us to lead them somewhere or at least point them in the right direction and walk with them; the everydayness of blending head and heart; the everydayness of getting up and trying one more time to get our living right.104 What Townes makes clear in the naming of these specific acts is that they are precisely the acts that are caught either in the cultural reproduction of the “fantastic hegemonic imagination” or in witnessing to justice and love. In the context of this work, it is important to think about the everydayness of judgement and disbelief, how these cultural images of ‘scrounger’ or ‘benefits fraud’ or ‘bogus asylum seeker’ are informed at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, work, and family. These are not always as obvious as media headlines or government policy but are about how everyday actions and attitudes can replicate racism, classism, heterosexism, and ableism, especially for those of us who seek to work for change. They are the socially and culturally-informed judgements we make over bodies, speech, and knowledge and whose bodies, whose speech, and whose knowledge are welcome and trusted in certain settings. We need to understand the everydayness of the replication or disruption of these cultures; how this shows up in our listening, eating, teaching, working, reading, praying, and meditating—all the ways we encounter ourselves and others. Kwok Pui-lan offers a sense of the hope and transformative possibilities in the everyday in her reflections on the texts of women theologians constructing “historical imaginations” through remembering oppressed, disenfranchised, and often forgotten women.105 She considers that, in these texts, hope does not rest “on the final eschaton, on an unpredictable utopia, or on historical

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Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, 164. Kwok Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 31–38.

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progress” precisely because these theologians recognise history as “too full of ambiguities” to provide optimism in linear progress.106 In her description, she considers: The hope for some of the disenfranchised women may be a place to dry their fish on the beach, enough seeds for next spring, or money enough to send their children to school. The future is not a grand finale, a classless society, or even a kingdom of God, but more immediate, concrete, and touchable. It may be the pooling of communal resources, of living better than last year, or of seeing grandchildren grow up healthy and strong. It is a historical imagination of the concrete and not the abstract, a hope that is more practical and therefore not so easily disillusioned, and a trust that is born out of necessity and well-worn wisdom.107 Kwok’s articulation indicates where such practical, immediate, and everyday concerns can be overlooked in the articulation of more total and complete theological visions of transformation. This view affirms hope for transformations in the midst of the everyday. In thinking with Kwok and Townes, and in light of what I have attended to in this research, I suggest that the hope for some may be in the everydayness of forming a homework club for kinship kids and in seeing a granddaughter make positive progress, as attested to in chapter one. It may be in taking steps to be heard by a political representative when there is no way to do laundry. It may be in receiving refugee status and being reunited with daughters. It may be in finding creative forms to express lived experiences and, in facilitating creative groups, encouraging others to also find their own forms of creative expression. It may be in campaigning with others and seeing changes to school uniform grants, or how community projects can promote dignity in responding to food insecurity. It may be in the everydayness of shaping a space in which the silences and the ‘not-knowing-what-to-say’ are heard and respected alongside other forms of sharing lived experiences. It may be in holding the laughter with others alongside the pain and the frustration, and in participating in a community that enables room for all of these. These may be the things that our “too trained eyes” fail to perceive as theologians because we consider them to be too mundane, too trite, too ordinary to be of worth in our reflections on the sacred or our discussions on transformation. Thus, whilst this approach remains passionate in the ongoing work for 106 107

Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination, 37, emphasis in original. Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination, 37–38.

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justice and mindful of the fact that there is much that still needs to be done, it also takes joyful notice of the marvels in the everyday. As noted in chapter two, this approach welcomes ambivalence as the intensely-held, and sometimes contradictory, emotions and stances and enables these to compel our political and theological commitments. Such passionate ambivalence may also be part of recognising the critical importance of these ordinary and embodied aspects of people’s everyday experiences rather than seeing them as peripheral to the struggles for justice. Such an approach knows the difference the doing of laundry or a homework club for grandchildren can make, and why joy is important in the face of judgement and disbelief. Yet, this approach to the everyday recognises other meaning systems in which transformation may be understood in various ways, and I suggest that these everyday transformations may be different across different communities. They are also different within communities. From this setting, we might name looking for the “incidental goodness” others carry with them “in the various parts of the day” as transformative, as Shirley’s thread poem suggested in chapter three. It may be in taking off the world’s labels and naming yourself as an activist who ‘carries’ other people in their hearts, as Rhiannon stated in chapter one. It may be in Victoire’s naming of her daughters, education, and sharing her experiences with PTC as the unbreakable cord that kept her going, or in her statement, “my joy is coming back to me” as recorded in chapter three. It may be the meaning drawn from the creativity and courage of communities sharing lived experiences, and commitment to the ongoing struggling-against seemingly intractable problems.

Chapter 6

Enacting Disruptive Encounters In this final chapter, I examine political and theological practices of working with lived experiences, considering both their entanglement in dominant discourses and also the possibilities of disrupting the power dynamics that inform these practices. I have been arguing that practices of sharing lived experiences are effective when they intervene in the power dynamics that shape social relations, particularly the social relations that structure these very practices of sharing and responding to lived experiences. Using the example of austerity in the UK, I have shown how practices of sharing lived experiences are caught in cultures of judgement and disbelief that are at once material and discursive. Yet, it is also in and through these power relations—in and through words, bodies, everyday encounters—that transformation can take place. In taking this collaboration with PTC as a case study, I examine where particular practices of engaging with lived experiences bear the potential for reinforcing or disrupting cultures that demand, co-opt, and control the meaning of others’ experiences. I address four practices: firstly, ‘face-to-face’ sharing, taking the example of PTC meetings. Secondly, collaborative and participative practices, evaluating the collaboration in this research. Thirdly, creative arts-based research practices, again assessing what has been presented in this work. Finally, I consider reflexivity in research, particularly reflexivity through embodied experiences of chronic illness and pain. I reflect on making claims to the authority of lived experiences, and how knowledge and meaning are seen to be shaped through the performance of these practices. In examining each of these practices, I seek to refuse claims to the full knowledge of others. As a result, I then move to propose an understanding of how theological and political meaning-making can occur in response to the ongoing and fragile nature of sharing lived experiences.

‘Face-to-Face’ Sharing Collaborating with PTC in this research has highlighted the ‘face-to-face’ as vital to their way of sharing lived experiences, whether in the full commission meetings, commission lunches, writing workshops, or working groups focused on issues such as food poverty. In chapter one, I emphasised where participants in the first cycle of research noted the importance of the rela-

© CL Wren Radford, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004513181_008

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tional nature of sharing their lived experiences. Sharing with others ‘in person’ enabled people to put their experiences into wider contexts, emphasising that there is no single experience of poverty. However, I have also noted some of the challenges involved in this relationality, such as judging others against inherited social norms and images surrounding experiences of, for example, poverty, disability, and seeking refuge. These signal the binds on practices taking place within existing unequal power relations, but also the vital work of shaping spaces in which people are treated with dignity, as enacting these values creates changes in these relationships whilst also working toward wider transformations. It is how PTC shares and responds to lived experiences ‘face-to-face’ that are crucial to disrupting cultures of disbelief and judgement in which people’s experiences are both demanded and denied in sites such as Jobcentres and the Border Agency, which are also often ‘in person’. I have emphasised the importance PTC places on shaping meetings as spaces where people are welcomed and treated with dignity; through icebreakers, cups of tea, and informal conversation. For the Connecting Stories exhibition, we asked commissioners who had not been involved in the creating-curating group to bring objects that, for them, represented PTC. Using items such as teapots, candles, or postcards, several people explained their objects in similar ways, noting the value of “the relationship-building over a coffee and cake, giving space to voices;

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listening and valuing”.1 The design of the labyrinth in the exhibition reflected this relational emphasis in being circles of chairs facing one another much like they are laid out in PTC gatherings and meetings, and also in providing spaces for people to meet and sit together within the labyrinth. A participant commented on this in the feedback booklets, stating that they valued in PTC’s work “the power of the circle—equal footing, people with lived experience of poverty at the heart, together building a just society with everyone”. However, I have also highlighted where PTC are recognising that face-to-face sharing is not always appropriate; for example, in exposing those experiencing trauma and stigma to judgemental remarks from others or jeopardising those whose refugee applications are under review. Similarly, I noted where participants felt that the Connecting Stories exhibition became a different kind of space for holding face-to-face conversations, with Sandra noticing that she had discussed sensitive topics with others that they wouldn’t otherwise have covered in PTC meetings. One of the challenges in engaging with face-to-face sharing is when the disclosing of personal experiences—often painful, charged, and jarring experiences—can be disproportionately expected from people experiencing marginalisation, especially when differences in voice, body, and gesture may mark them as ‘other’ in certain spaces. In one of the initial PTC workshops, a testifying commissioner responded to questions of how others could be “better listeners” by reflecting that it sometimes “feels like one side tells stories and the other is perfect”. It was felt that an existing power dynamic was being reinforced, creating a divide between “those who share” and “those who listen”. However, aiming to address these divides by asking accompanying members of PTC to also share at a similarly personal level may obscure the power dynamics surrounding who is in relative social positions to be ‘heard’. In other words, this can re-centre the emotions and experiences of those with power and privilege, rather than maintaining a focus on the experiences and knowledges of marginalised groups. Thus, although the roles of ‘sharing’ and ‘listening’ should be “heuristic rather than deterministic”, those who are in positions of power and privilege “ought not to quickly seize the silence”.2 Through this research and their own reflective work, PTC is working towards ways of encouraging commissioners in decision-making positions to connect their everyday experiences to aspects of inequality, and how they may benefit from different kinds 1 Quotes from participants when writing a brief description of the items for the exhibition. 2 M. Shawn Copeland, “Toward a Critical Christian Feminist Theology of Solidarity,” in Women and Theology: The Annual Publication of the College Theology Society Volume 40, ed. Mary Ann Hinsdale and Phyllis H. Kaminski (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1994), 25.

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of inequality, without obscuring their focus on the knowledge and experiences of testifying commissioners. Additionally, face-to-face sharing can sometimes be seen as providing direct, immediate access to others, or a place in which ‘ethically pure’ relations can be conducted. In chapter one I discussed the concerns around ‘voice’ being seen to provide transparent access to a stable, unified self. This applies to face-to-face sharing as much as to the construction of texts, particularly as face-to-face settings are situations in which others’ voices are quite literally ‘being heard’. In political conceptions of community, face-to-face settings are often privileged due to being seen as providing immediacy and transparency rather than recognising that such settings are also already mediated by voice and gesture, by bodies and by socially shaped assumptions about bodies.3 Face-to-face sharing does not carry us to a place ‘outside of’ or ‘beyond’ the social and political. In critiquing Levinas’ construction of the ‘face-to-face’ as the place where obligation arises, Caputo considers that such a purity of ethical relations is impossible, and that ethical responsibilities to ‘the other’ occur in the midst of complex political realities.4 As much as we may wish to, we cannot simply ‘take off’ socially inherited assumptions that influence how we hear and respond to others. Rather, there is the need to reflect on how embodied and socially shaped notions of gender, sexuality, race, class, and disability are responded to differently within various settings. Furthermore, we can also seek to be receptive to others’ words, actions, and experiences in ways that challenge and change harmful worldviews. These criticisms indicate where face-to-face sharing cannot be used to claim a better, more total, or direct knowledge of others. In part, I suggest that much of PTC’s work is in reshaping the assumptions that are made about how we claim knowledge through our encounters with others; in refusing relations in which people experiencing poverty are seen as objects of knowledge to be ‘grasped’ by those with power and privilege, whether through reading statistics and written evidence or through hearing testimonies face-to-face. I noted in chapter one the statement “I’ve heard that story before” from a policymaker as an example of how listening to people’s experiences face-to-face can be reduced to a way of gathering raw material. PTC’s work has therefore come to involve shaping spaces in which people are encouraged to listen not for examples of the ‘story from poverty’, but to engage with people’s critical interpreta3 Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990), 234–5. 4 John D. Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1993), 124.

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tions and creative work. These practices may require considering the aesthetic elements of how the structure and setting of events create specific political affects, for example, whether we view others as witnesses to be judged, or as potential collaborators in the tasks of interpretation and political action. From sitting in circles, sharing cups of tea, and forming woollen webs, to presenting from a stage, writing collaborative creative pieces, and moving through a labyrinth together, these creative, aesthetic practices can all foreground how particular spaces and events privilege certain experiences, knowledges, and bodies, and marginalise others. Yet, they can also gesture toward alternative ways of meeting and being with one another. This attention to the materiality of meeting together—the locations, how rooms are arranged, welcomes, icebreakers—is crucial for thinking about how power relations are embodied and outworked in sharing and responding to lived experiences. In engaging ‘face-to-face’ modes of sharing and responding to lived experiences, practitioners, researchers, and activists must then be aware of the kinds of claims that they are making to the authority of knowledge gained from working ‘in person’. When the ‘face-to-face’ is prioritised as ‘better’ for building relationships, this sends a particular message to those for whom physical meetings take a greater toll on their resources, including time, energy, and pain levels, or for those who have additional demands of multiple jobs and caring responsibilities. Who makes the decisions about physical spaces and their accessibility, both in terms of access, transport, and childcare as well as senses of belonging or feeling welcome in a space? The face-to-face is also sometimes framed as a place where politics can be ‘set aside’ in order to hear from people ‘as they really are’ or ‘people as people’, but this framing means it can be more difficult to address the inequalities of power—and thus interpretation—that are carried into that space. We need to think about what happens afterwards too, beyond the room, and how such encounters and experiences are then claimed and re-told elsewhere. We need to resist framing ‘being there’ as an authoritative proximity to others or to particular social issues that ultimately elides the various ways in which meanings pre-exist and are mediated through our relations.

