Tag: Research

Camper leaning on counselor

The pilot of a dissertation that might have been

Kyle

Before there was Becoming Tapestry there was … something else.

I had planned on calling the series Faith Adjacent (read idea refresher here) in order to more squarely associate my dissertation podcast as a whole with one of the core intellectual contributions of the project.

My tentative plan was to produce a more mixed-genre series that would continue season by season in a robust way after I had defended. Short documentary episodes exploring my research, across both the pilot and the main study, would be interspersed with colleague chats (see Bonus 2) and possibly with case studies from other faith-adjacent communities. Think less of an account, more of a platform.

Making the familiar …

The third bonus episode of Becoming Tapestry is the pilot episode for that now-abandoned series.

So there’s two senses of “pilot” at work here. This episode is about my pilot study, the digital storytelling project in a faith-adjacent camp setting that I gloss as briefly as I could in Act 2 of Chapter 3. You can read more about that pilot project in this write-up I presented at REA 2018—and I hope later in a revised version of this article. If our family hadn’t decided to relocate coasts that same summer, St. Sebastian’s might have gone on to serve as the site for my main study as well.

And then there’s the way that this pilot helped me try out some affordances of podcasting as research documentation, even though I significantly adapted the trajectory upon which I thought I was embarking.

So if you have a listen, I think there will be much that is familiar to you if you’ve been following Becoming Tapestry:

  • a “cold open” segment to begin the show in the middle of the action;
  • the use of pseudonyms to offer some protection of the identities of the participants;
  • reflection in the midst of the narration on this novel way of conducting and presenting research;
  • the theme music (“Intimate Moment” by MFYM);
  • the structuring of the episode around a significant narrative and analytic turning point in the research project itself; and
  • most importantly, the voices of young people reflecting on their experience of community and self-exploration within the site of the partner organization.

… strange

On the other hand, there are two things that are very different about this episode.

The first is the length. The episode clocks in around 13 minutes, which is comparable to the length of a single act in the format I eventually settled on.

I originally imagined that I’d be “podcasting through” the project, producing and releasing episodes along the way rather than when I had reached some discrete “end point.”

In that approach, I think shorter episodes organized around a single moment would have made sense. They would have needed to be much easier produce to turn them around quickly.

And it was the benefit of hindsight that made possible the longer narrative arcs of the episodes in what became Becoming Tapestry. I had to actually traverse multiple significant moments, and also have the perspective to select and weave in a couple significant pieces of existing literature, in order to tell a story that answered one of my research questions in a treatment that could feel complete, though of course not exhaustive.

Still, the trend in podcasting writ large has been toward shorter, more digestible episodes—audio you can listen to completely in an average-length commute. Like many scholars, I have a tendency toward unchecked verbosity, so I enjoyed and benefitted from being forced to be so concise. It’s fun to think about how the show might have taken shape according to this more condensed episode format.

The other big difference is in the tone of the tape. I love hearing the sounds of camp in the background of our conversation about what camp means. It’s such an improvement in terms of both illustration (“here’s what St. Sebastian’s Camp is like”) and intimacy (“here’s how we authentically related there”) over session recorded via Zoom.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed reflecting a bit on how Zoe’s and her mentors’ home lives came to the fore as we recorded our conversations online. But I would have loved to “show” you Tapestry through field recordings not orchestrated from my apartment.

Take on a “Take 1”

Anyway, in the same way that I lauded the requirement of a pilot study in my Chapter 3 narration, I’d like here to laud the opportunity of a pilot “text” for those considering research documentation formats outside the usual “book chapter and/or journal article” academic box.

Not only did I benefit from the opportunity to experiment with form. I was also incredibly encouraged by the reception this pilot received at the 2019 Ethnography in Education Forum at the University of Pennsylvania.

Non-traditional research takes so long partly because you don’t have super relevant exemplars to follow. You have to be your own exemplar. So producing something you can share with others, get some feedback about, and gain some confidence from, is I think even more important than with more traditional kinds of projects.

So I hope you enjoy this pilot of a series that never came to be, but that gave birth to something different and perhaps better. More than maybe any other piece of media in the whole project, I certainly enjoyed making it.

A "Tapestry Moment" instagram post

Good stories have conflict. Honest research has plenty.

Kyle

Chapter 3 feels like the episode that got away from me a bit. At least that’s how I’m still hearing it.

Even with good strategies for how to say “no” to a particular idea or piece of tape, I think it was natural that one episode before the big finish would become the repository of “everything else.” There is, I confess, a lot going on in the penultimate chapter of Becoming Tapestry.

But there was a theme to the “everything else.” I think what helps this story about “empathetic engagement” shine is that it’s the place where I got very honest about what didn’t go well in my studies.

