Derrick Leslie Watson
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Poietic Hermeneutics: Making local paths Item Type Thesis or dissertation Authors Watson, Derrick L. Citation Watson, D. L. (2017). Poietic Hermeneutics: Making local paths (Doctoral Dissertation). University of Chester, United Kingdom. Publisher University of Chester Download date 27/09/2021 20:26:31 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10034/620601 Poietic Hermeneutics: making local paths Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Chester for the degree of Doctor of Professional Studies in Practical Theology by Derrick Leslie Watson JUNE 2017 i | P a g e ii | P a g e POIETIC HERMENEUTICS: making local paths derrick l. watson ABSTRACT This thesis argues for poietic hermeneutics as a work of gathering and re-siting which intervenes in the local material-discursive site. This is an interruptive tactic of the local church, seeking the flourishing of here through transitory, non-hegemonic acts of re-making. In developing this tactic I draw a critique of a practical theology discourse which, I argue, masks acts of making, with a consequent loss of attentiveness to materiality and a normative commitment to the development of practices internal to the church and the practitioner. This commitment to developing poietic hermeneutics for the local church arises through ministry experiences of participation in local embodied and situated narratives of people’s lives which are running counter to wider discourses of this place. I turn to the work of the anthropologist Tim Ingold for reading such local embodied narratives as trajectories of interweaving living, and begin to shape a conceptual framework to the research through his tools of ‘in-between’ lines, meshwork and correspondence. Through these I construct a textility to the language of making which I draw into critical alignment with a wisdom trajectory set out through the participatory Trinitarian theology of Paul Fiddes. Attentive to creativity, justice and love, under Fiddes’ model of wisdom, I note disparities in a local meshwork, and shape a tactical performative work of participation through which both the local site and my faith community are reflexively interrupted through temporary re- makings of here. The thesis demonstrates a methodological validity to the practice through a performative ethnographic structure. The gathering and re-siting work takes place in Cathcart, Glasgow. The Field Text is constructed through visual ethnographic work across four ‘everyday sites of praxis’ in the local setting. Through thematic analysis on the Field Text I develop a Research Text of particular narratives of local living which weave together, tracing a local texturing, a meshwork. This prepares for the installation #imaginingcommonties, a temporary kinetic performative intervention through a local material-discursive space, undertaken as a reflexive activist work within a wisdom trajectory of the local church. There is an unfolding development of findings in the research. Within this particular working out of the practice locally, the project #imaginingcommonties develops as a tactical interruption which speaks into wider Scottish land questions and is becoming a useful device in participating in those debates, exploring and assessing local developments in Glasgow. It is also prompting reflection and exploration of the identity of Cathcart Baptist Church in its situatedness. These immediate developments arising through this particular project point to the value of poietic hermeneutics as a valid reflexive wisdom practice for the local church. New projects are planned under the same practice, which will develop further distinct tactical moves towards local flourishing. The significance of the work within the academy lies in the extending of a developing poiesis strand in practical theology, which here intends to question both the local church and its site through poietic hermeneutics, positioned as a wisdom practice undertaken beyond the ecclesia. Within this particular expression of the practice through Cathcart, the use in practical theology of visual ethnography is extended towards non-ecclesial settings and explored within a performative methodology that is underused within the field. The thesis argues that this is a valid wisdom practice for the local church. iii | P a g e SUMMARY OF PORTFOLIO This research makes a response to a ministry context where I lacked an adequate language and framework for the issues present. That context lay with a disparity between particular situated lives and wider discourses of stigmatized places, aligned with feelings of being implicated, as a faith community, in that disparity through our proximity to those situated lives. The Literature Review set an interim language towards making that response. I constructed a conceptual tool in the phrase visceral body of Christ, committing to an embodied, liberative and attentive hermeneutical action of the local church. But the conditioning of that action through stigmatized sites brought a second commitment in developing that conceptual tool, displacing power away from the