Collaborative Practices I have been arguing for political and theological practices rooted in the everyday experiences and ways of knowing of grassroots communities, noting the necessity of collaborating with others who struggle against injustice in order to construct transformative practices. Collaboration is often a political strat-

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egy in which charities, policymakers, and businesses may seek to work with public groups impacted by a particular issue. It has also become a key practice in research, such as I have explored here in my own work. However, collaboration does not, in and of itself, provide ethical and transformative ways of engaging with marginalised lived experiences. Concepts of ‘participation’ and ‘collaboration’ have become malleable—suggesting almost anything involving other people—and collaborative strategies in politics and academic research can be appropriated as colonising strategies for working with ‘hard to reach’ groups.5 As Isasi-Díaz notes, participation can be easily co-opted by power; even when marginalised groups are ‘round the table’, there can still be a failure to hear what is said or to recognise how the operations of power in that setting prevent the full participation of these groups.6 She suggests that participation requires recognising the “particularity and multiplicity of practices, cultural symbols, and the ways of relating” whilst also resisting setting up universal categories.7 In short, seeing participation as including oppressed others in existing practices fails to consider how those practices—the running of meetings and business, the administering of public interest, the shaping of theological education and conferences, the organising of activist groups— exclude others by continuing dominant cultural norms for relating and thus demanding assimilation to those norms in order to ‘participate’. Here, I want to reflect further on collaboration as a strategy in research. Collaborative methods in practical theology and social research often draw on participative action research (PAR), which seeks to create collaborations between researchers and community members to address key concerns and find practical solutions.8 In collaborative processes, the researcher must

5 Andrea Cornwall, “Unpacking Participation: Models, Meanings and Practices,” Community Development Journal 43 no.3 (2008): 269. Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari, Participation: The New Tyranny? (London, New York: Zed Books, 2001). Steven Jordan, “Who Stole my Methodology? Co-opting PAR,” Globalisation, Societies and Education 1 no.2 (2003): 185–200. 6 Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), 136; Ada María Isasi-Díaz, En La Lucha = In the Struggle: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology, Tenth Anniversary Edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 198. 7 Isasi-Díaz, En La Lucha, 199, quoting Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 169. 8 For example, Helen Cameron, Deborah Bhatti, Catherin Duce, James Sweeney, and Clare Watkins, Talking About God in Practice: Theological Action Research and Practical Theology (London: SCM Press, 2010). Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, “Participatory Action Research,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, ed. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Elaine Graham, “Is Practical Theology a Form of ‘Action Research’?” International Journal of Practical Theology 17 no.1 (2013): 148–178.

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assess their role in research. Researchers who engage specific theoretical frameworks—such as feminist or critical race theory frameworks—need to reflect on decisions taken in sharing these interpretive frameworks and commitments with collaborators. On the one hand, this can impose a perspective on participants; on the other, these frameworks can be useful meaning-making resources for participants and not disclosing these frameworks may fail to reflexively bring these perspectives and concerns into critical discussion with collaborators.9 I have detailed here the work of the planning group, as well as sharing evolving ideas and interpretations with participants and how this can create generative ways of developing meaning together. For example, in chapter five I described the thread poem I made to summarise the reflections of the first workshop, this then led to further elaboration from Shirley in making her own thread piece in response; collaboration can create generative cycles of response. In any aspect of collaborative research, then, it is important to consider adaptations that enable a focus on the everyday interpretations and ways of knowing from grassroots community members, and also to consider how to work with—rather than flatten—the tensions that emerge between different frameworks and ways of knowing. I suggest that in Christian practical theology the desire to encourage collaborative research is informed by the central role of community in Christian theology. For example, in her discussion of epistemic violence and ventriloquism, discussed in chapter one, Goto states: The fact that oppression is not only pervasive but also horribly destructive should invoke in practical theologians an urgent call to work strenuously and unceasingly to pursue and achieve a profound and robust vision of community, beyond what is characterized in terms of diversity and inclusivity. In the image of God’s new creation, we have a vision to which we can aspire, where institutional power has been reigned in so that all may be subjects, that is, so that all may be persons.10

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Emily Houh and Kristin Kalsem, “Theorizing Legal Participatory Action Research: Critical Race/Feminism and Participatory Action Research,” Qualitative Inquiry 21 no.3 (2015): 262–276. Lesley Treleaven, “Making a Space: A Collaborative Inquiry with Women as Staff Development,” in Participation in Human Inquiry, ed. Peter Reason (London: Sage, 1994). Patricia Maguire, 2001. “Uneven Ground: Feminisms and Action Research,” in Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice, ed. Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury (London, Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2001). Courtney Goto, “Experiencing Oppression: Ventriloquism and Epistemic Violence in Practical Theology,” International Journal of Practical Theology 21 no.2 (2017): 193.

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Similarly, in discussing action research, Graham summarises that “the collaborative relationships inherent in research processes are not only important because they respect the local or insider knowledge of participants; they are important as an anticipation of a participatory new social order”.11 These collaborative aspects of research are then linked with the transformative claims of practical theologies. Whilst these suggest that collaborative research practices offer a way of relating to others different from more ‘traditional’ research practices, this requires critical work for recognising and resisting the colonising impulses of all research. Belief that our research, in whatever format, is benefitting others reflects colonising ideologies as much as it reflects our academic training.12 Despite my own passion for collaborative and community-orientated research, I have also noted here that relationality is not automatically positive but bears the potential for harm and misrecognition. Forms of participative research can mask, replicate, and contribute to unequal power relations. Feminist researchers have noted where techniques of friendship, solidarity, and collaboration can work to conceal power relations whilst benefitting the researcher who is praised for ‘giving away’ their power.13 Conscious of the negative impact of academic and policy researchers’ engagement in marginalised communities, the planning group made clear that they wanted my collaboration in Connecting Stories to be as an academic researcher, so that I could be learning from and with PTC’s practices of sharing lived experiences in order to inform and reshape academic research practices. In other words, they wanted to offer their own intervention into academic theological research. This means refusing to place myself as an entirely ‘different kind’ of researcher untouched by typically white, middle-class, colonial academic priorities. Instead, it requires recognising where my research practices are shaped by these active legacies in order for the collaborative encounter to imagine the possible alterative futures and relations that could be opened up as a result of this encounter. This includes refusing a romantic colonial frame for collaboration in which I, as the ‘privileged academic outsider’, come to learn about a better way of conducting research from this community, failing to consider

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Graham, “Is Practical Theology a Form of ‘Action Research’?”, 152. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Second Edition (London: Zed Books, 2012), 32. Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).

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where marginalised perspectives cannot simply be translated into the language of dominant discourse.14 In one of the Connecting Stories workshops we used the exercise of the woollen web to foreground what we were learning together from listening to each other. As I highlighted in chapter three, this is a well-known facilitation technique and versions of it are frequently used within PTC sessions. However, it was reversed in this setting as, rather than speaking first and then choosing a person to throw to at random, group members were asked to throw the ball of wool to another person and then name something that person had shared in the session and why it had resonated with them. This exercise enabled us to name how Sandra saying “I don’t know what to say” was significant to our learning, a fragment not typically recognised within academic and activist contexts. As Visweswaran argues, the problem with equating “voice” with “agency” is that temporality and silence are assumed to signal a lack of agency, a lack of knowledge.15 This collaborative exercise enabled us to move away from activist and academic emphasis on voice and speaking, and instead toward naming uncertainty, silences, and ‘not-knowing-what-to-say’ as alternative, resistant ways of engaging, signalling the impossibility of neatly translating certain experiences into words to be consumed by others. This proved to be a powerful exercise for many in the group, and I encouraged participants to take photos of the strands from where they were sitting, noting our different locations in the web. However, as these webs of relationality are woven within existing social relations, the collaborators in Connecting Stories were differently positioned within unequal power dynamics. The impact of complex situations around health, family, study, and work meant that attending workshops for Connecting Stories became difficult for some commissioners. Fiona and I were also impacted by these issues, but in our positions as a staff member and a funded researcher, we navigated these challenges differently to commissioners who were volunteering their time. Sandra reflected on caring for her mother in hospital, finding herself wondering as she sat at her mother’s bedside: “Where’s my web now? Where’s my threads, all those connections?” Her questions raise the need for ongoing reflection on the social, material, and economic factors

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Goto offers a welcome discussion of how this romantic view of learning from the “natives” is operative in practical theology in the chapter “Revealing the Natives”. Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, The Idolization of Context and the Hope of Community (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 134–162. Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, 51, 68–69.

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that influence grassroots communities’ engagement in any collaborative practices, and how to structure collaborative research. Furthermore, throughout this research I have reflected on the dangers of engaging lived experiences in collaborative research in order to claim connectivity with and thus knowledge of others. The prevalence of metaphors of webs and spinning for relationality in white feminist theology—akin to those in the workshop exercise above—is indicative of the way the “selves of white women have been formed by connectivity” and also by the “class prerogative of whiteness”.16 Overemphasising connectivity obliterates difference; by ignoring differences around race, class, religion, sexuality, and disability, white middle-class women often claim connectivity with relative ease. Techniques of claiming identification, sharing, and connection in order to overcome difference ultimately conceal rather than address questions of power. Identification and similarity are powerful social discourses that are not straightforwardly changed. I have noted in this work my tendency to focus on shared experiences of chronic illness as a way of relating to commissioners such as Mary, Kitty, and Jane; this offers both problems and possibilities. This

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Susan Brookes Thistlethwaite, Sex, Race, and God: Christian Feminism in Black and White (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2009, reprint from 1990), 90.

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way of relating can ignore how gender, sexuality, class, income, and race intersect in the diagnosis, treatment, and management of long-term conditions; yet tracing such differences enables the potential for developing research practices sensitive to the complexities of power and knowledge in working with embodied experiences. After the workshop, Kitty took away the wool from the facilitated web exercise, and crocheted a web of her own, weaving the word “power” into the centre (Figure 26). Thus, in enacting collaborative practices, researchers need to be alert to where the relationality of participating communities in chapter one might look very different from the kind of relationality the researchers themselves envision. Although enmeshed in these aspects of wider social and material relations, as a collaborative project Connecting Stories opened spaces for engaging testifying commissioners’ embodied, creative, relational, everyday forms of knowing. As I have argued through drawing on Isasi-Díaz’s work, sharing lived experiences conveys not only descriptions of daily life, but also grassroots communities’ ways of knowing, the way they interpret and understand their realities. Goto identifies her concern that collaborative methods in much of practical theology have typically not engaged with these alternative ways of knowing, and they often train non-academics into academic frameworks whilst failing to indicate “how scholars are being trained to think like the nonacademic members of the community they are studying”.17 In order to address this, I employed the initial cycle of research, Encountering Themes, to consider the approaches that would be suited to PTC. This helped to unfold what participants considered to be ethical and respectful in practices of sharing lived experiences, so that the research practices were not entirely determined by academic norms and my assumptions as a researcher.18 This also led to the consideration of engaging with creative arts-based methods that would work with and develop commissioners’ existing ways of making meaning, which I explore further below. Collaborative practices for foregrounding particular lived experiences require careful examination of the claims to knowledge-making through these lived experiences. Ownership of knowledge often moves with, rather than against, flows of power in collaboration. Researchers and practitioners therefore need to consider how collaborations may themselves disrupt this by

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Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 175. Bishop provides an interesting discussion on the contrasts between ethical systems for storytelling in Māori and colonial modes. Russell Bishop, Freeing Ourselves (Rotterdam: Sense, 2011).

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seeking alternative outcomes that cannot be grasped and owned by those in positions of power. We may seek to refuse to locate participants within existing interpretive frameworks, instead ensuring that participants are part of naming and developing the different ways of knowing that then guide the project. Work often needs to be done prior to and as part of the collaboration to negotiate what is considered ethical and respectful, as well as being realistic about the outcomes and benefits of collaboration. Due to funding and timelines, collaborations are often entered into with fixed products in mind, so where might we enable processes and products that are informed by the collaboration itself? This is difficult and long-term work, requiring a reshaping of academic and political ways of working. Whilst we may name some collaborative relationships as imagining and enacting alterative social relations, I remain cautious about naming connectivity, collaboration, and relationality as goods in themselves without also considering how these are used by researchers for their own power and claims to authentic and authoritative knowledge.