In pretty much every research project I’ve ever participated in, there’s been at least one crisis moment that helped clarify the issues and stakes on the table. Usually the precipitating event raises a flaw in the design.

I wish more researchers could be more transparent about these moments, rather than framing their studies as having been flawlessly designed from the beginning. So this story part of the story is where I get honest about my mistakes—and especially what I learned from them.

I won’t spoil the various sources of tension, and how they resolved, in this little preview post. I will say that this is the episode about how I learned to stop worrying about timelines and love the process.

Ethnography works because you get deeply embedded in a field site—complexly enmeshed in the network of relationships and stories unfolding in/as the space. We simply cannot rush these relationships.

But since many of us are likely to try anyway, we better have some mechanisms in place for recognizing when that’s happening, for helping us pump the brakes when we do, and for reflecting on what these little mini-failures are telling us.

The failures I chronicle in this episode helped me understand more deeply how Tapestry works, and especially how to be a more just researcher.

It wasn’t easy telling this part of the story, and that’s probably exactly why it needs to be here.

Reconstructed Instagram post: Tapestry volunteer training

Faith-Adjacent Spaces Are Where Religion Intersects Everything Else

Kyle 1 Comment

If you’ve been following along in the story of my dissertation research, you’re probably enjoying getting to know Tapestry and their model for “starting with the work” in order to be and to become a community.

But if you’re like me, or even like Tapestry’s co-directors as their organization has developed, then it might be hard for you to further understand the nature of this “church that doesn’t look like a church.” In the new episode of Becoming Tapestry, I explore this problem and propose a way of thinking about it.

I shared in Episode 1 that social theorist Bruno Latour is skeptical of our often unnoticed belief that calling a group by a particular name automatically tells us something about its members. It’s better to stick close to the members themselves and the interactions they have, he says.

That focus on interaction can help us appreciate an insight from another social theorist, Doreen Massey. It’s about space.

Space is more than connected locations, more than the material or even digital places where people hang out. It isn’t empty. It isn’t flat. It isn’t a Euclidean grid to be filled like the Star Trek holodeck.

“Space is a social practice,” says Massey. It’s distinct people relating to each other, often across significant differences, and often according to some unpredictable trajectory of change and becoming. Space is a great “pin cushion” of interconnected “stories-so-far.”

In my story of Tapestry, the extension from understanding the organization and its mentor teams as connected groups-in-formation (Latour) to connected spaces convened by those group members (Massey) lays the groundwork for tackling what feels to me like the biggest challenge facing faith leaders in a time of disconnection.

How do we understand religious belonging when people are religiously disaffiliating? How do we meaningfully and respectfully include people who feel strongly that they don’t want to be labelled? How do we understand the impact of faith on people’s lives without resorting to the often toxic binary of insider/outsider?

Here’s my take:

If we pay attention to spaces rather than groups, we start to emphasize relationship as it is practiced rather than how it is represented by fields in a membership database. We engage according to who is showing up in the moment rather than who we wish had showed up—and by their presence and contributions rather than by their membership status.

Here’s the most important part:

The boundaries of spaces, in this way of thinking about them, are much more amorphous and flexible than in our typical ways of describing affiliation: member, non-member, visitor/lead/prospect/member-in-training.

We hold space together simply by encountering one another. We do it all the time, and with people of all persuasions.

So when our lens shifts from what happens in the church building among the members of that church (or the online/hybrid service for the worshipers) to what happens when religious people engage in the other spaces of their lives, we don’t need new language or analytic tools. New spaces just mean slightly reconfigured orientations to the religion(s) in question.

When faith, theirs or others’, comes to bear on the spaces they’re moving through, we should simply note the connection. The spatial metaphor of adjacency, of two things being close to or next to or connected to each other, captures how such spaces are experienced in these moments.

  • When the Tapestry co-directors unpack how their background as religious leaders shaped the founding of their organization …
  • When Tapestry teams “borrow” church kitchens or church playgrounds for their meetings …
  • When a Tapestry facilitator uses a popular religious education format to develop the story of how religious concepts have informed the “multi-faith and no faith” guiding principles of the community …
  • When Tapestry turns a church yoga night into a mentor recruiting event …
  • When a beloved Tapestry mentor dies and the team gathers at that same church for her funeral …
  • When Tapestry facilitates a partner organization turning a church sanctuary into a traveling exhibit space …

… we recognize something not exactly religious, but certainly not secular or entirely non-religious. I call it faith-adjacent space. Faith is nearby. Not irrelevant. Visible, as it were, but visible among other salient details as well.

At a time when so many of us are reevaluating our relationship to organized religion, to institutions more broadly, and to our daily practices of relationship and presence, it’s very helpful to have ways of describing religious encounter that don’t center ideas of institutional membership and don’t force some kind of “religious identity acid test” onto every interpersonal interaction in our pluralistic society.

