The Faith Lives of Women and Girls

Qualitative Research Perspectives

Nicola Slee, Fran Porter, Anne Phillips, Nicola Slee, Fran Porter, Anne Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317032106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Sexuality & Gender in Religion

Identifying, illuminating and enhancing understanding of key aspects of women and girls' faith lives, The Faith Lives of Women and Girls represents a significant body of original qualitative research from practitioners and researchers across the UK. Contributors include new and upcoming researchers as well as more established feminist practical theologians. Chapters provide perspectives on different ages and stages of faith across the life cycle, from a range of different cultural and religious contexts. Diverse spiritual practices, beliefs and attachments are explored, including a variety of experiences of liminality in women's faith lives. A range of approaches - ethnographic, oral history, action research, interview studies, case studies and documentary analysis - combine to offer a deeper understanding of women's and girls' faith lives. As well as being of interest to researchers, this book presents resources to enhance ministry to and with women and girls in a variety of settings.

PART I
Feminist Research Perspectives

Chapter 1
Feminist Qualitative Research as Spiritual Practice: Reflections on the Process of Doing Qualitative Research

Nicola Slee

Introduction

In this chapter, I seek to reflect on some of the characteristic features of qualitative research, as represented in the work of feminist practitioners – including the work of the women contributing to this book – and consider how the practice of research both arises out of and feeds back into women’s own ethical and spiritual lives. Both qualitative and feminist researchers are fundamentally concerned with the process(es) of research as an integral aspect of the work. We researchers understand that process and content are integrally interconnected; that feminists are after new ways of knowing – in our case, new ways of doing theology – as much as they are after new knowledge; that, as Audre Lorde famously put it, ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’,¹ or, as qualitative researchers might say, positivist perspectives which assume objectivity, neutrality and detachment on the part of the researcher in the interests of control are not likely to yield liberating results for oppressed groups.

Yet even in qualitative and feminist research paradigms that pay explicit attention to the process and to the importance of method, much of the concern is focused on methodology per se, the ethics of research enquiry and the effects of the process on participants – all right and proper concerns. There is much less in the literature about the significance of the research process for the researcher herself, about research as a means of transformation for the researcher – and even less about the research process understood in essentially religious or spiritual terms. There are exceptions. Within the literature of pastoral theology, the notion of scholarship as part of the vocation of the pastor/priest offers some scope for reflecting on the significance of learning, broadly conceived, in the formation of the believer². The literatures of heuristic or organic research, as well as that of auto-ethnography, are also helpful, in which the use of the self in research is acknowledged and explored, and research is perceived as a vehicle for personal growth and development. Thus, Kim Etherington explores the role of feelings, personal stories, creative processes such as painting and poetry, as well as body work, as legitimate and significant features of the research process, affirming that the recognition and conscious working with the self in research can lead to insight and transformation³. Although she does not speak of this process in explicitly spiritual terms, others do. Robert Pazmiño speaks of doing theological research as ‘a spiritual practice’, a ‘form of worship that seeks to glorify and enjoy God through the exercise of one’s mind and skill in expression and dialogue’,⁴ and Mary Clark Moschella acknowledges and explores ‘the research process itself as a potential means of spiritual growth and social transformation’.⁵

For myself and for other women researchers I know, the pursuit of research using qualitative methods has been a transformational process – not only in the way that it has contributed to our knowledge and understanding of women’s and girls’ faith lives, but also in the ways in which the research process itself has embodied and enacted core ethical and spiritual values. I do not intend here to discuss the many definitions of spirituality and feminist spirituality in particular.⁶ Instead, I want to take a more experiential, narrative and analogical approach. By comparing the ways in which feminist researchers use qualitative methods to research women’s lives (in our case, women’s faith lives) with some of the classic ways in which religious traditions enshrine spirituality, I hope to illuminate some of the ways in which the research process may be both experienced and perceived as spiritual practice. I seek to describe the research process as I have experienced it, and as I have witnessed other women researchers experience it, in such a way as to evoke the lived experience of research and to bring to light some of its core personal, ethical and spiritual characteristics and values. I want to suggest ways in which the research process itself forms and shapes us as women of faith (however we understand that term),⁷ challenges us to dig deep within our own spiritual resources (as well as calling on the support and resources of others), teaches us how to discern the sacred in other women’s and in our own lives, and enables us to grow in spiritual stature and wisdom. I shall attempt to do this, first, by describing some of the features of the context in which many of us perceive ourselves to be doing research, and then to go on to outline the various stages of qualitative research, trying to show how each discrete aspect of the research process presents its own spiritual challenges and, if we respond faithfully, gifts us with its own particular spiritual graces.

The practice of research, I want to suggest, is one which can, when conducted within the theological framework of a faith perspective, not only reflect but enact and enshrine core values of the faith community. Where Elaine Graham speaks of pastoral theology in broad terms as ‘transforming practice’,⁸ I want to focus in particular on ethnographic and qualitative research and show how they can be such transformative practices. Graham articulates an understanding of praxis as a form of practical wisdom mediated and embodied in the Church’s activities of care, worship, social action, formation and initiation, as much as in its formal theology. Although we do not normally think of research as a fundamental characteristic of the life of the Church, perhaps we should. Moschella argues powerfully for Ethnography as a Pastoral Practice, as the title of her book puts it, in which the process of ethnographic research, undertaken with intentionality, care and skill, can be a form of pastoral care, prophetic critique and spiritual discernment within the life of the Church. She draws on doctoral work by David Mellott who describes the ethnographic encounter as ‘an act of primary theology’, a means of being in relationship with God and practising the core values of the faith community.⁹ More broadly, Robert Pazmiño argues that theological research can be a form of worship, a practice through which the student learns to love God with mind, heart, soul and strength, and the neighbour as the self.¹⁰