Creative Arts-Based Research Practices Creative arts-based research includes a range of practices—from visual arts, performance, dance and music, to creative writing and poetry—either as stand-alone qualitative methods or additions to more traditional research methods. Creative methods can be a way of exploring and presenting lived experiences, for example encouraging participants to engage forms such as poetry, photography, or collage. A challenge of engaging with creative arts is that art does not always tell a neat or coherent tale, and it is open to interpretation. This is perhaps one of the reasons that researchers may be nervous about engaging with creative arts when they are trying to make a theological and political argument: it opens up the possibilities of multiple interpretations and even misinterpretations. However, as I have argued throughout, all forms of sharing contain this risk of our words and our lived experiences being misunderstood, misread, and misused; this risk of misinterpretation is more acute for marginalised communities. Yet, it is in creative methods posing questions about the nature of fixed and full explanations that they offer disruptions of how dominant discourses determine the meaning of marginalised groups’ experiences. Creative methods are committed to being open to the multiple interpretations that an artwork may offer, and also the multiple ways of experiencing, knowing,

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and engaging in the world.19 Meaning is to be “evoked” in creative artsbased approaches rather than “denoted”.20 Often, creative arts-based research runs contrary to traditional qualitative methodologies that are framed by the “metaphysical desire to make things safe and secure”.21 In this way, creative approaches may be able to disrupt closed and certain meanings and images produced by dominant society, for example those I highlighted in chapter four: what it means to be disabled, to be a refugee, and the ‘deserving/undeserving’ binary. However, this focus on multiple and ambiguous meanings in arts-based research can risk erasing specifically political messages in creative works. Susan Finley offers the example of her ethnodrama Street Rat being used to make a point by arts researchers Barone and Eisner about the “ethics of political ambiguity” when the purpose was to “lash out against a metanarrative about homelessness and poverty that blames the victim”, and as such the piece “did not intend political ambiguity”.22 Yet, in the example of Liz Crow’s Figures discussed in chapter four, multiple meanings and paths into interpreting the project enhanced the central anti-austerity message. Recognising multiple ways of knowing in creative arts-based methods also emphasises collaboration. In community arts practices, collaboration exists on a number of levels: between facilitator and community; among participants; between the project and the audience; and with the materials or setting. I noted in chapter four the way the creative methods enabled viewers of the Connecting Stories exhibition to engage in different ways, finding their own way through a labyrinth, reading text or looking at images, and creating their own connections between different elements. As awareness of these multiple levels of collaboration can be unsettling, researchers must “learn to live with uncertainty, become comfortable with discomfort, and be excited by the

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Elizabeth Grierson and Laura Brearley, “Ways of Learning from Creative Research: A Postscript,” in Creative Arts Research: Narratives of Methodologies and Practices, ed. Elizabeth Grierson and Laura Brearley (Rotterdam, Boston: Sense Publishers, 2009), 166. Ardra L. Cole and J. Gary Knowles, “Arts-Informed Research,” in Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues, ed. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra L. Cole (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2008). Patricia Leavy, Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice, Second Edition (New York, London: The Guilford Press, 2015), 22. Tom Barone and Elliot W. Eisner, Arts Based Research (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2011), 15, quoting John D. Caputo Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction and the Hermeneutic Project (Indianapolis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 7. Susan Finley, “Critical Arts-Based Inquiry: Performances of Resistance Politics,” in Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, Fifth Edition, ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 2018), 570.

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insights and creativity” emerging from challenging moments.23 Conscious of the tendency for collaboration to mean academic co-option, particularly of indigenous or minoritised participants, Laura Brearley and Treahna Hamm see collaboration in arts-based research as a “deep listening” requiring attention to “our participatory connectedness with other research participants”.24 Brearley and Hamm indicate through this notion of deep listening that the creative and innovative elements of arts-based research are ultimately in facilitating settings of listening and respect, from which artistic “products” such as poetry or material pieces can emerge.25 What this suggests is that creative arts do not automatically provide ethical, respectful spaces for engaging marginalised lived experiences, but that the work to shape respectful spaces is itself a creative process from which artistic products can be developed. Whilst the Connecting Stories exhibition was a focal point, creative artsbased methods emphasise the process of research alongside the end products, whether exhibitions or academic texts. In chapter three, I highlighted the processes of making, in particular the ways in which participants generated and developed their images and ideas. Equally, I foregrounded the process of this research in making connections between participants’ insights and the work of theorists and theologians; this can be seen very clearly in the construction of chapter one of this text. As meaning-making takes place throughout the research, arts processes offer a way of disrupting ideas about the linear, sequential aspects of research that moves from planning, gathering data, interpreting data, and presenting findings.26 The researcher’s role is instead in being with the research, being open to being transformed in the process.27 In this way, creative arts-based research emphasises the performative and embodied nature of research, as the relationships and material products of creative arts research are implicated in and constitutive of our knowing and transforming. Elizabeth Grierson argues that this emphasis on process in creative arts-based research challenges modern discourses that posit the

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Deborah Barndt, “Touching Minds and Hearts: Community Arts as Collaborative Research,” in Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues, ed. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra L. Cole (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2008), 360. Laura Brearley and Treahna Hamm, “Ways of Looking and Listening: Stories from the Spaces Between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Knowledge Systems,” in Creative Arts Research: Narratives of Methodologies and Practices, ed. Elizabeth Grierson and Laura Brearley (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2009), 44. Brearley and Hamm, “Ways of Looking and Listening,” 50. Cole and Knowles, “Arts-Informed Research,” 67. Barone and Eisner, Arts Based Research, 134.

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researcher as an individual knowing subject expressing themself in creative acts, and instead points to an approach in which “one is mediated by and opened up to the research process to the point that one ‘becomes’ a subject”.28 This can also help to foreground where social discourses—including those at work in theological research—are themselves constructed and performed, rather than given and immutable. Creative arts-based methods were especially useful for researching with PTC, as they offer ways of drawing on and working with the emotional, embodied, and relational knowledges that are often hard to engage in research. In the planning group we decided on specific creative arts-based and discussion methods that would work with and develop testifying commissioners’ existing ways of making meaning, as PTC members had engaged with writing groups, quilting workshops, and photography workshops. However, this will not be the case with every community, and researchers need to think carefully about why arts-based methods might work for their participating community, and how this is to be implemented. One of the concerns is that arts-based methods require more time and effort, which can sometimes place physical demands on the researcher and participating community, yet also disrupts academic models and demands on the production of research. Such an approach involves considering “how the creative arts can serve as a shared space in which questions of meaning can be explored”.29 This embodied, experiential, creative learning enables ways of entering into and staying with knowledge that is difficult to pin down. As highlighted through the staging of the Connecting Stories exhibition, which stood separate to the writing of chapter three that recreated the exhibition in text, creative arts-based approaches raise the possibility of making pieces outside of or in addition to the construction of an academic text and arguments. Such shared pieces, whether poems, visual arts pieces, performances, or installations, can never ‘belong’ solely to the researcher, highlighting the knowing and interpreting that cannot be easily recuperated into academic practical theology. This can serve as ways of disrupting models of the individual academic ‘knower’; raising questions about how we can better value the processes and outputs of knowledge beyond academic texts whilst also giving appropriate credit to research collaborators in these existing forms.

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Elizabeth Grierson, “Ways of Knowing and Being: Navigating the Conditions of Knowledge and Becoming a Creative Subject,” in Creative Arts Research: Narratives of Methodologies and Practices, ed. Elizabeth Grierson and Laura Brearley (Rotterdam, Boston: Sense Publishers, 2009), 17. Elaine Graham, “The State of the Art: Practical Theology Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: New Directions in Practical Theology,” Theology 120 no.3 (2017): 110.

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Creative arts-based methods are still emerging as research practices in theology, though this already includes a range of approaches, for example: found object sculpture in theological education;30 performance in congregations and faith communities;31 life writing;32 creative non-fiction;33 poetry;34 and studiobased visual arts.35 This emerging strand emphasises theological research as a constructive, creative practice. Researchers in practical theology can be seen as “creative practitioners” who generate insight and knowledge in a “creative

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Courtney Goto, “Reflecting Theologically by Creating Art: Giving Form to More than We Can Say,” Reflective Practice: Formation and Supervision in Ministry 36 (2016): 78–92. Anthony Reddie, Dramatizing Theologies: A Participative Approach to Black God-Talk (London: Routledge, 2006). Courtney Goto, The Grace of Playing: Pedagogies for Leaning in to God’s New Creation (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2016). Heather Walton, Writing Methods in Theological Reflection (London: SCM Press, 2014). Heather Walton, Not Eden: Spiritual Life Writing for this World (London: SCM Press, 2015). Pamela Couture, We Are Not All Victims: Local Peacebuilding in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Zurich: LIT Verlag, 2016). Nicola Slee, Seeking the Risen Christa (London: SPCK, 2011). Nancy Lynne Westfield, Dear Sisters: A Womanist Practice of Hospitality (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2001). Libby Byrne, “Practice-led theology: The studio as a site for theology in the making,” Theology 120 no.3 (2017): 197–207.

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making” that counterbalances notions of “useful doing” in the discipline.36 Mary Clark Moschella argues for the importance of “art, creativity, and poetics” in practical theological research as these highlight that research is not a “precise science” where researchers “simply ‘write up’ their findings in a mechanical way”, rather all theological research involves the “creative activity of composing”.37 Goto contends that “playing with/through art” recognises how theological construction “involves the complex process of knowing and reflecting, not only through words, statements, and theories but also through aesthetic sensibilities”.38 This foregrounds the constructive, creative element in all theology: the fact is that we are always imagining, creating, constructing, and fashioning answers to theological questions (as well as re-forming the questions)—perhaps not with paint, marble, or music but with images, ideas, and approaches that are by definition interpretations. In other words, we have been functioning as theologians, imaginatively, all along—without recognizing what we have done as creative, aesthetic, and theological.39 Researching “with/through art” may be seen as deviating from standard practice in theology, however Goto suggests that this “decentering” reconnects us to “an expanded notion of reflecting theologically that gives form to the sayable and ineffable”.40 Similarly, womanist theologian Nancy Lynne Westfield considers that working with the aesthetic and artistic is a way of refusing the mainstream scholarly “voice” and “allows description without dissection, exploration without violation, interpretation without devaluation or redaction”.41 As such, engaging with creative arts in theological research can disrupt what I have described as the cultures of judgement that are held over lived experiences by opening researchers to what has been ruled ‘out of court’ by modes of research that emphasise rationality and discount the experiential, affective, and imaginative. I want to suggest that creative arts approaches hold strong possibilities in practical theological research, but this is not to set up 36 37

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Zöe Bennett, Elaine Graham, Stephen Pattison, and Heather Walton, Invitation to Research in Practical Theology (Abingdon, Oxon, and New York: Routledge 2018), 152–155. Mary Clark Moschella, “Practice Matters: New Directions in Ethnography and Qualitative Research,” in Pastoral Theology and Care: Critical Trajectories in Theory and Practice, ed. Nancy J. Ramsey (Chichester, UK; Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2018), 23. Goto, “Reflecting Theologically by Creating Art”, 80. Goto, “Reflecting Theologically by Creating Art”, 84. Goto, “Reflecting Theologically by Creating Art”, 84. Westfield, Dear Sisters, 10.

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creative arts-based research as a solution to the problems I have raised in working with lived experiences. Rather, it is to indicate that creative methods may take us further toward recognising the inherent tensions and problems of representation and interpretation in practical theology with which we need to grapple.

Reflexivity Reflexivity has become central to practical theology as a way of recognising how researchers’ lived experiences and social locations come to shape the design, execution, and interpretations of research. Reflexivity is seen as a way of highlighting the subjectivity of all research, critiquing notions of an objective researcher able to do what Donna Haraway terms the “god trick of seeing everything from nowhere”.42 In practice, reflexivity often involves the researcher acknowledging their positionality: the ways gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and global location shape the process of research. However, such moves may be seen as a strategy enabling the researcher to become aware of and thus bracket their biases in order not to “contaminate” the research and become impartial.43 When reflexivity is a standard for practical theologians to achieve, it may become another form of “mastery” in which researchers are expected to display thoughts and feelings in becoming a ‘better’ or ‘more ethical’ researcher, which can often just mean being more ‘in line with’ the norms of the discipline.44 Reflexivity sometimes results in a confessional practice whereby the researcher notes their individual social location without critically interrogating the implications. Invoking a litany of outsider privilege in reflexive accounts, it has become “commonplace to rehearse inventories that begin with middle-class and end with Western or Western-educated”.45 Whilst it may be helpful to begin with such narratives, reflexivity cannot remain as a “listing of adjectives of assigning labels such as race, sex, and class”—although I confess to such confessional practices myself —as this fails to get to grips with how 42 43 44

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Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, 14 no.3 (1988), 581. Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 99; Bennett et al, Invitation to Research in Practical Theology (Abingdon, Oxon, and New York: Routledge 2018), 44–45. Bennett et al, Invitation to Research, 38. Wanda Pillow, “Confession, catharsis or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodological power in qualitative research,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 16 no.2 (2003): 175–196. Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, 49.

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these locations are constructed and interact with the unfolding research.46 Individual aspects of identity have the tendency to replace fuller accounts of how these positions are constructed in and through the research process, and precisely how flows of privilege and power are reinforced in the process.47 Furthermore, writing reflexive accounts can depend on conjuring the researcher as a stable, unified self. Disclosures within reflexivity can be “limited and limiting because such usages are necessarily dependant on a knowable subject and often collapse into linear tellings that render the researcher and the research subject as more familiar to each other (and thus to the reader)”.48 I have been arguing, particularly in this methodology, for the need to resist forms of sharing lived experiences that make others fully present and knowable; such resistances need to be extended to reflexivity. I noted above how creative arts-based methods may emphasise the performative process in which one becomes a researcher—or a practical theologian—through interacting with participants, texts, research materials, and within or against disciplinary norms. Similarly, it may be possible to develop a practice of reflexivity that is less a “coming to know who the author is” and instead offers a “critique of the disciplinary practices”, continually exposing and confronting power in the process of interpretation.49 Attempts to locate the researcher in relation to research participants are also caught in these dynamics of power and representation. Images of the “self-in-relation” can acknowledge the political, embodied nature of knowledge creation.50 However, this may rely on “fixing others in place” in order for the researcher to attain reflexivity.51 Reflexive practices can come to depend on the use of an ‘other’ to demonstrate the researcher’s self-knowing; including through identification of oneself as a privileged outsider in relation to participants. This can play into ‘quest’ narratives of seeking the acknowledgement and respect of participants who ultimately teach the researcher about themselves.52 Thus, even when this is not a researcher’s intention, we need to

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Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouseTM: Feminism and Technoscience (London: Routledge, 1997), 37. Beverley Skeggs, “Techniques for Telling the Reflexive Self,” in Qualitative Research in Action, ed. Tim May (London: Sage, 2002). Pillow, “Confession, catharsis or cure?” 184. Pillow, “Confession, catharsis or cure?” 188. Bennett et al., Invitation to Research, 42. Skeggs, “Techniques for Telling the Reflexive Self,” 36. Skeggs, “Techniques for Telling the Reflexive Self,” 357; See also: Pillow, “Confession, catharsis or cure?”. Ahmed, Strange Encounters. Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Goto, Taking on Practical Theology.

