Rev. Dr. Michelle Walsh publishes Violent Trauma, Culture, and Power: An Interdisciplinary Study in Lived Religion
Congratulations to Rev. Dr. Michelle Walsh (STH MDiv. ’06, Practical Theology ’14) on publishing Violent Trauma, Culture, and Power: An Interdisciplinary Study in Lived Religion. Rev. Dr. Walsh has worked for over 25 years in lay and professional urban ministry and social work and has directed two major mental health clinics. She currently is a Lecturer at the BU School of Social Work and has a private consulting practice for activists. Here, she offers a deeper understanding of how her world/sense impacted her research, her interdisciplinary influences, and the significance of a framework of lived religion for her book and for practical theology as a discipline.
Your book begins with “A Prelude of Lived Experiences,” where you articulate ways your life experiences inform the book. You write, “Whether we acknowledge it or not, our lived experiences in the world shape what we study and what we write – and perhaps there is a larger academic “objective truth” and capacity for connection, even sacredness, in acknowledging and taking ownership of this very human reality. Perhaps we should begin to demand a detailed preface of lived experiences – the social experience and identities from which we write – for every academic book published as a matter of ethical accountability within institutional systems of domination” (vii). Was there a particular moment – or moments – that convinced you that naming experience and identity would be integral to your work and that inspires your conviction of this practice for other writers as well?
My awareness of how my different identities shape my experiences of the world has, of course, grown over time. Most frequently this happened through experiences of direct encounters with people who come from different lived experiences with the world than myself. Methodologically in my book, I came to identify this as more aptly described as our respective different “world/sense” rather than simply different “worldview” because identities are experiential in formation. A significant first encounter was being a first-generation college student at an elite women’s college, Wellesley College. While there, I became more deeply aware of the different realms of comfort, ease, and taken-for-granted class privilege that some individuals carry, such as with global travel for vacations or work/study, while I worked in a donut shop back home on my vacations, for just one example. The most prominent experiences shaping me were those of developing and directing an urban youth ministry program with the Unitarian Universalist Urban Ministry. I navigated not only my own identities as a white working class cisgender female but also provided pastoral support bridging relationships between predominantly white economically privileged suburban families and predominantly African American families living in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan.
Leadership in that role meant that I needed to embrace deeper levels of antiracism and anti-oppression education, which I did through my social work training as well as through Community Change, Inc., Visions, Inc., and Crossroads Antiracism Organizing & Training. All trainings emphasized the need for us to be authentic, honest, and open about the various identities of privilege, as well as marginalization/oppression, that we may carry as a first step toward building beloved community and a shared world of justice. During my dissertation process, I also married a person of indigenous heritage, which also became another ongoing cross-cultural encounter with different world/sense in relationship. Naturally I carried all of these experiences into my writing, and I also have come to view this writing style as an ethical necessity and moral call. Those of us who carry identities from the dominant culture are morally required to be as open and honest as we possibly can about the experiences that have shaped us as researchers and writers. By doing so, we cultivate the type of transparency that carries not only the possibility of deepening our relationship with our reader audience but also allows for a richness of critique that captures more phenomenological possibilities – the essence of a form of truth gathering that challenges the institutional bases of power on which our constructed dominant “world/sense” depends. Such encounters are fundamental to transforming all of our institutions toward expansive and inclusive equity and justice.
Can you say a bit about how you made your disciplinary partner choices? The interdisciplinary character of the book provides you an opportunity to weave together insights from trauma, theology, and sociology. But even within each of these disciplines, how did you make choices about the different strands within disciplines from which you would draw?
My lived experiences and “world/sense” from being immersed in different cultures were my guide (with eternal gratitude to my two dissertation advisors, Dale P. Andrews and Shelly Rambo for initially detecting, appreciating, and keeping me on track with my methodology and writing). As I cite in my book, bell hooks speaks of “Theory as Liberative Practice” in the sense that she grew up with certain experiences and turned to theory as a way of making larger sense of these experiences. In this same sense, as I describe in my book, I also write auto-ethnographically as a survivor of trauma seeking to “make sense.” I both drew on my own experiences and also attended closely to the lived experiences expressed by those whom I interviewed, being careful to distinguish between the two. I then sought resonance among the various theories in trauma, theology, psychology, and sociology in which I had been trained. A core question always was: Which survivor experiences drew upon language that reflected or challenged these theories? I was a sponge in this way for a lot of different theories – not just classical ones that often are used, but also others that theoretically resonated and which sometimes challenged classical theories. My bottom line of attention always was with the survivors themselves. How were the survivors the experts who could both guide us through and dismantle the tangle of theories originating from those with a world/sense cultivated by dominant world/sense identities?