Our Location as Researchers

Before looking at the research process per se, it is important to acknowledge the context(s) in which researchers of women’s and girls’ faith lives find ourselves and the ways in which we experience our location, for this impacts significantly on our experience of the research process and the personal/spiritual challenges it offers us. Without wanting to suggest that we are all positioned in precisely the same location – clearly we are not, and we need to acknowledge our different contexts, whether academic or pastoral, whether as lay women or ordained, as white, black or Asian, as younger or older, as more or less established in the Church or academy – my experience is that many of us describe our location as researchers in similar terms. Rosalind Edwards and Jane Ribbens describe feminist qualitative research into women’s so-called ‘private’ lives as being on the edges of the social sciences,¹¹ a perception widely shared by those of us conducting research into women’s and girls’ faith lives. Many of us perceive ourselves and our research to be located on a liminal margin, a location that boasts little status, recognition, or understanding from other theologians or social scientists. We may experience a variety of margins. Theology exists somewhere on the edges of the social sciences or the humanities, hardly considered mainstream by larger, secular disciplines. Within theology, both feminist theology in general and feminist practical theology more specifically, are marginalized discourses. Even within the small world of feminist practical theology, we may experience ourselves as marginal as those who are choosing to use qualitative methods to research women’s and girls’ faith lives. Then there are other margins for each of us – for Anne Phillips researching the experience of girls, or Abby Day, focusing on older women, or Deseta Davis and Eun Sim Joung,¹² concerned with the faith lives of ethnic minority women and traditions. It is not surprising if we experience ourselves as ‘resident aliens’, outsiders in an insiders’ world, ‘internal leavers’ as Gwen Henderson tellingly describes the subjects of her research.¹³

This is the location in which we experience ourselves doing research, and it is a spiritual landscape every bit as much as it is an intellectual or professional one: a landscape which might be named in a wide variety of metaphors,¹⁴ but which requires us to exercise courage, self-belief and tenacity. From such a location, we conduct our research, drawing on inner resources of conviction, justice-seeking compassion and prophetic daring.

Women’s and Girls’ Lives as Holy Ground

Whatever the precise focus of our respective research studies, we share an approach to the lives of women and girls as holy ground, a place where we expect to discern the presence and activity of the divine, however we name that reality. Moschella describes the reverence that undergirds all ethnographic research as ‘profound respect and regard for the dignity of the persons and communities who allow us to see so much of themselves’.¹⁵ Whilst this attitude of reverence may be required of all ethnographic research, in studying the faith lives of women and girls researchers are aware of approaching a neglected site. We are cartographers of neglected landscapes, charting maps that have not been made, until now.

I am talking here, of course, about the fundamental feminist principle of women’s experience(s).¹⁶ We deliberately privilege women and girls as the focus of our study, and whilst we need to face the myriad complex theoretical questions about the legitimacy of such a stance – what do we mean by ‘women’? which women and why? how far is gender a stable category and why focus on gender over and above other variables? – we continue to operate a strategic feminism that insists on the prioritizing of women’s lives. We do so because we want to hold up the holiness of ordinary women’s and girls’ lives, to say that their lives are sacred, worthy of painstaking study, that their lives are revelatory of God. To put this theologically, our research becomes a praxis of the communion of saints,¹⁷ a way of insisting on the participation of ordinary women and girls within the life of the people of God and holding up their lives, amongst the company of the faithful, as worthy of narration, visibility and reverence.

This sense of the holiness of our research territory connects also to the profound sense of vocation and mission which many feminist theological researchers profess in relation to their research (something one might hope to find in theological research generally). There is a common desire, not only to witness to the neglected experiences of women and girls but, by bringing that experience to light, to empower the research participants¹⁸ and to challenge and transform the ecclesial and other communities to which the participants belong. This sense of vocation may be particularly evident at the start of the research process, in the framing of a research proposal, but is also evident as a motivating force throughout.

Listening to Women’s and Girls’ Lives as a Practice of Prayer

Much has been written about the importance of listening within practical and pastoral theology, within the practice of ethnography, as well as within feminist theology. Nelle Morton’s work on ‘hearing into speech’¹⁹ has become a classic text which enshrines a core value of listening to women’s lives. Listening is key at every stage of the research process. Long before the formal beginning of research, we are listening to our own lives and the lives of others we know and hearing stories, questions, ideas and hunches, which shape themselves up into our research proposals. We listen to the literature, bringing our own lives and the lives of the women and girls we know into dialogue with it. We listen to our supervisor and to peers and colleagues who may shed valuable light on our research. We listen with acute attentiveness to our participants in interviews or other settings. We listen again, over and over, when transcribing and analysing data. We listen when we present our research to others and when we hear back from them. All the time we are listening at many different levels: to self, to the other, to the literature, to the Spirit at work in each of these. Moschella, borrowing a phrase from Dave Isay, speaks of such ethnographic listening as a profound ‘act of love’.²⁰

The way we listen as women researchers is, I suggest, a form of spiritual practice that has many of the qualities of prayer understood as the most attentive listening to self, other and God we can manage.²¹ We listen with our lives. We bring our whole selves to the act of listening. Our listening is informed by scholarly reading, certainly, but it is also shaped by our own hunger to be listened to, by positive experiences of what it is to be listened to well an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: FEMINIST RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES
• PART II: NEGLECTED AGES, STAGES AND STYLES IN WOMEN’S AND GIRLS’ FAITH LIVES
• PART III: FEMALE FAITH IN DIVERSE ECCLESIAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL CONTEXTS
• PART IV: WOMEN’S SPIRITUAL PRACTICES, BELIEFS AND ATTACHMENTS
• PART V: EXPERIENCES OF LIMINALITY IN WOMEN’S FAITH LIVES
• Bibliography
• Index