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examine where forms of reflexivity often benefit the researcher and academia more broadly by “fixing others in place” as a means for the researcher to display their learning about their own assumptions about others’ lives. In her analysis of reflexivity, Goto demonstrates the paradox I have been describing about various practices of sharing lived experiences. She discusses where white scholars often fail to fully reflect on race and the implications of whiteness, whilst scholars of colour are expected to perform particular notions of race in their reflexive accounts. Goto notes where this is problematic for scholars of colour as it “fulfils white expectations of ethnic availability to be seen and known as other”—particularly where this might go against cultural standards, for example Goto’s own as a Japanese American woman—but is a standard demanded within the discipline of practical theology.53 However, she suggests that it may be possible to engage in reflexivity to “offer images that destabilize what is taken for granted so that we might try to take alternative steps together”.54 In this way, practices of reflexivity may intervene in existing discourses, yet this cannot simply fall to particular ‘outsider’ individuals in constructing disruptive reflexive accounts. As Goto suggests, one possibility is undertaking radically collaborative work that addresses the “collective construction” of harmful attitudes and assumptions, seeing these as beyond individual personal biases but part of the histories, institutions, and traditions we performatively enact.55 Collaborative practices of reflexivity involve conversing with participants, with readers, and with others in the field of practical theology to address dynamics of power and privilege in the midst of research. Whilst I am drawn to a thoroughly relational reflexive practice that also demonstrates awareness of how notions of reflexivity are entangled in power and privilege, I am conscious of having framed this discussion through the ‘making visible’ or ‘making known’ of power relations. Feminist geographer Gillian Rose argues that discourses of reflexivity reliant on claims to understand how power works assume that “power”, “self”, and “relations” are ultimately knowable.56 Rose argues that the reflexive questions feminist

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Courtney Goto, “Writing in Compliance with the Racialized ‘Zoo’ of Practical Theology,” in Conundrums in Practical Theology, ed. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore and Joyce Ann Mercer (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 129. Courtney Goto, “Writing in Compliance with the Racialized ‘Zoo’ of Practical Theology,” 129. Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 211–2. Gillian Rose, “Situating Knowledges: Positionality, Reflexivity and Other Tactics,” Progress in Human Geography 21 no.3 (1997): 311.

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researchers are supposed to pose—for example, “how does the work deploy and confront power”—are “extraordinarily difficult to answer”.57 She argues: the answers are so massive, the questions are so presumptuous about the reflective, analytical power of the research, that I want to say that they should be simply unanswerable: we should not imagine we can answer them. For if we do, we may be performing nothing more than a goddesstrick uncomfortably similar to the god-trick.58 The ability to know and chart the dynamics of power may become a similarly panoptic vision to what I have critiqued throughout this work. Rose suggests that the impossibility of answering such total questions signals the “impossibility of such a quest to know fully both self and context”.59 Rose’s critique is a useful reminder that our claims to know how power works are limited; potentially becoming totalising claims, a new form of mastery. This is then a tension or ambivalence not only in reflexivity but also in each of the practices I am naming here: needing to trace and interrupt such power dynamics, whilst simultaneously recognising the impossibility of fully accounting for how our encounters are shaped by such complex relations. Yet, I am reminded of Rivera’s articulation that “not-knowing” cannot lead to indifference, rather, such entangled relations can be imagined through a poetics.60 In this way, I emphasise poetic reflexivity as a way of taking seriously the complexity and otherness of ourselves, participants, and the world. Reflexivity through a Body in Pain I have engaged reflexivity to consider how I am shaping and being shaped by the research process. Through autoethnographic fragments I have detailed my embodied experiences; yet I have also conveyed my ambivalence about this, suggesting a tension between reflexively ‘displaying’ these experiences whilst also encountering where the realities of such experiences are frequently judged, dismissed, or ignored, including within practical theology. I am also wary of disability narratives that are often produced for and seek to reassure a non-disabled audience, with the potential to reinforce harmful norms of a ‘disabling event’ and an inspirational ‘overcoming’. I have tried to offer a refusal

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Rose, “Situating Knowledges,” 311. Rose, “Situating Knowledges,” 311. Rose, “Situating Knowledges,” 311. Mayra Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015), 4.

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of these in some of my own tellings here; for example in suggesting that I became ill both ‘slowly’ and ‘all at once’ reflecting the relationship between body and society as well as reflecting on how disability and the ‘chronic’ nature of illness disrupt normative ideas of time and diagnosis.61 Thus there is a deep ambivalence to reflexivity: it is a practice shaped by ongoing legacies of power and privilege whilst also enabling possible images to be offered that can disrupt such legacies. This indicates where practical theology as a community of practice needs to respond to what is shared in reflexive accounts by actively changing harmful practices, including changing where reflexive practices demand an account of oneself that can be all too easily consumed by others. We need to think about the purposes of collected reflexive accounts, and how these might resource the possibilities of shaping more just and welcoming communities and practices. In the previous chapter, I drew on Rivera’s work to indicate the need for interventions that arise from images and experiences of ‘disorderly’ bodies. Where, then, might accounts of embodied research in and through chronic pain and illness, as I have provided glimpses of here through my own experiences, offer the potential to disrupt discourses of embodiment in practical theology? As suggested by Sheppard, where might reflexivity and other research practices become a truth-telling refusal to comply with the demand for abstraction of bodily experiences, particularly abstracted concepts of race?62 I am also conscious of where disability narratives also often reproduce whiteness and sometimes compare disability to other forms of oppression rather than recognising multiple and intersecting experiences and that oppressions cannot be comparatively evaluated. I hesitate, aware of the dangers of presenting narratives to be consumed by others, and the very real implications that disclosing disability has on how one is received in academia. The “ambivalence” of chronic pain and illness directs attention to the often “taken-for-granted substance of embodiment”, challenging notions of the stability or wholeness of ‘the body’ in theology.63 “Pain is messy”, reflects theologian Deborah Creamer in discussing her own experiences of chronic pain, suggesting such messiness indicates “the complexity and contested nature of

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See for example Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). Phillis Isabella Sheppard, “Raced Bodies: Portraying Bodies, Reifying Racism,” in Conundrums in Practical Theology, ed. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore and Joyce Ann Mercer (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 243. Elaine Graham, “Words Made Flesh: Women, Embodiment and Practical Theology,” Feminist Theology 7 no.21 (1999): 117.

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this work”.64 Elaine Scarry argues that pain “does not simply resist language but actively destroys it”, requiring acts of the imagination to move outside the body in order to communicate pain.65 However, Anzaldúa, Rivera, and Betcher all consider it necessary and possible to work in and through the body in pain in order to hold “corporeal contours—finitude, limits, transience, and mortality, as well as the suffering and pain associated with such—in cultural consciousness”.66 Making theology with and through a body in chronic pain is risky, perhaps tomorrow these fluctuations in pain and movement will mean I will not find today’s strategy possible and desire a different route. Yet, these others who share from their own experiences of illness and chronic pain offer a sense of companionship and, even if I disagree with their conclusions, offer images and texts that enable me to construct some kind of path. This pain and illness I live with is not new, but writing about it remains challenging. I cannot entirely make peace with the pain and its incessant fluctuations, nor with bringing it into words. I reconstruct experiences in the text, fists clenched, ears ringing, a feeling like the crunching and grinding of glass somewhere at the limits of my perception. Aspects of my embodied experience are contested and widely misunderstood. I worry about my body, and words about my body, being judged and carried to unintended conclusions. And of course, as soon as I put these experiences into text, my body shifts and flares— yet another round of hospital stays, tests, and adapting to symptoms that… just become part of life. Particularly frustrating is the increased impact on my hands, the difficulty in holding the tools I once used in making the creative pieces that appear in this work.

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Deborah Beth Creamer, “Theology and Chronic Pain: Some Initial Reflections,” Journal of Religion, Disability & Health, 17 no.2 (2013): 214. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4. Mayra Rivera, “Unsettling Bodies,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26 no.2 (2010): 119–123. Gloria Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark = Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015). Sharon Betcher discusses the writings of Hildegard and Lucy Greary to argue against Scarry. However, she also offers the reminder that ‘disability’ cannot be conflated with physical pain, stating that for people with disabilities, “our bodies, though we may not be and are often not in pain, will not stop confessing their transient contours”. Sharon Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 195–198. Suzanne Bost responds to Scarry by arguing that the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Ana Castillo, and Frida Kahlo “opens up new perceptions of the relationship between one’s body and the world around it and creates new ways of moving through the world”. Suzanne Bost, Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 31.

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In chapter two, I discussed different images from Anzaldúa and Oyeyemi of the disassembling and reassembling of gendered bodies as part of wider metaphors surrounding the agonising, ambivalent task of remaking oneself especially in hostile cultures that expose particular bodies to violence and oppression. These images seep into me and, in a long sequence of nights with pain—pain like heavy corrugated metal sheets sliding and clashing against one another through my limbs—I dream about being dismembered and reassembled; reassembled smaller to take up less space in the world. In this reassembling, the sharpest, most jarring, and unique parts of myself have been turned against stone, so that they may blunt and become malleable through exposure. The dream diffuses but the feeling lingers… as does the pain. After these nights, I return to Anzaldúa’s writings, wondering what other bodily images I may hold in my mind, in my body. Anzaldúa offers a vivid account of the everyday realities of writing amidst taking readings of her glucose meter and administering insulin, walking by the edge of the sea, editing multiple drafts, washing dishes, marathon-reading novels through episodes of depression, and coming back to the piece months later.67 She reflects on the challenges of deciding “which chunks of your inner struggle and pain to cannibalize and incorporate into the text” and of “mixing a discursive style with a poetic one”.68 Contemplating her account, I think of what it is to be making theology in and through this everyday embodied life, and what it might be to bring this into the text. I wonder if my account here has portrayed too much of the public, busy self—the self of interviews, creative workshops, exhibitions— and not the private self of the slow days preparing and recovering or taking notes in endless medical waiting rooms. The many days spent lying down just watching the soft lights of passing cars play on the dark bedroom ceiling, trying—as a method of distraction—to conjure a handful of useful words to write down later. I wonder what it would be to make more apparent in the public spaces of practical theology these conditions of constructing through this body in pain. I consider where practical theologians have written about their everyday lives as an aspect of making theology. In days of gardening, reading, teaching, and anxious, sleepless nights.69 In the tensions between writing about spirituality amidst children’s smelly laundry that “piles up faster than we can say the

67 68 69

Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 95–117. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 103. Walton, Writing Methods.

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divine office”.70 Alongside his discussion of the narratives that congregations tell to make sense of their shared experiences, Hopewell sets the narratives he and his friends share as they make a “mutual quest for meaning and love” during his terminal illness.71 He writes of his struggle in perceiving meaning, between wanting this “illness of mine to be resolved by miracle” then rejecting such “selective solace” in favour of a sense of life that “contains within itself the extraordinary”, stating: “I gain a glimpse of its wonder, when, in a communion of love, the scales fall from my eyes and I am amazed by the intricacy of the ordinary”.72 Yet, this shifts again under his suspicion that this “lyricizes the dull, given matter of life” and his desire for greater significance: “I do not want to be merely intricate; I want also to participate in some pattern that transcends the course of my feeble life”.73 This struggling, this shifting and searching, emerges in “the uncertainty of my sickroom”, with the community of friends and colleagues telling stories gathered around his hospital bed.74 I am drawn to Hopewell’s descriptions—living myself with those waves of meaning that roll, break, recede, and erode in the midst of illness—but in this I think of another image of bedside conversations, that of Liz Crow’s performance piece Bedding Out (2012–2013). I pour over the images of Crow lying in bed in a performance space for 48 hours at a time, conducting conversations with participants, and engaging her own experiences of spending a lot of time lying down or working from bed as a way of “managing” activities as an “ill person”.75 I am drawn to her making apparent these often-concealed elements of chronic illness: the fluctuations between being able to do something one day but being “too ill” the next as simply being the “ordinary complexity of life”.76 Crow describes in an autoethnographic piece the act of lying down in public as a “confrontation” against social conventions—a simple “stretching out my legs,

70 71 72 73 74 75

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Claire E. Wolfteich, “Standing at the Gap: Reading Classics and the Practices of Everyday Life.” Spiritus 10 no.2 (2010): 252. James F. Hopewell, Congregation: Stories and Structures, ed. Barbara G. Wheeler (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 57. Hopewell, Congregation, 64. Hopewell, Congregation, 64. Hopewell, Congregation, 55. Liz Crow and Keren Zaiontz, “The Aesthetics of Austerity: A conversation with Liz Crow.” Public 53 no.1 (2016): 11. Available at: http://www.roaring-girl.com/work/aesthetics -austerity-conversation-liz-crow/. Accessed 14th March 20194. Images from the performances can be viewed on her website. www.roaring-girl.com/work/bedding-out. Accessed 30th Dec 2020. Crow and Zaiontz, “The Aesthetics of Austerity,” 6.