I hope you’ll try out this idea of faith-adjacency as one such way of shifting your understanding of the religious/non-religious/multi-religious spaces you move through each day.

It just might free you up to focus on the relationships you form in those spaces—and all the potentialities those relationships hold.

All this to say: Episode 2 of Becoming Tapestry is now available in your podcast feeds.

Photo of objects from the Tapestry guiding principles story

On the power of bonus episodes

Kyle

When you write your dissertation as a podcast, there isn’t a great way to do footnotes.

I do have some footnotes in my manuscript, at my committee’s suggestion. But I didn’t make any effort to register them in the audio episodes.

Basically, I decided people who would care about footnotes would be willing to do the extra work to track them down via links on the show’s website and investigate without further scaffolding from me. Being more proactive on my part didn’t feel worth the distraction to listeners who, understandably, don’t really care about these extras.

That’s how I handled citations as well.

I do admire shows that find creative ways to mark that a citation has just passed by in the voiceover. The show My Gothic Dissertation, the first dissertation podcast, uses one of those bells you find on desks for when attendants step away. It’s a clever, effective, and maybe necessary device in a humanities dissertation.

Similarly, at least one audiobook of David Foster Wallace’s writing—famously reliant on footnotes—inserts the “text” of footnotes directly with a temporary audio effect to mark the shift.

Anyway, I decided there were plenty of audio and cognitive layers present in my show already. I didn’t want to introduce another.

Still, the function of a footnote—to stick a little text off in a corner somewhere, where it doesn’t disrupt the flow of the main narrative—is incredibly useful. Maybe especially for people who like to qualify, complicate, and otherwise unpack what they’re saying/writing as they say/write it.

At a larger scale, that feels similar to what a bonus episode is all about too. Because Becoming Tapestry is an ethnographic project, I work on the assumption that my primary job is to immerse you in the “spaces” (that is, the sites and relationships) of the work.

This desire tended to lead me to say to myself “Add a little more tape. Just a little more. That last thing they said was so interesting! That introductory comment provides helpful context! I love the sound of so-and-so’s voice in that redundant sentence!”

Of course, the opposite usually needs to happen. The bulk of my editing energy was spent making cuts. And more cuts. And more cuts.

So it was incredibly useful to be able to say, in effect, “I’m going to play you a tiny bit of tape here, and if you’re interested in a full immersion, check out the bonus episode.” Which is what I do in Act 2 of the opening chapter.

And now that first bonus episode is available in your podcast feed. It’s the complete audio of Hannah introducing the guiding principles of Tapestry at a monthly mentor training.

There’s no better scene to immerse you in, because it’s representative of the moment when I realized I truly could write a religious education dissertation about an organization that isn’t traditionally religious.

So here’s a little bit of Godly Play, remixed with practices of organizational storytelling. The photo at the top of this post contains all the items Hannah speaks about.

With the introductory comments from me, it’s about 18 minutes. And it’s a great way to get to know my research partners.

Enjoy!

Demo video screenshot - reading more with Kindle accessibility features

How I’m reading more – and maybe better

Kyle

I read a paper in my cognition class a couple years back that kinda blew my mind.

In “How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds,” Edwin Hutchins makes the argument that a whole bunch of representational technology helps a flight crew “think” as a single system. The cognition in this system is socially shared and spatially distributed across the roles and procedures of pilot and copilot as well as the dials, displays, and other controls that they work with.

That’s an idea that would appeal, I think, to Bruno Latour, the theorist whose book Reassembling the Social* has more recently been rocking my world. Like Hutchins, Latour believes it’s silly to talk about human agency in a way that robs the objects we create, think with, and increasingly depend on of the significant part they play in our lives.

As a researcher studying religious meaning-making, I find these thinkers’ ways of looking at artifacts appealing. Bibles, icons, prayer beads, bread and wine—the role they play in our spiritual lives is really powerful and has the mark of a kind of presence that, like Latour, I don’t want to dismiss:

In addition to ‘determining’ and serving as a ‘backdrop for human action,’ things [i.e., objects] might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on. (p. 71)

My ongoing dissertation study of a faith-adjacent nonprofit whose foster youth mentor teams gather each week in parks and coffee shops all around a large metropolitan area is helping me see this point even more clearly. Basketballs, Uno cards, and cute animals all play a part in this organization, as do the Instagram posts and newsletter reflections that tell the stories of how teams use these physical objects—and so many more—to practice and signify unconditional love.

Tapestry, as I call them, is changing a lot of lives, including mine. In my case, how could they not be, given how much of my time and energy is devoted to thinking and theorizing about them?

I’ve been spending some of that time and energy a little differently, lately. And that, dear reader, is why I have a recommendation for you, plus a technology hack that makes my new practice a little easier and cheaper.

