Categories: uncategorized
Date: 01 October 2012 10:57:10
I've decided settling in a new place and new community is best approached in a similar way to an ethnographic research study.
You have to keep your eyes and ears open, be ready to ask questions and gratefully engage with anybody and everybody who is willing and ferret around for as much as information as you can being ready to join up the dots. Throughout this you must be treat people with utmost respect, realising that first impressions matter and that you are a visitor into new territory. You need to understand you will make mistakes and there is likely to come a point when you realise that you've interpreted the initial data quite wrongly and that you need to go and re-examine it being willing to recognise assumptions you bought in which may be wrong. At the same time you need to be honest about who you are and why you're there, what is it that you are looking for and want to achieve - you need to be ready to do the personal reflexivity.
There is one big difference between good ethnographic research and settling into a new community though. In the research situation you are wary of becoming too influenced by the group you are studying and always seek to maintain some level of professional distance in order to objectively measure, reflect and comment on what is happening. When you enter a new community - if you think this is going to be a community you are going to settle in - you want to "go native" as soon as possible.
The ethnographic approach of entering a new community is interesting because it also involves some element of deep listening, which is a missional idea and best expressed by Barbara Glasson within her book I Am Somewhere Else. This is exciting but also challenging because you have a problem when you enter with this approach, particularly as somebody who has not been given "official sanction". What do you do with the information you have gleaned? How can you use it and feed your findings back into the wider community without sounding like the upstart?
Also, how long do you regard the "field work" stage of settling in to be and at what stage can you start to work on the findings? Is there a defined level of time you need to listen for before you have a "right" to comment and actively engage in the local community? How do you as an "ordinary person" rather than the "researcher" negotiate the gatekeepers in order to gain access to the situations you need to in order to get the information and opportunities you require? How do you as a lay person gain the trust which having gone through an ethics committee prior to going into the field can give a researcher?
There's also the problem of the lack of "literature review", how do you test your findings? What texts do you need to be using? Are you working in an interdisciplinary place where you need the skills of a human geographer as well as those of an anthropologist, practical theologian and sociologist?
These questions I am finding become heightened when you find yourself living within what in other circumstances would be a really interesting research environment and you are somebody who is seeking to move from having been working in an academic research environment to somebody who is outside of the academy. You understand that there are things being said and done which you would love to simply observe with detachment and produce a detached response to but there are discussions and so forth that you need to be a part of and contribute to because you are part of the community. Yet, it feels too soon to comment because you have only just begun studying the group and understanding it, you are not ready to come to conclusions yet.
As you can probably tell I am becoming a frustrated ex-academic at the moment. Somebody who has been trained up in practical theology and is now having to adjust to life back in the real world.
On a positive note I am preaching on the evening of 21st October and as part of the wider diversity conversation I have prayerfully decided (and got permission) to do my service on "single parenting" where I'll be unpacking the story of Hagar and Ishmael as well as bringing in aspects of my research findings and using music to help further reflection together with praying more widely.