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reclining my body, resting my head” at conferences, in pubs, in the street.77 “To lie down in front of others feels so exposed”, Crow reflects, “in public, reclined, I have so much body; it unfolds and unravels on the horizontal plane, taking up more than its share of space”.78 This act of “lying down anyhow” for Crow is not about “managing shame or the troubled body” but is about “seizing some small courage and breaking rules that cry out to be broken. It is about laughing with the results and going back for more. And it’s about realizing that, when I push boundaries, others find their courage too”.79 Crow’s lying down is deeply political, the bedside conversations countering austerity narratives of disabled people I have discussed throughout this work. Courage and laughter, and conversations lying down—is this what I envision for embodied reflexive practices? Mine is not a bedside or a lying down attended by communal conversations; it is too mundane, too uneventful for that. There is no real crisis, and I have mostly made peace with the quiet. Yet, I often find myself daydreaming—as I try to keep myself awkwardly upright against seminar tables or library shelves, pushing further into pain and a dizziness that blocks my vision—what would it be to lie down, to rest here? Not as a way of ‘managing’ an unruly body in pain but to let it take up space, to be shown as the place from which I do my theology? Taking up space physically in public is also a gendered and racialised issue. What is it, then, to let ambivalent, disorderly bodies, with their pain and joy and creativity and contradiction, inhabit the rooms and texts of practical theology? Are there ways to be and become one’s body alongside those who have also been excluded from theology, without taking over their space or demanding others mimic or submit to my postures, especially recognising where whiteness often demands its own centring and control. There are dangers in projecting claims about pain onto others, warns Creamer, arguing that a more interesting task lies in considering “how we might be present to ourselves and each other in the midst of pain, noting both the terror and rupture and the beauty therein”.80 I want acts of embodied reflexivity to also be a gesture of invitation, a making place with others, a recognition of different bodily beings, becomings, and gestures. What I have articulated in this work, about cultures of disbelief and judgement, about practices of sharing lived experiences was learned through

77 78 79 80

Liz Crow, “Lying Down Anyhow: An Autoethnography,” Qualitative Inquiry 20 no.3 (2014): 360. Crow, “Lying Down Anyhow,” 360, emphasis in original. Crow, “Lying Down Anyhow,” 361. Creamer, “Theology and Chronic Pain,” 218.

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embodied collaboration. I have noted where the physical making of and interaction with creative pieces shaped my understandings, and also where my own unruly body has been implicated in these discourses. Through participating in and co-creating spaces that cultivate forms of attention to plural and particular experiences and ways of knowing, I could recognise the significance of these material practices, even as I had already come to be facilitating such practices. To borrow from Rivera, this was a “lending” of my embodied self to this community, to these creative interventions “in order that [I] may be shaped by those visions—through words, ceremony, ritual, and practices”.81 This collaborative creative research has shaped an understanding of my own entanglement in cultures of disbelief and judgement, enabling this to also be a still unfolding intervention into these discourses, particularly those of practical theology.

Fragile, Ongoing, Responsive Practices In each of the practices above, I have noted how sharing lived experiences risks presenting a full and authoritative knowledge of others. I suggest the need to recognise the fragility of sharing lived experiences as a way of refusing such certainties, of refusing to ‘fix in place’ a person or an experience they have shared. Acknowledging that sharing is fragile is also a refusal to enshrine or sacralise specific practices of sharing lived experiences in ways that ignore this complicity in power relations. This is not to suggest that we cannot or should not engage with lived experiences, but to consider where our ways of making political and theological meaning need to be more responsive to the ongoing and varied nature of people’s experiences. Again, this is not the inclusion of marginalised ‘voices’ into existing ways of operating, but to reshape ways of relating to one another and society. As I have been arguing through chapters four and five, creative interventions into cultures of judgement and disbelief can be transformative when they continually re-enact holding space for heterogeneous and specific experiences and communities’ re-making of meaning, rather than in becoming definitive places of certainty and full presence. Ongoing Lived Experiences The approach I have taken in this work has highlighted the importance of responding to people’s ongoing lives, rather than treating lived experiences

81

Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 148.

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as static and immutable. In the initial reflective workshops with PTC, commissioners considered the unpredictable aspects of embodied and affective responses in both sharing and listening to lived experiences. The commissioners also reflected on what they termed people becoming “stuck in their story”. In other words, people repeating the same version of their experiences without reflecting on changes in their circumstances, including the changes emerging from sharing and responding with others at PTC. In chapter one I briefly noted the experiences of a commissioner who felt that a policymaker was telling an “out-of-date” narrative about the challenges facing kinship carers, failing to include the activist work that had achieved policy changes. Engaging others’ lived experiences requires consideration of the ongoing and shifting personal and political circumstances, a way of staying with the creative work that is being done by communities. This sense of the ongoing nature of lived experiences was conveyed by commissioners in the reflective workshops. In responding to the prompt “my story is…”, one person wrote “my story is a reflection in the sea”, an image suggesting movement and temporality, a line we picked up on at the start of the Connecting Stories project by sending out invites with paper boats and a creative written piece (Figure 7). Another commissioner wrote the following: My story is living inside me and shows itself all around me in different shapes and forms. My story is not sorted, so to speak, and sometimes I’m unsure of what it’s all about. There are parts of my story that I’ve looked at, dwelled on and got some sense of closure on. Some chapters I’ve let go of and some I haven’t even looked at Sometimes I just feel that it is what it is. These lines reflect a sense of the varied nature of lived experiences, being able to give expression to and find a sense of closure for some experiences, whilst also feeling that there are some parts of life that remain unexamined. Resonating with the notion that in any encounter there are various elements of a person’s life that are made apparent but that other aspects cannot be made fully present, these words offer the reminder that a person’s lived experiences are not monolithic. Gaps and silences sit alongside oft-narrated episodes; the rough, jagged edges alongside what has been worn smooth. These considerations of the ongoing, shifting nature of lived experiences continued into Connecting Stories. I noted in chapter three that Kitty’s ongoing health concerns made her feel less confident about what she had previ-

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ously shared with PTC around issues of health inequalities. Similarly, Shirley commented in a creative workshop that she didn’t want to look back on what she had previously shared with PTC. In contrast, due to being unable to participate in the Connecting Stories workshops as a result of chronic health issues, Jane was keen that a previously documented version of her experiences of a disability assessment should be included in the exhibition, and in this research. Other commissioners also felt proud of what they had shared, particularly of some of the longer written “life stories”, poems, or performance pieces. In the planning group we discussed how the changes in someone’s life influenced the dynamics of sharing their experiences; equally we considered where the lack of change in someone’s circumstances can also have an impact, noting that the effort of “keeping going” can be exhausting for people experiencing poverty. Although this does not negate the critical knowledge that people share in their lived experiences, it does require a sensitivity toward the shifts and changes that occur and the implications for how people engage with sharing their experiences. As I suggested in chapter five, these are not “personal histories told in the past tense, but lives in flux”. Research and activist practices need to be responsive to these ongoing, fragile, shifting experiences. Given changes in people’s circumstances, we cannot assume that, having shared their lived experiences in one context, people can be asked to do so again, or that they are willing to share details of other experiences. Consent to share and to have these experiences told elsewhere requires continued discussion, and thus structures that enable this reflection and involvement. In research, “‘consent’ is fragile. It is not a one-off, neverto-be-repeated event, but should be extended as an ongoing negotiation as the research process evolves—sometimes beyond the researcher’s involvement”.82 The ethical processes of engaging lived experiences also need to be named as ongoing and fragile if they are to be responsive to developments in the research and in people’s lives. This ongoing negotiation of ‘ethical consent’ in seeking to honour participants’ experiences was particularly important during the Connecting Stories project. I have been arguing for approaches that value everyday lived experiences, indicating where this involved listening to various fragments of conversation; such as in the examples discussed in chapter three: of broken washing machines, exclamations about the return of joyfulness, or whispers about not 82

Elaine Graham and Dawn Llewellyn, “Promoting the Good: Ethical and Methodological Considerations in Practical Theological Research,” in Qualitative Research in Theological Education: Pedagogy in Practice, ed. Mary Clark Moschella and Susan Willhauck (London: SCM Press, 2018), 55.

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knowing what to say. Although participants understand their comments as contributing to and shaping the research, these words may be offered less intentionally than those that are written or narrated responses to prompts in facilitated sessions. Due to this, it is important to carefully negotiate the boundaries of what can and cannot be stated within ‘public’ research texts, to think about how others’ lived experiences become examples in activist statements, or in teaching, preaching, and writing. Additionally, I aimed to honour the ongoing nature of people’s lived experiences in the processes of making. Alongside the creative pieces, and the exhibition, I engaged creative arts-based forms of ethnographic and autoethnographic writing within in this text, offering the text of chapter three as a “site of aesthetic contemplation”.83 I have discussed concerns about creating transparent, present, and stable others in this text—offering experiences as a way to grasp others. By using the vignettes as snapshots, I signalled the limitations of making others ‘appear’ through research frames, gesturing toward the ‘voices’ outside the ‘range of hearing’ of the researcher; the experiences of others beyond this research encounter that cannot be made to ‘appear’ here. In sketching multiple vignettes, I also provided a sense of the development of ideas, documenting in the creative pieces and the larger exhibition the various encounters and efforts that are part of practices of sharing experiences. Layering the short vignettes, I hoped to create a sense of movement, almost like the multiple frames of an animation. Thus, in this writing I aimed to reflect the ways meaning-making with and through lived experiences is a complex process, with understandings emerging, developing, shifting, and being revisited. Aware of the challenges of representation in practical theology, I have aimed to incorporate “representations of the community that resist interrogation” by creating encounters with and through creative pieces and texts, allowing “the other to be seen and known in a variety of ways”.84 Various creative arts forms can “defy concretization and domestication, especially if the theorist is sensitive to this”.85 As well as engaging the ethical responsiveness of creative arts forms, this highlights the character of practical theology not as a “static resource”, but as a generative and non-innocent way of responding to

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Ardra L. Cole and Maura McIntyre, “Research as Aesthetic Contemplation: The Role of The Audience in Research Interpretation,” Educational Insights 9 no.1 (2004): 8. Available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.572.3206&rep= rep1&type=pdf. Accessed 30th Dec 2020. Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 157. Goto, Taking on Practical Theology, 157.

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the ongoing and fragile nature of people’s lived experiences.86 This emerging strand of creative qualitative research in practical theology offers fruitful possibilities for further research, especially in connection with sensitivity toward engaging troubling and complex experiences that refuse total representation. Although I have pursued this here through creative pieces, particularly installation and poetic writing, I suggest that the need to consider how various forms—protest, poetry, and photography, liturgy, song, and statistics—can trace their responsiveness to the ongoing nature of others’ lived experiences. Re-tracing the Labyrinth I met with members of the creating-curating group individually to review with them the texts I have written. In community cafés, art galleries, and university rooms, I invited them to read neatly printed pages containing their own words and actions. Given what emerged about people looking back over their own stories, I was aware of how the months since the close of the project may have changed their thoughts and feelings about what has been shared, and its place within this research. I sensed the nervous hesitation in others and myself, as it is a delicate, exposing process: having parts of your life written, having your writing read. Kitty was still struggling with her health but was excited about taking part in new art projects and collaborations. Victoire had just handed in her masters’ thesis, exhausted by it, but was thinking about what comes next; she asked me for tips on facilitating group work and we laughed a lot about how the project had gone. Sandra reflected on all the new things she has done in being part of a global anti-poverty project PTC had provided connections to but, truth be told, she was tired from all of this too. Shirley was nervous about what was coming next, for herself, for her kids, and for PTC, but she was excited that her eldest son was beginning to make plans for his life. As they read, there were laughs and murmurs, and ‘aye, that sounds like me’, and ‘oh, you really listened to what I was saying’. They were all gently surprised by the writing, thinking it would be more formal, and most of them commented warmly on the tone, welcoming that I had written my own thoughts and feelings in. As soon as I was in earshot of Mary, walking up to the community café where she was waiting outside in the August warmth, she told me she had been crying all morning in the PTC offices because she was back to having to use foodbanks. Remembering the text included her stating that having to use

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Heather Walton, “We have never been theologians: postsecularism and practical theology,” Practical Theology 11 no.3 (2018), 255.