One example of this in psychology was the epiphany I had at a 2010 social work conference when I first was exposed to “continuing bonds” theory as a counterpoint to some classic psychoanalytic theory of grief and loss. I already had been immersed in pilot studies and interviews and was preparing my prospectus when I realized that this theory fit so much of what I was hearing from survivors. They had a continuing bond with the dead that was being expressed through street memorials, buttons, etc. Another example from disability theology is when Thomas Reynolds’ concept of “vulnerable communion” in disability theology struck me as a powerful additional tool for expressing the relational and communal strength survivors found with each other in the aftermath of violence. This also resonated with a form of resilient fierceness, as described in the works of Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakishima Brock, demonstrating that post-traumatic growth also is a possibility. Plus, as I’ve described above, I already was attuned to language that signified experiences of race, class, and gender in my research from my background trainings in social work and sociology. With an evolving conceptual guide of “world/sense,” I eventually began to describe my practical theological methodology as one of “embodied metaphorical and mutual critical correlational” in approach. Our operating theories and theologies must be grounded in the embodied experiences of human beings and in the metaphorical language they bring to bear on those experiences. When we bring these embodied (and material) metaphorical experiences into mutual critical correlation with theories of trauma, psychology, sociology, and theology, our theories are more grounded, practical, and ultimately effective. My overall approach is liberative in that I normatively prioritize the lived experiences of those with the least power.
How did insights from a perspective of lived religion assist your analysis?
My first exposure to lived religion came through the works of Hans-Günter Heimbrock when he gave a lecture at the BU Center for Practical Theology before I submitted my prospectus. Heimbrock’s commitment to the spiritual element existing in all phenomenological experience, including popular experience rather than solely formal religious institutions, fit what I was experiencing and witnessing as religious or spiritual dimensions in the creation of street memorials in the aftermath of violence in the Boston area. Heimbrock had issued a call for new methods of examining this type of phenomenon, and I experienced myself as responding to the need for more methodological tools in lived religion studies, particularly for studies of trauma. I remained in email communication with Dr. Heimbrock for a period of time when I was completing my prospectus and sent a copy of it to him in 2010. I also had enjoyed several of the works of BU sociologist Nancy T. Ammerman in lived religion studies, such as her book Everyday Religion, though I had not had an opportunity to work in depth with her as an advisor.
In 2015, after I had graduated and completed my dissertation, I had the opportunity to meet other European colleagues at the Amsterdam Centre for the Study of Lived Religion. There, I learned more about the works of R.Ruard Ganzevoort and Srdjan Sremac and that there was interest in publishing my book as the first in their new series on lived religion with Palgrave Macmillan. Later I also learned that Nancy T. Ammerman was one of their series editors. Overall, I experienced that the methodologies of lived religion approaches were most conducive to my work as an ethnographer of religious experiences in the popular realm and also most compatible with my public theological ethical orientation as a Unitarian Universalist scholar and clergy person. Unitarian Universalism embraces wisdom from all religious traditions and practices, inclusive of science and the popular realm. I find compatibility in lived religion’s embrace of social scientific methods as well as in its witness to the religious or spiritual phenomenological impulse as being an essential quality of our humanity, with the range of its full expression as worthy of scholarly attention. In a forthcoming chapter in the edited volume Lived Religion and Trauma I develop this theme as well, building now on the work of R.Ruard Ganzevoort.
You frame your findings in terms of “lessons learned” from survivors and from cross-cultural encounters. Are there one or two lessons that surprised you? Are there any that reverberate particularly strongly today?