enacting, interpreting community. The visceral body of Christ within the Literature Review, is a declaration of my hermeneutical site. It invokes whole body practices of participation in understanding the local site while addressing the sense of being implicated in existing disparities. My use of the term holds the eucharistic/gathered body of Christ to a normative attentiveness to this visceral body of Christ, argued as occurring through lives being lived in stigmatized settings. The Literature Review located reflexive resources within practical theology. But a normative commitment to the ecclesial body raised questions for me in addressing the sense of being implicated, as a faith community, in those disparities. I began work on a critical engagement with ethnographic immersive- expressive hermeneutical practices. The Literature Review develops a theological position on taking these kinds of resources into ecclesial practice. Within the Publishable Article I developed a pilot project, Naming Fragments, to test this kind of hermeneutical action through my context. The Publishable Article was submitted prior to the pilot project completing. But the full project was set out within a paper presented to the 2012 Association of American Geographers (AAG) conference in New York, where I shared on a work of gathering within Glencairn Tower. Lying directly opposite the church where I ministered, this tower had become a synecdoche of the problems associated with Motherwell, after the demolition of Ravenscraig Steelworks. In dialogue with the work of the sociologist Loic Wacquant, I developed a temporary expression of a different ‘becoming together’ than that depicted in the public discourse around the tower. This grew out of research work undertaken in the months before its demolition. Traces of lives were gathered and valued, thematically analysed into expressions of colour, writing, and secret places. Shortly before the tower was demolished these traces were projected onto the tower. Lessons that came out of the experience of the pilot project lay in two directions. First, that I needed to gather not simply traces of lives but the living, embodied narratives of people as a critical act towards local flourishing; and second, that I needed to find better ways of recording new becomings occurring through the practice. Outside circumstances also bore significantly into the research at this point. Between the construction of the pilot project & the research proposal, I moved ministry from Motherwell to Glasgow. I retained the commitment to the displaced, embodied, liberative hermeneutic in proximity, but my site was no longer the stigmatized site of Glencairn Tower. I turned to activist ethnographic work on the everyday to rework the condition under which that hermeneutic action was being undertaken, intending to gather disparate intimacies of meaning in the social-material local space, attentive to disjunctions and collaborations of relations in those intimacies. At a personal level, the reflective piece Discourse Analysis & Reflection on Three Images was a key work in clarifying my own commitments and entanglements in the works of gathering that now underpinned the developing methodology to the practice, understanding this research as a making and not a finding. And in that the research became an ‘owned’ work of personal research calling for a continuing act of reflexivity throughout on my own making of it, while also calling out a reflexivity of the church through enacting the proposed hermeneutic practice. In the context of my portfolio, my thesis will argue for a local, embodied, reflexive practice of poietic hermeneutics that is appropriate to the originating situation but not conditioned by it, where the language has moved from the visceral body of Christ to one of wisdom. Under a model of wisdom set out by Paul Fiddes, I can carry the participative, embodied and non-totalising aspects of that earlier conceptual tool that I needed to begin making a response to my context, while also opening the practice to other everyday sites. iv | P a g e The material being presented for examination is my own work and has not been submitted for an award of this or another HEI except in minor particulars which are explicitly noted in the body of the thesis. Where research pertaining to the thesis was undertaken collaboratively, the nature and extent of my individual contribution has been made explicit. signed……………………………………………………………. date………………………………………………………………. v | P a g e This thesis is dedicated to my family. To my daughter Abigail. Early thoughts towards this research were undertaken in the first times away from you, in Cambodia and then Prague, while on sabbatical leave in 2005. I placed your photograph at the end of the sabbatical paper which prepared the way for the thesis, to mark how difficult I found those times away from you. To my son Jonathan. I was writing research material on the top floor of the library at Strathclyde University when I got the phone call that you were arriving early and I had to get back. Your whole life has been lived with this project alongside, and I have missed time with you.