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foodbanks was like ‘being in hell’, I fretted about asking her to read over the sections, checking she was willing to go ahead, reminding her that we could stop at any time. She assured me it was fine, got out her reading glasses, and diligently focused on the pages before her. In writing the section ‘Root and Branch’ in chapter 3, I reflected on the challenges of avoiding sensationalist approaches that focus on having fixed ‘broken’ individuals when presenting experiences of the changes brought about through activism. As with the entire chapter, I aimed to create an open-ended piece of writing that, when looked back on, would not undercut a commissioner’s current situation, whether that situation was positive or negative. Mary commented “this is great! I love it!”, and stated “look, you’ve got down what I said about branches falling away, that things knock you back down again… isn’t that just it”. She looked thoughtful, her own words coming back to her. Of course, it is not only individuals who experience this life in flux, but the communities to which they belong. As I have been writing, PTC have been considering their future, engaging in reflection and discussion for around a year, alongside continuing campaigns. I see photos on social media of ten-year timelines laid out on the floor and handwritten post-it notes from community discussion days. Meeting with Fiona, we squinted at each other in the absurd winter sunshine that evoked the brightness of the spring exhibition, sharing how our diverging projects had evolved from Connecting Stories. She reflected on the value of Connecting Stories in enabling engagement with critical issues around PTC’s practices, both for those who took part in the planning and creating, and also those who attending the exhibition. The discussions about PTC’s future have affirmed a commitment to sharing people’s lived experiences and engaging in places of influence, creating change through current campaigns and new opportunities. However, there was a unanimous feeling amongst the PTC community that the commission model is not the best way to take these commitments forward for now, particularly as it has become more difficult in the current climate for individuals and organisations to engage in eighteenmonth long commissions. They are also changing their name, moving from ‘Poverty Truth Commission’ to ‘Poverty Truth Community’. This raises provocative questions about presenting research ‘findings’ here just as this collaborating community are slowing and reflecting, in order to consider what steps to take to ensure that this movement remains led by people experiencing poverty. I admire the time and space given to these discussions; in the face of apparent success and funding pressures it is easy to look for minimal agreement and to continue with existing practices. This future unfolds at the pace of listening and learning together. In the midst of my own sense of academic pressure—like a press tightening to preserve, flat-

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ten, and display this work—this conversation is a gentle gift, a reminder of the continued unfurling of meaning, together. Political and Theological Making with Lived Experiences What I experienced in the above process of returning writing to commissioners suggests the delicate balance involved in political and theological making with and through lived experiences. I have been arguing that in encountering others and ourselves there is much that cannot be made present to us—scars and shadows, histories and multiple other encounters. As I noted in chapter two, Rivera draws on Borges’ imagery to suggest seeing others as the endless labyrinth of the “garden of forking paths” to imply that others are shaped by infinite other encounters and relations.87 However, this encounter—in the here and now—is finite. We cannot keep holding on to others in this encounter, thinking we can map out all possible paths. Collaborations and commissions end; exhibitions finish, and the tents must get taken down. Conclusions and a sense of closure must be offered in order to honour what has been shared, what meaning has been made in the process. However, precisely because of this finite nature of our encounters with others, we cannot claim to have fully understood others and thus see no further need for listening to and sharing with them. Rather, I want to suggest that precisely because of these provisional, fragile understandings, it is critical to continue building with others more just and liberating theological and political practices. Responsiveness to the fragility and temporality of sharing experiences may mean that “one-off voicing is replaced by sites and skills that facilitate cycles of telling, as local people conduct their own research and activism in a more sustainable way”.88 Such an approach resonates with where theological engagement in politics in postsecular society is considered as a performative praxis “based on narrative, imagination, and the cultivation of shared spaces of dialogue” whilst also giving an account of how such practices are “nurtured by the well-springs of faith”.89 We might find such images for this in Liz Crow’s “dwelling space activism” discussed in chapter five, or in Anzaldúa’s “spiritual activism” explored in chapter two, recognising the heterogeneity within and between bodies in such spaces.

87 88 89

Mayra Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 117. Paul Gready, “Introduction,” Journal of Human Rights Practice 2 no.2 (2010): 189. Elaine Graham, Apologetics without Apology: Speaking of God in a World Troubled by Religion (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2017), 122, 150.

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Throughout this work I have presented practices of sharing lived experiences as being a way that marginalised communities share their interpretations of their everyday lives, which also includes their critical lenses on social relations and political systems. However, this is not a stable, reliable process, but is unpredictable and disruptive. “Sharing, moreover, is fragile”, summarises Iris Marion Young in discussing political conceptions of community, noting that “at the next moment the other person may understand my words differently from the way I meant them, or carry my actions to consequences I do not intend”.90 Recognising subjects as nonunitary, plural, and contradictory— for example, in Anzaldúa’s sense of re-making the various fragmented parts of herself—means that we cannot assume that because we have previously understood the other’s standpoint, we can always do so.91 For Young, this sense that there are always aspects of the other’s perspective that we do not understand should keep us from using our encounters with others as a way of claiming that we can take their perspective. Listening to others in commission meetings or in collaborative research can enable shared knowledge to emerge, but it cannot allow us to claim that we have completely understood their experiences and perspectives on all the complexities of life. Rather, it should keep us open to continuing to listen to one another’s specific expressions, advocating for political processes shaped by the “participation of those who suffer injustice in the institutions, norms and practices that affect our lives”.92 As I noted in chapter two, one of the questions that we should ask in engaging with others in their particularity is “what future roles and relationships might this encounter open up?”93 In that discussion, I noted the engagement with Levinas’ conception of the encounter between self and Other, and the potential problems when identifying this ‘Other’ as a fixed social identity. Rivera raises questions of how this ethical encounter is linked—or not linked—to questions of addressing and changing the very injustices and exclusions through which “the Other” comes to be known and named as Other. Rivera is critical of where in Levinas’ conception of the encounter with “the Other” disrupts the system but maintains an otherwise “passive” role.94 She comments: “in his absolute otherness, Levinas’ Other produces an undeniable shock in the totality, but there seems to be no other role for him. Time 90 91 92 93 94

Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 231. Iris Marion Young, “Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder and Enlarged Thought,” Constellations 3 no.3 (1997): 358. Ada María Isasi-Díaz, La Lucha Continues: Mujerista Theology (New York: Orbis, 2004), 1. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 145. Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 155.

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seems to freeze in the primal scene of the face-to-face encounter”.95 Thus, although I have been describing encounters with others’ lived experiences as disrupting cultures of disbelief and judgement, I have also indicated that this intervention comes through imagining and enacting collaborative theological and political praxis in which those sharing their experiences are involved in the ongoing meaning-making from these experiences and in altering and reshaping these very forms of encountering others. This fragile, shifting nature of sharing lived experiences also has particular implications for the task of practical theology. What I have been articulating as “lives in flux” echoes Chris Greenough’s emphasis on Althaus-Reid’s use of “living experiences” in the present continuous tense, as opposed to “lived experience” in the past tense.96 Working on theologies emerging from the life stories of “non-normative” Christians, Greenough articulates: whatever stories we tell, and whatever new theology emerges, the important conclusion is that they are fragile and temporal … The biographies and theologies of sexual migrants offered in this book highlight that the changing nature of our beliefs, of our stories and of our understanding of God is fragile. Yet, this fragility makes our stories more valuable.97 Greenough’s approach is useful in refusing to re-centre stories and experiences as solid, reliable categories in theological reflection. Instead, this approach seeks to escape fixed theological systems, embracing instead a fragile, temporal theology. As such, the kind of close attention to embodied lived experiences that I have been arguing for and enacting here is not about focusing on everyday life and experiences as a way of providing more precise, accurate information leading to more robust theologies. Rather, this form of attention recognises the fragile, living nature of our theological understandings and participates in the re-making of our theological understandings through encountering others. Thus, practical theology reflects this ongoing, temporal, fragile nature of the lived experiences that are vital to the discipline. I have articulated practical theology as an ongoing process of making, and that this is not a neutral activity, but one that must be passionately involved in addressing inequalities

95 96 97

Rivera, Touch of Transcendence, 72, 155. Chris Greenough, Undoing Theology: Life Stories from Non-normative Christians (London: SCM Press, 2018), 164. Greenough, Undoing Theology, 172–3.

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and injustices, including in its own ambivalent representations and as a community of practice. In considering this ongoing, temporal nature of practical theology, Terry Veling suggests that this is a desire to “keep our relationship with the world open, so that we are never quite ‘done’ with things; rather, always undoing and redoing them, so that we can keep the ‘doing’ happening, passionate, keen, expectant—never satisfied, never quite finished”.98 Recognising the ongoing, fragile nature of theological reflection is to engage in a “theology that is given over to a passion for what could yet be, for what is stillin-the-making, in process, not yet, still coming”.99 It is a theology re-shaped in response to particular and plural lived experiences, to the sacred in the everyday. In this way, the ongoing, fragile nature of theological making is deeply related to our encounters with others, the world, and the divine. It is our task to re-make these, with others, as ever more disruptive encounters. 98 99

Terry Veling, Practical Theology: “On Earth as it is in Heaven” (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), 7. Veling, Practical Theology, 7.

Concluding In one of the early reflective workshops with PTC, we began with a short collaborative writing exercise. I asked everyone to write as many sentences as they could beginning with the phrase “my story is…” (as mentioned in chapter six). In choosing “story” I worked with the terms used by PTC members, wondering how they might respond to or reframe this in their own writing. We sat in the quiet for a few minutes, pens scribbling quickly or consciously carving out each word. Each person then selected a sentence or two, and reading these out in turn, we worked round the circle to draw together a collective piece. The response was… less than enthusiastic. Shrugs, “yeh ok”, what’s next. Still, I asked the group if they would hand their papers back to me, giving them time to cross out any lines that they would not want shared publicly. During the tea break, I leafed through bright yellow sheets, a colour I had chosen to stand out amid all my other papers that day—workshop plans, consent forms, handwritten notes, seminar preparation, journal articles. I selected a few lines from each of the writers, weaving them together. At the end of the workshop, I read this back to the group. They responded joyfully, “look at that”… “I love it”… “really gets to the heart of what we were saying today”… “what poets we are!” Tired hands in soapy water, I worked at the tea mugs from the session. Scrub, rinse, stack to dry. The small kitchen window framed a view of the gothic spire of the University. I’d soon be walking back to teach and take notes in rooms in the shadow of that spire. Scrub, rinse, stack to dry. The solid repetition eased from my mind the intense focus of listening and making connections in the reflection group. Scrub, rinse, stack to dry. I wondered what caused such a change in the groups’ responses to their writing. After all, I had selected many of the same lines that individuals had chosen to read out themselves. Was it in creating more coherence, being spoken by a single voice without the hesitations in between? Was it that the words had been selected and read by me as a researcher and the authority my role implied? Was it that, at the end of the session, they felt that their creative images could speak to truths that our discussion could only hint at? I wondered what I’d lost in pulling this together. Hesitations and moments of uncertainty; the silence of the lines purposefully crossed out. In selecting only phrases from each person, had I had missed the internal exploration in each person’s words, where they had found form for the contradictions in their own lives? Still grappling with these questions several weeks later, I turned to making. I explored with ink, papers, pencil, letting the concerns in my head play out in the movement of my hands. This became a creative piece—a form known

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as a ‘flag book’—that featured as part of the exhibition (Figures 28 and 29). Each individual’s words can be read by following the same handwriting across each row of the book, retaining some sense of the particularity of their experience and expression. The style of text is different for each person’s words, bringing out the heterogeneity of perspectives at work in the piece. Where people had scored out a line of text, indicating they did not want to make it public, this has been cut from the spine of the book, a space for these gaps and silences. The piece thus invites the viewer to make their own choices in interacting with the form and the text, foregrounding the viewers acts of interpretation and response. It holds the potential for multiple different ways of reading and interacting. Materialising this piece provided a way of living with, rather than resolving, the contradictions of this work and, crucially, provided a way of sharing these questions by quite literally putting them into the hands of readers. Lived Experiences and Social Transformations has been a similar exercise in making and shaping a work that holds space for the particularly and plurality of the lived experiences of PTC members, whilst also putting into the hands of readers the questions and tensions enmeshed in the practice of sharing lived experiences. I have constructed and enacted a methodology for engaging with complex, disruptive, and generative lived experiences. I have named this

Figure 28

Different texts and gaps

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Figure 29

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‘There is no contents page’

as a passionate ambivalent process of making, a process as much performed as defined, a way of being and acting in the world. A way of foregrounding strongly-held convictions and emotions, and enabling these contradictions to inform political and theological commitments. In this process, I have drawn out space for the experiences and insights of various participants, their words and their art pieces, trusting in their interpretive capacities and creative work. I have worked with literature, performance art/activism, cultural theory, and postcolonial, mujerista, womanist, and feminist theologies; with practical theologians who do not entirely ‘fit’ within the boundaries of ‘practical theology’ as well as those who do. Although this has risked producing a piece that is less clearly definable within the somewhat shifting disciplinary boundaries of ‘practical theology’, my purpose here has been to materialise my own argument that engagement with lived experiences of marginalisation requires attention both to particular experiences and ways of knowing that have been traditionally excluded from theological knowledge-making. Naming this in connection with the making of creative pieces is thus to recognise that theological texts are themselves a process of making that is at once imaginative, constructive, aesthetic, and theological. Here I want to name four areas of the questions and tensions that I have put into the hands of readers, and the implications of these for future direc-

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tions in practical theology. Firstly, there are implications for the practice of sharing and responding to lived experiences. In examining various practices of sharing lived experiences here, practical theology might critically interrogate how ways of representing and interpreting these experiences operate in specific settings—in research, in activism, in preaching and liturgy, in teaching. What are the judgements made about whose knowledge and what kinds of embodied, affective, imaginative knowledge are valid? How do cultural imaginations about race, disability, gender, sexuality, class, work, and family influence these judgements? Crucially, how are such judgements reinforced by the very material and embodied mechanisms of sharing and responding to these lived experiences? Presently, when there is a distance between our theological and political practices and the marginalised groups whose experiences are under discussion (as there often is), we need to be cautious of how we seek to create proximity to others as a way of claiming authority. This can occur especially when we locate ourselves as ‘careful listeners’ who are merely letting others ‘speak for themselves’ by presenting their words as accurately as possible, as such claims avoid rather than address our own roles in the process. Speaking and listening—or sharing and responding—are not neutral and uncomplicated positions. Neither are those positions of knowers and makers in collaboration, yet I suggest that acknowledgement of this offers ways of naming the power dynamics at work when engaging in lived experiences. Secondly, this collaboration with PTC has implications for theological work in addressing the social and material aspects of inequality. Where might we retain a persistent focus on addressing inequality without resorting to categorising and labelling people’s complex lived experiences as being ‘about’ particular issues? Broad generalisations about poverty and inequality cannot be made from this research; indeed, I have written against ‘using’ lived experiences to make claims about ‘the poor’ or ‘marginalised groups’, even in specific contexts. However, the case study with PTC makes a particular contribution to analysing how austerity cultures create conditions of judgement and disbelief over various aspects of poverty at the intersections of disability, race, gender, sexuality, and legal status, and the implications this has for work, family, housing, food, and physical safety. Austerity culture in the UK both demands lived experiences as ‘proof’ from marginalised groups whilst also denying the validity of the meanings and interpretations that marginalised persons give to these experiences. Understanding this aspect of austerity culture enables a reconsideration of approaches to addressing inequality through sharing lived experiences. Sharing lived experiences may rely on extractive practices, or it may engage with the creative work and interpretive capacities of those sharing. I hope that this book will encourage us away from notions of ‘one-off’