**

I’m a pretty slow and undisciplined reader, which is a major liability when you’re working on a dissertation. I know I need to be reading more.

But I am a very attentive and agile listener: hence the pastoring, and also the podcasting.

Thus, it has totally revolutionized my reading and research life to get the hell away from my “desk,” i.e., wherever I’m sitting with my laptop checking my email too often, and learn by listening. (I’m just realizing that I’ve talked about this “lace up and listen” approach before).

I’ve been doing serious miles reading more while walking and running around the beautiful city of San Francisco, much of which I still haven’t explored (despite ample inspiration from the likes of a writer who’s walked every neighborhood*, plus delightful albeit fictitious characters like this programmer-turned-baker* and this designer-turned-decoder*). And since I’ve also started surfing, I now have added time for reading more on my once- or twice-weekly round trip to Pacifica (where these adorable surfers were back out in force on Saturday).

You probably know there are decent apps out there for reading PDFs aloud. These have been pretty helpful for me on this journey.

I ended up going with Voice Dream, which has good tools for keeping files organized. I also like that you can double tap on the text to move the “voice cursor” directly to a section where you want the narration to recommence. Unfortunately, it’s only available on iOS. Looks like NaturalReader, another pretty well rated one, is available for iOS and Android.

A tool I’d already been using for listening to long reads from online publications is Pocket, which as a bonus is now owned by Internet do-gooders Mozilla. Pocket’s a great tool even if you don’t have this eccentric desire to have someone else read to you.

Here’s the trouble: in my field, I need to be reading more actual books. I read almost exclusively on Kindle, though I’ve been delighted to discover the occasional book I need available as an audiobook. (I recommended the excellent audiobook of For White Folks Who Teach In The Hood* a couple newsletters ago.)

The problem is, audiobooks are rare in both academia and in mainline protestant religious publishing, plus when they do exist they’re understandably expensive—good audio is hard to make. So to really get the most out of learning by listening, I finally had to figure out how to get my iPhone’s accessibility features to read from me directly from the Kindle app.

It is not a super pleasant experience, as I suspect anyone who reads with a screen reader surely knows. I’m sure some of this also has to do with Amazon not wanting to discourage us from buying content on Audible.

(If you create online content, I hope this post will double as a call to attend to your content’s accessibility features.)

In any event, it is indeed possible to get your Kindle to read books to you. And it is possible to get used to the experience, even if the book you’re reading is full of pull quotes (as in Dear Church*), tables (as in Discourse Analysis Beyond the Speech Event*), and citations/footnotes (as especially in the writing of my new BFF, Latour). I know I’m dropping a lot of book links here, but I’m reading more than I have since seminary, y’all!

Let me walk you through it:

(Here’s a similar demo someone else made for Android.)

I’d love to hear from folks who find this possibility exciting, or who have similar reading/listening workflows. Perhaps I’m even weirder than usual in my willingness to slog through academic texts via robot voice and a finicky interface. Please don’t hesitate to tell me if you think that’s the case and I’ll just move the hell along.

What I know is that the need to be reading more books has been holding back my scholarship and probably my religious leadership for a long time. (For example, I listened to big chunks of Battered Love* preparing for my recent sermon on Hosea 1; I’m not sure I’d have read as much of it without this new technique.)

I also know that Hutchins and probably even Latour would probably believe me when I say that I think I’m remembering what I hear at least as well as what I read, especially when I’m walking around San Francisco. I can remember the neighborhood I was jogging in when I had a breakthrough in understanding Latour, the same neighborhood (though running in the other direction) as when I heard Renita Weems on the marriage metaphor in a way that went on to inform my sermon.

There’s something about mapping the books I’m reading onto the geography of the city that is helping me make connections I’m not sure I otherwise would have.

Plus it feels good to “read” with my whole body and not exclusively with my eyes and my note-taking fingers, especially as I continue to study religious organizations who stress getting out of their buildings and out into their neighborhoods.

* Disclosure: Affiliate links.

Interview training resource: Learning to ask good questions

Kyle

Interviewing people is kind of amazing, right?

I’m inspired by journalists shining a light on our fraying democracy, researchers discovering something new with every human encounter, storytellers weaving together strands of narrative from a whole host of voices, and everyday people practicing radical caring and empathy.

When we ask each other questions and care about the answers, new possibilities are born into lives on rails.

I wouldn’t say I’m an expert at interviewing. But I’ve done a lot of it over the years, and I was recently invited to share some of what I know with a group of students embarking on a research project.

So I give you Interviewing for research & media production, a fully remixable interview training resource to share or build on next time you want to help your students or colleagues get the most out of the opportunity to ask good questions of people with something to say. Which is everyone.

As always, would love to hear your feedback—or about ways you do interview training in your setting. Enjoy!