As I discuss in my book, I absolutely was caught off guard when some of the survivors resisted my use of the language of “healing” in a question in my interviews. The pushback entailed their association of the word “healing” with the expectation of closure around the murder of their child. A therapist interviewed who works with survivors said that the language of “movement,” as in finding the ability to move again, often was more helpful to survivors than the word “healing”. This continues to strike me very powerfully on an embodied level and as so obvious to me now: of course, often a first aspect of “healing” is feeling like one can move again, our bodies are the first to respond to traumatic impact as so many trauma theorists point out. I suggested in my book that human service providers perhaps need to explore a broader range of metaphors for the experiences of “healing” in the aftermath of trauma. This particular encounter also led me to delve more deeply into literatures of disability theology and disability rights movements where there also is a sensitivity to language and theologies of “healing and wholeness” that neglect or further marginalize and oppress aspects of our human experience. Disability theologies and movements are a crucial area of attention in today’s world when considering how to expand inclusiveness for beloved community.
Another transformative moment, with which I open my separate chapter in Post-Traumatic Public Theology, came from an encounter with a young adult African American woman who was describing her memorial buttons and t-shirts in a way that went beyond simply looking at a picture and remembering a lost loved one. She was describing the wearing of these objects as channeling the felt living presence of the person. Again, I was struck powerfully by the cultural differences between us in this moment. This experience, as well as others in my pilot studies with street memorials, eventually led me to find resonance in the literature of theopoetics and material religion when I applied theopoetics to the material realm of existence, hence “material theopoetics” as I came to name this integration of literatures. Later I learned that my methodological move here also had resonance with theological and political/sociological developments in the “New Materialism”.
What excites you about your book as a work of practical theology?
My methodological contributions excite me the most, of which there were several between my dissertation and the development of my book. One is my concept of “world/sense,” which led me to articulate my practical methodological method as being an “embodied metaphorical and mutual critical correlational” approach, as described above. I also first began to work with the idea of a “material theopoetics” in my dissertation and later in my book, as well as for my chapter in Post-Traumatic Public Theology. In essence I began to argue, under the influence of the work of Mark Johnson and George Lakoff as well as feminist theory, including Rebecca Chopp, that poetics shapes all language and narratives, including those of science, and that such poetics are not only narrative in form but also embodied as well as material. Hence, we can easily speak to a need for correlational approaches for theopoetics, material theopoetics, religio-poetics, socio/politico-poetics, etc. Expressive poetics on both the embodied and material levels continues to be an underappreciated and yet significant realm of practical theology still to be more richly explored, and my work is compatible with other practical theologians renewing a call for the expressive and aesthetic turn, including David Tracy himself . And last but not least for me personally, I believe that I make a contribution to the international and interfaith religious scope of practical theology in my attention to Unitarian Universalism as a public theology in ethical practice that enables wisdom from all religious traditions to be mined and respected. Practical theology proudly arises within the Christian tradition, AND practical theology also has the capacity to have international impact when focused through a lived religion method on the practices of all popular and formal religious or spiritual ways of human being.
Do you have another project in the works?
LOL, can I say rest and earning a living in teaching and activism now? Seriously, I feel like I’ve lived a few lifetimes already from where I’ve come in my roots to now, including in my own exposure to trauma, and my book feels like a magnum opus already reflecting the learnings of my world/sense in my writing. I also count myself as among scholar activist social work clergy who are deeply concerned about how all of our institutions in the United States and globally – inclusive of higher education – need to undergo a radical transformation that is moral and spiritual to its core. We already are daily exposed to the planetary danger of climate change and its growing deadly impact on the most vulnerable and marginalized. Justice calls all of us to the public square in these times, particularly those who are scholars with privilege from higher education. Higher education itself needs to be challenged to consider its own institutional role in these times. How are our institutions of higher education accountable to our interdependent world in the magnitude of its suffering under the historical weight of colonialism and the domination world/sense theologies that are bringing about our collective destruction? We all have much to learn from the world/sense knowledge and theologies of marginalized and oppressed peoples, those who have developed resilient and transformative ways of being in the face of destructive forces. Our collective liberation depends on finding new and creative paths for sharing our respective world/sense experiences. Those of us who have been well trained in domination need to learn new skills of cultural humility and power sharing or power yielding. For me personally, this means an ongoing path of discernment as to where my skills as an educator-scholar -clergy-social work-activist fit best for these crucial times and where and by whom I am called in that path. Thank you for a wonderful set of questions on which to reflect, Kathryn House!