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sites of hearing as enough for understanding an ‘issue’ and toward the ongoing building of more just and liberative practices with others marginalised by current systems. I hope that it will also encourage others to ask in their specific locations how they can focus on the everyday experiences of inequality and also the everydayness of its transformation. Thirdly, this work has raised questions for the possibilities of collaborative and creative research. The creative, collaborative approach taken here is, in itself, deeply theological and political as it emphasises and engages the everyday, creative meaning-making capacities of marginalised communities, thus countering cultures in which these shared experiences are seen either as insufficient evidence or as ‘raw material’ devoid of critical, interpretive value. Recognising that collaboration in and of itself is not always ethical, what steps can we take toward more collaborative research practices that foreground the meaning-making strategies of marginalised communities? How might we engage with cycles of research and planning groups that disrupt our wellworn assumptions about how research proceeds? Presenting the workshops and exhibition pieces here has gestured to the creative work that has taken place beyond the bounds of this text, in creative pieces and conversations that cannot be assimilated into academic work. Where might engaging with collaborative, creative arts-based methods allow us to value work and forms of knowledge that cannot be ‘owned’ by the academy and cannot be recuperated into publishable texts? Finally, this work has imaged a way of working theologically with and through the disruptive aspects of lived experiences. This research has been shaped through encounters with others’ experiences, both in literary and theological texts and in sitting with people—in sharing, in making together, in moving through a labyrinth, in silences and in laughter. These encounters with others, in their particularity and alterity, have profoundly shaped my ways of being, knowing, and acting in the world. I have strayed toward presentations of these experiences through fragments, images, and interruptions, thus risking an uneasy journey for the reader as they trace such encounters in the text. Yet, the poetic approach enacted here signals the unmanageable, troubling, and disruptive nature of lived experience, the revelations disclosed through silences and fragile utterances, through embodied gestures and ordinary speech. Passionately and ambivalently implicated in the practices it explores, this work inhabits a problematic and productive space, responding to and representing these experiences and encounters in ways that seeks to re-make our relations to one another, to wider society, and to the divine. I suggest this has significant implications for working in ways that grapple with the non-

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innocent strategies we employ as practical theologians. It raises questions of whether the tactics and methods we trust to produce proper theological ‘results’ are adequately responsive to those who struggle against oppression. Yet, I also want to be clear that this is not in setting up an alternative mode or method. Rather, it is in refusing methods and explanations that clearly and coherently grasp the ‘objects’ of our studies. The emphasis for such poetic ways of working with lived experiences in practical theology may be in whether or not they disrupt present ways of perception and facilitate transformations. It is in whether or not we can call others—and ourselves—away from positions of judgement over lived experiences, and into that of potential collaborators in the work for justice.

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Index Abstract/Abstraction 16, 20, 36, 57–61, 63, 64, 77, 78, 83, 159, 176, 190, 213 Figures 149 Methodology 68 Social myths and stories 39, 145 Academic research 47, 150, 157, 158, 188, 199, 200, 202, 203, 206, 223, 232 Academic theology 9, 54, 60, 66, 80, 206 As extractive/co-opting 10, 44, 51, 54, 60, 66, 80, 141, 142, 197, 205 Citational practices 19 Practice of sharing lived experiences 1, 23, 44, 51, 141 Voice metaphors 33–34 See also disciplinary boundaries See also knowledge Activist/Activism 1, 5, 6, 49, 93, 145, 150, 157, 161, 167, 176, 197, 231 Art-activism 21, 132, 146–156, 230 Dwelling space activism 149, 160, 177, 224 Emphasis on voice 200 Ethics 221 Image of activist community 159 Material and discursive 131 Naming yourself as an activist 49–50, 191 Responsive to changes 220, 223 Spiritual activism 71, 176, 224 Aesthetic 63, 70, 78, 142, 196, 208, 221, 230 Agency 17, 70, 74, 166, 175 Moral agency 38, 46 Voice and 35, 70, 200 Ahmed, Sara 19, 36, 84 Alterity 79, 149, 172, 182, 186 Particularity and 50, 82–86, 232 As relational 85 See also ‘other/the other’ Ambivalence 51, 52, 61, 62, 75, 159, 173, 183, 184, 191, 212, 213 See also ‘passionate ambivalence’ Anzaldúa, Gloria 19, 23, 31, 53, 65n.63, 68–72, 75, 78, 97, 159, 176, 214, 215, 224, 225

Art

3, 19, 20, 30, 70, 78, 80, 129, 159, 168, 170, 176, 222, 230 See also creative arts-based research methods See also art-activism See also creative/creativity Asylum See also refuge/refugee Austerity 2, 10, 11, 13–16, 20, 21, 23, 39, 41, 130–161, 166, 168, 169, 173, 178, 192, 204, 217, 231 ‘Anti-welfare commonsense’ 138 Brown envelope 124–125, 153–154 Disability Assessments 3, 108, 132–135, 141, 146, 174, 220 Family cap and rape clause 135–138, 167 Sanctions 10, 29, 50, 92, 108, 130, 146, 148 ‘Scroungers’ 14, 38, 49, 141, 148, 175, 189 See also food poverty and foodbanks See also housing and homelessness See also welfare cuts and assessments Betcher, Sharon 142, 157, 214 Body/Bodies 149, 173–176, 178, 181, 186, 187, 192, 194, 213 As complex/contradictory 23, 69–71, 133–135, 152, 159, 173–176 As crossroads 69 As social and material 39–41, 53, 67, 71, 78, 145, 176, 194 Bodily experience 59, 213 Dehistoricized 6 Difference 84 Embodied knowledge/bodies and knowledge 56–60, 189 Embodied research 42 Jesus’ body 175 Reflexivity and 212–218 Writing the body 69–72 See also disability See also pain Caputo, John 54n.5, 65n.63, 83n.157, 195 de Certeau, Michel 18, 19, 20, 65–66, 168, 178–184, 185, 186, 188

254 Chopp, Rebbecca 18, 19, 21, 31–32, 168–173, 186 Collaboration/Collaborative 17, 22, 36–38, 82, 85, 130, 157, 218, 224, 225, 226, 231, 232 Addressing others as potential collaborators 85, 130, 143, 146, 155, 156, 196, 233 Academic/activist practice 3, 21, 150, 167, 170, 206, 130 Community in Christian theology 198–199 Face-to-face sharing and 192-196 In creative arts 89, 204, 205 In reflexivity 211 Planning group 13, 89, 92–93, 118, 122, 140, 146, 150, 159, 167, 198, 199, 206, 207, 220, 223, 232 Theological and political practice 196–203 With PTC 2, 11, 13, 21, 89–129, 130, 150–156, 192 Writing/making 37, 108, 113, 121, 228 See also community See also relationality Colonial/colonisation 31, 33, 35, 44, 53–57, 63, 68, 70, 73, 74, 82, 131, 142, 144, 182, 197, 199, 202n.18 White theology and 56 See also postcolonial Community 36–38, 44, 48, 191, 218, 219, 221, 223, 225 Community activism 145 Community arts 204, 206 Community organising 9, 15–16 Differences and complexities within 22–23, 35, 53, 62–64, 160, 190 Epistemic community 36 Face-to-face 195 Images of community campaigning 149, 157, 159 Immersion in challenges understandings 165 Grassroots communities 45, 46–47, 51, 60, 66, 142, 157, 168, 170, 179, 196 Otherness of 82 Practical theology as community of practice 34, 55, 213, 227

Index Shaped by participation in 175–176, 218 See also collaboration/collaborative Cotidiano/Lo Cotidiano 20, 45–48, 66, 179, 187 See also ‘everyday’ Creative/Creativity 68, 75, 157, 168, 170, 172, 173, 176, 179, 196, 202, 218, 219, 228 Connecting Stories 13, 89, 10, 110, 113, 126, 129, 159, 219, 221 Creative arts-based research 13, 17, 21, 22, 38, 192, 202, 203–209, 210, 221, 222 Creative interventions 2, 21, 130, 146–160, 168, 173, 175, 176, 178, 187, 218 Creative method 3 In sharing lived experiences 20, 27, 31, 42–51, 190, 230, 231, 232 Making oneself 70–71 Poetics 18, 66, 67, 81, 177 Transforming 71, 159 Credible/credibility 8, 20, 41, 55, 80, 131, 139, 145, 152, 157, 161, 169, 170, 188 See also disbelief See also valid/validity Crow, Liz 19, 21, 130, 134, 135, 146–149, 157, 158, 159, 160, 177, 204, 216–217, 224 Cultures of judgement and disbelief 21, 130–161, 167, 168, 177, 181, 182, 188, 191, 217, 231 Interventions into 187, 193–194, 218, 226, 189 Material and discursive 173, 192, 196 Putting cultures of judgement on trial 168–173 Theology as 168–173, 208, 186 Difference 22, 38, 59, 62, 83, 84, 85, 170, 171, 173, 181, 201 Disability 2, 13, 13n.37, 27, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43, 50, 53, 56, 79, 84, 93, 94, 100, 131, 140, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 152, 157, 158, 159, 161, 169, 173, 175, 189, 193, 195, 201, 204, 209, 231 Chronic illness and pain 42, 70, 72, 95–97, 107, 110, 150, 153, 192, 201, 212–218 Disability assessments 3, 100, 108, 132–135, 141, 142, 143, 174, 220 Disbelief 21, 29, 95 See also doubt

Index See also credible/credibility See also cultures of judgement and disbelief Disciplinary norms and boundaries 19–20, 52, 53–57, 66, 69, 86, 209, 210, 211, 230 Doubt 6, 41, 137 See also disbelief Encounter/Encountering 1, 116, 177, 187, 232 Aesthetic text as a site of 21 Disruptive encounters 192–227 Encounter as judgement 142 Finite 224 Labyrinth of encounters 89 One-off encounters 22 Particularity and alterity in 20, 52, 53, 82–85, 86, 186 With the other/otherness 53–54, 68, 83, 113, 149, 161, 225–226 Epistemology 20, 22, 36, 45, 47, 57, 65, 77, 78, 184 Epistemic community 36 Epistemic practice 55 Epistemic violence 63, 64, 198 Standpoint epistemology 7, 77, 78 Essentialism 45, 77, 79, 182 Ethnography 21, 35, 62, 79, 89, 221 Meta-ethnographic method 38 Everyday 2, 13, 21, 82, 86, 129, 174, 196, 198, 215, 220, 225, 226, 232 Creativity 142 De Certeau and 65–67, 70, 72, 78, 178–184 Divine/sacred in 58, 70, 186, 227 Everydayness 188–190 Experiences of poverty 92–93, 150–151, 159, 220 Knowledge/meaning-making 143, 157, 198, 202 Marvels in the 18, 67, 93, 113, 191 Material elements 153, 174, 186 Transformations in 21, 165–191, 232 See also cotidiano/lo cotidiano Extractive practices 48, 231 Face-to-face 22, 83n.157, 140, 192–196, 226 Feminist/feminism 19, 35, 73, 85, 86, 171, 198, 199, 211, 230 Feminist movements 5

255 Feminist practical theology 8, 10, 18, 19, 55, 57, 58 Feminist retellings 74 Feminist standpoint theory 77–78 Feminist theology 2, 9, 16, 17, 20, 27, 44, 65, 85, 86, 168, 170, 172, 201 Feminist theory 7 Fragmented and relational selves 22, 23, 35, 80, 201 Personal is political 42 Food poverty and foodbanks 2, 15, 21, 39, 46–47, 105, 122–123, 145, 152, 153, 160, 166, 173, 190, 192, 230 See also ‘austerity’ Forrester, Duncan 9, 12, 80, 81 Fragile/fragility 69, 82, 108, 149, 159, 181, 186, 218–227, 232 Consent as 220 Creative interventions 187 Creative pieces 112, 113 Sharing lived experiences 3, 22, 160, 192, 225, 226 Sharing is fragile 225 Stories as 90, 167 Fragments/Fragmentation 23, 151, 152, 171, 180, 186, 200, 220, 232 Bodies as 174 In practical theology 17, 66, 80–82, 86 Lived experiences as 8, 20, 30–33, 51, 65, 68 Knowledge as 52 Poetic attention to 158 Selves as 22, 35, 225 Writing/making with 75, 89, 118, 144, 146, 158, 184, 212 Goto, Courtney 18, 19, 34, 53, 55, 59, 62–64, 198, 200n.14, 202, 208, 211 Graham, Elaine 10, 17, 59, 77, 199 Grenfell Tower 143–146, 166 Hegemony/hegemonic 57, 60, 61, 188–189 Hope 23, 32, 47, 71, 90, 92, 100, 116, 121, 123, 144, 156, 159, 167, 176, 184, 188, 189, 190 Housing and homelessness 2, 9, 21, 29, 43, 50, 92, 108, 132, 140, 144, 145, 152, 153, 154, 160, 173, 204, 230 See also ‘austerity’

