New Research Associate the Revd Dr Susie Snyder introduces a new project.
“Hope has holes in its pockets,” as poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer puts it—and this perhaps feels particularly true at this point of the twenty-first century (1). I have been interested in hope for a while, and at a time of global polycrisis, public and academic conversations are burgeoning. Some theologians have retrieved insights from Aquinas, Augustine and Moltmann to argue for a particular understanding of hope, while others argue that hope should be abandoned as it allows the privileged to avoid working for social justice. Pastoral theologians have drawn on positive psychology to stress the importance of goals, actions and agency in generating hope. I’m interested in exploring lived hope today and its role in supporting personal, social and political flourishing. My research grapples with these questions: How do people experience, understand and practice hope? How does this resonate with or challenge received theological accounts? What does this suggest for individual and communal Christian understanding and practice, and for action in the public square?
So far, I have explored existing perspectives on hope and developed a proposed methodology. In 2024, I gave a lecture at St Paul’s Cathedral on “What is Hope?” and presented a work-in-progress paper at the Ecclesiology and Ethnography Network Conference in Durham. This year, I will start the fieldwork. My methodology seeks to integrate creative and collaborative qualitative approaches with Intuitive Inquiry—an approach which values insight, intuition and imagination—and I will be co-creating and designing the research project with people based in one local urban community (2). We will discuss and decide together what methods will work best for us to explore hope, with options ranging from focus groups engaging in a creative arts activity (e.g. textiles, collage) to in-depth interviews and journalling. Relationship will lie at the heart of the emergent project, and given that hope can be hard to articulate in words, a creative, poetic approach that allows for the messiness of life—or as Wren Radford puts it, “lived experiences that cannot be tamed”—will allow us to attend to complexity and ambiguity (3). To give you a taste of what I have done so far, Intuitive Inquiry begins with bringing to mind a text or image that draws us. For me, this was an image of water bunds in Tanzania—semi-circular areas dug to encourage regreening. I sat with this image for a while over some days—having a conversation with it in writing and creatively—and this sketch is what emerged:
I will continue to return to this image I drew, to journal and scribble, as the project progresses.
In addition to producing articles for academic journals, the idea is that together we will come up with some events or resources that will be of interest and benefit to those involved and the broader local community. I will also work with SWF to create a resource that will be of value to churches.
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[1] Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, “Hope” in J. Crews, ed., How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope (North Adams, MA: Storey Publishing, 2021), p.5.
[2] Intuitive Inquiry is an approach developed by Rosemarie Anderson. See ‘Intuitive inquiry: Inviting transformation and breakthrough insights in qualitative research’, Qualitative Psychology 6(3) (2019), pp. 312–319
[3] Wren Radford, Lived Experience and Social Transformations (Brill, 2022), p.68.