256 Imagination/imaginative 47, 70, 78, 79, 144, 149, 173, 176, 186, 208, 214, 224, 230, 231 Fantastic hegemonic imagination 188–189 Historical imagination 189–190 Incarnation/incarnational 15, 40, 173–177 Inequality 1, 2, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 21, 45, 46, 52, 59, 122, 141, 142, 146, 156, 157, 159, 188, 194, 195, 196, 220, 226, 231, 232 See also poverty Instrumentalising 43, 181 Intervention/Interventions 21, 42, 71, 146, 168, 171, 173, 179, 182, 186, 187, 199, 213, 218, 226 Creative interventions 2, 21, 130, 146–160, 168, 218 Cultural intervention 170, 173 Performative interventions 21, 173–178 Isasi-Díaz, Ada María 19, 20, 38, 45–48, 66, 151, 179, 187, 197, 202 Judgement 2, 4, 5, 7, 21, 38, 41, 42, 51, 61, 80, 173, 189, 196, 212, 214, 233 See also cultures of judgement and disbelief Just/Justice 1, 5, 6, 22, 47, 57, 65, 78, 105, 108, 116, 122, 123, 145, 188, 189, 191, 194, 213, 224, 232, 233 Knowledge/Knowing 52, 60, 81, 83, 84, 85, 93, 189, 194, 220, 225, 230, 232 Broad highways of 66, 76 Claims to know others/the other 1, 4, 34, 64, 83, 195, 201, 203, 218, 225 Creative arts and 205–208 Embodied knowledge/knowing 13, 16, 47, 143, 155 Finding what is already known 76, 86 Genre and 73 Insider knowledge 199 Knowledge-making/knowledge production 8, 18, 36, 51, 52, 53–57, 60, 80, 85, 150, 202, 211, 230 Of grassroots communities 45–48, 196, 198, 202 Multiple ways of knowing 203, 204, 206, 221

Index Not-knowing 20, 30–33, 51, 65, 84, 93, 103, 107, 115, 150, 158, 190, 200, 212, 221 Power and knowledge 10, 16, 202, 212 Reflexivity 210–212 Refusing complete knowledge 22, 23, 158, 180, 192, 195 Relationality 77–80, 206 Validity of 22, 81, 231 Who is knowing 20, 36, 51, 231 See also epistemology Kwok Pui-lan 44, 45, 78, 80, 189–190 Liberation Theology 31, 60, 61 Levinas, Emmanuel 53n.2, 54n.5, 83, 84, 85, 195, 225 Margins 78–79, 182 Material/Materiality 22, 50, 53, 64, 73, 130, 157, 169, 218, 231 Creative pieces 113, 128, 131, 147, 149, 150, 153, 154, 160, 204, 205, 229 Epistemic conditions 36, 45, 59–61, 78 Exclusion of materiality 59, 60n.35 Inequality/austerity as discursive and 2, 11, 15, 16, 131, 192 Material resources 2, 21, 130 Power relations as 21 Practices of sharing lived experiences as 22, 36, 50, 196, 200 Social co-constituting material 39–41, 52, 67–68, 71–72, 74, 143–146, 156–157, 172–178, 186–191 Methods/research methods 3, 12, 17, 18, 34, 38, 48, 62, 64, 68, 186 Collaborative/participative 12, 48, 196–203 Creative arts-based 17, 155, 203–209, 210, 232 Research journal 42, 44, 89, 114 Mujerista theology 2, 9, 16, 19, 20, 27, 38, 44, 65, 95, 230 See also Isasi-Díaz, Ada María Narrative 32, 122, 146, 151, 171, 204, 209, 210, 212, 213, 216, 219, 224 Austerity narratives 133, 158, 217 Christian narrative 81

Index Cultural/social narratives 4, 47, 73–75, 148, 157 Figures 147, 149, 157, 158, 160 For telling one’s story 41 Grand narratives 80 Linearity 65 Lived experience narratives 5, 6, 34, 45, 136, 139, 169 Narrative theology 17 Structuring 75 Victimhood 140 Norms/Normativity 59, 146, 175, 197, 212, 213, 225 Disciplinary norms in theology 17, 202, 209, 210 Social norms 40, 41, 173, 175, 176, 193 Other/the Other 6, 34, 44, 52–54, 63–64, 66, 79, 113, 142, 149, 161, 173, 180, 187, 194, 224–226 De Certeau 180–184 Knowledge of others 1, 21, 34, 36, 192, 201, 210, 211, 218, 221 Myth of common otherness 182 Orientation to otherness 68, 212 Particularity and alterity 82–85, 186 Responsiveness to others 20, 86, 195, 232 Speaking on behalf of 34–35 See also Levinas See also Rivera Oyeyemi, Helen 19, 53, 68, 72–75, 81, 215 Pain

4, 6, 18, 23, 42, 52, 53, 77, 110, 113, 159, 160, 161, 167, 176, 194, 196 Chronic illness and 70–72, 96–97, 110, 121, 133–135, 192, 212–218 See also disability See also body/bodies Participation 4, 9, 12, 30, 43, 48, 60, 77, 121, 160, 170, 173, 174, 190, 192, 197–203, 205, 218, 225 Participative Action Research (PAR) 12, 197, 199 See also collaboration Passionate Ambivalence 20, 52–86, 168, 186, 190–191, 226–227, 230, 232 Performativity/performative 15, 21, 40–41, 67, 77, 159, 171, 173–178, 205, 210, 211, 224

257 Poetics 8, 17, 18, 21, 31, 52, 53, 64–76, 81, 167, 158, 168–184, 187, 208, 212, 215, 222, 232, 233 Metaphoric construction 67 Theopoetics 18, 65n.63 Postcolonial 2, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 27, 33, 35, 44, 54, 55, 60, 65, 73, 78, 79, 80, 85, 86, 230 See also colonial/colonisation Poverty 2, 9, 10, 11–16, 21, 38, 39, 43, 46, 53, 89–129, 131, 137, 143, 145, 150, 152, 154, 158, 160, 161, 166, 167, 175, 192, 220, 223, 231 Deserving/undeserving poor 13, 41, 140, 143–146, 148, 157, 161, 176, 204 Labels and categories 43, 93, 152, 193, 195, 231 Social myths and stigma 39, 41, 49, 140–141, 157 ‘The poor’ in theological discourse 59–62, 82 See also austerity See also food poverty and foodbanks See also housing and homelessness See also inequality Poverty Truth Commission (PTC) 2–3, 19, 20–23, 165, 192–196, 202, 219, 220, 228, 229, 231 Addressing cultures of judgement and disbelief 130–131, 134, 138, 140, 141, 159–160 Collaborating organisations 27 Connecting Stories 89–129, 146, 150–156, 199, 200, 206, 222–224 Difficulties of telling and listening 28–30 Focus on austerity 14 History 11–13 Interpretative capacities 48–51 Language of ‘story’ 28 Name change 223 Power dynamics 42–44 Reflecting on change 167, 191 Value of relationships 36–39 Power 6, 7, 16, 33–36, 47, 49, 69, 73, 79, 143, 168–170, 178–180, 184 Disrupting 1, 3, 192

258 Power (cont.) Hierarchies of power 39 In research 8, 36 Knowledge and 10, 16, 52–56, 59, 63 People in positions of power 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 43, 46, 47, 51, 75, 94, 141, 143, 150, 157, 182, 188 Power dynamics 6, 10, 16, 27, 42, 48, 51, 74, 76, 77, 80, 84, 86, 138, 183, 193–203, 231 Power relations 7, 10, 16, 20–22, 68, 143, 218 Power of transfiguration 172 Power to judge 142 Reflexivity and 209–218 Shift in power 43 Transformative 175 Unequal 20, 22 Public 2, 5–10, 11, 14, 21, 30, 33–34, 38, 39, 41, 50, 97, 130, 131, 134, 137, 140, 150, 215, 221, 228, 229 Grenfell public inquiry 143, 146 Lying down in public 216–217 Members of the public 29, 147, 148, 157, 159 Public consciousness 4, 12 Public discourse 33, 39, 67, 134, 166, 168–173 Public domain 148 Public forums and events 4, 27, 28, 37, 39, 140, 141, 146 Public interest 197 Public life 18 Public/private divide 135, 168 Public services 13, 15, 50, 130, 131 Public theology 10, 14–15 See also testimonial spaces Race/Raced/Racialised 2, 9, 41, 43, 46, 53, 54, 56–57, 59, 60, 77, 79, 80, 82, 84, 85, 93, 131, 144, 145, 158, 160, 169, 173, 189, 195, 198, 201, 202, 209, 211, 213, 231 Racism and 6–7, 80 White/whiteness 6–7, 8, 10, 19, 42, 55–59, 76, 80, 85, 160, 166, 199, 201, 211, 213, 217 Rambo, Shelly 32, 172

Index Redemption/Redemptive 17, 32, 48, 142, 177, 187 Reflexivity 3, 17, 22, 23, 35, 42, 82, 192, 198, 209–218 Refuge/Refugee 2, 4, 11, 21, 39, 92, 118–119, 130, 131, 136, 138–140, 157, 158, 160, 161, 169, 190, 193, 194, 204 Asylum/Asylum system 11, 50, 108, 138–140, 143, 153, 175, 189 Border Agency 4, 120, 131, 140, 146, 179, 193 Hostile environment 138, 167 Relationality/Relations/Relationships 2, 3, 20, 27, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 61, 83, 150, 176, 206, 225, 227, 232 And complexity 77–80, 159 As face-to-face 192–196 As mediating interpretations 7, 176 As social and material 36–42, 53, 67 Purity of relations 54, 83n.157, 195 Relational selves 22, 35, 210–211 Relational transcendence 85 Web image 200–203 See also collaboration Representation 6, 13, 18, 80, 82, 86, 148, 157, 161, 209, 210, 227 Fictional 73–76 Misrepresentation 16, 20, 53, 56, 59, 62, 76 Practices and processes of 1, 3, 7, 17, 34, 50, 52, 54, 57, 59, 62–64, 65, 67–69, 231 Refusing total representation 31, 64, 85, 149, 180, 182, 187, 221–222 Voice and 1 Resist/Resistance 1, 6, 33, 35, 46, 78, 79, 80, 110, 143, 145, 156, 180–184, 200 Rivera, Mayra 18, 19, 21, 23, 31, 39–41, 53–54, 64, 65n.63, 71, 79, 84–85, 97, 113, 158, 161, 168, 173–178, 186, 188, 212, 213, 214, 218, 224, 225 Robinson, Roger 144 Sacred 1, 2, 21, 70, 72, 78, 175, 186, 187, 190, 227 Sacred/secular divide 54, 58, 67, 70, 82, 173 Sacralizing testimony 172 Tracing the sacred 76, 186

Index Self 32, 71, 211, 212, 225 Fragmented 80–81 Reflexivity 209–218 Refusing stable, unified self 22, 23, 195, 210 Self-in-relation 22–23, 35, 201, 210 Voice and 33–36 Sexual abuse and sexual violence 4, 5, 6, 9n.28, 94, 139, 157 Family cap and rape clause 135–138 Sheppard, Phillis Isabella 56–57, 59, 78, 213 Silence 8, 10, 30–33, 50, 51, 62, 65, 142, 158, 169, 171, 185, 190, 194, 219, 228–229, 232 As resistance 35, 200 Connecting Stories Exhibition 114–115, 116 Solidarity 50, 84, 90, 108, 113, 140, 156, 199 And difference 171–173 Spivak, Gayatri 33–36, 63, 78–79 Stigma 2, 4, 38–39, 40, 42, 49, 51, 105, 130, 138, 140, 142, 148, 173, 175, 178, 186, 194 Story/Stories 4, 17, 41, 43, 51, 72–75, 140, 141, 146–149, 202n.18, 219, 226, 228 Connecting Stories project 89–130, 150–156, 159, 160, 167, 176, 193–195, 199, 200–202, 204–207, 219–220, 223 Difficulties of telling 28–30 Relational 37 Terminology 11, 28 Subaltern 33, 36 Testimony/Testimonial 21, 32, 41, 108, 122, 138, 139 Poetics of testimony 31, 168–173

259 ‘Testifying commissioners’ terminology 11 Testimonial spaces 131, 140–143 Testimonial witnessing 4–8 Townes, Emilie 188–190 Transformation 1, 2, 4, 8, 10, 18, 21, 23, 27, 41, 52–53, 66–68, 71, 75, 144, 146, 149, 151, 153, 159, 165–191, 192, 193, 218, 232, 233 Researcher being transformed 205 Risking transformation 20, 76–86 Transcendence 48, 53–54, 67, 68, 83, 85, 172, 177, 187 Trauma 4, 6, 8, 18, 30–33, 65, 80, 92, 118, 136–138, 139, 142, 171, 194 Valid/Validity 1, 2, 22, 39, 50, 56, 60, 130, 145, 169, 171, 231 See also credible/credibility Victim/Victimhood 5, 41, 59, 71, 84, 139, 140, 142, 148, 149, 159, 161, 204 See also disability See also poverty See also refugee Visweswaran, Kamala 35–36, 200 Voice 3, 10, 23, 32, 33–36, 51, 66, 79, 85, 94, 97, 140, 142, 158, 171, 180–184, 195, 200, 221 Walton, Heather 17, 18, 54–55, 58, 65–68 Welfare cuts and assessments 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 13–15, 21, 90, 124, 130, 131, 132–138, 153, 179 See also austerity Womanist theology 9, 16, 44, 65, 78, 95, 118, 166, 188, 208, 230