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The project has begun to move on to its next phase, where I need to start to write up my findings in several different outputs. The plan for is to write several articles based on the project one focused on some theory about narrative I’ve been developing from my data, an article about the construction of identity in the discourse about religious belief, and an additional article that’s still not determined. I’m also thinking about working on a (short) book that’s limited to the project and the findings, and a longer, more extensive book called Religious Belief and Discourse pulling together some of my larger thoughts about faith as it relates to Discourse. Finally, I’m going to be working on an infographic based on the findings for sharing with the institutions and people that have been involved in the project so far.

There is a challenge, of course, in doing this sort of writing as you try to present your work to both academic and general audiences. There’s no point in just producing a bunch of writing to be stuck in a library and read by a few dozen academics. A key part of the project has included working with community organisations and talking to leaders about what they do in their communities, but as I have been working at boiling this down to some key findings, it’s not clear to me yet, how best to communicate these findings and, indeed, if I have anything worthwhile to say at all. What seems most clear to me is that deciding what is useful to share requires more conversations with people who don’t share the same language as me about data and analysis and impact, but people who work in the real world of community engagement and know how best to speak to the audiences I want to reach.

Looking forward to presenting the project in-person at the Applied Stylistics Symposium in Aston this Friday! The slides for the presentation are here:

http://bit.ly/AstonPres

This last week, I was away at Citizens UK‘s six-day residential leadership course, hosted this year by The Queen’s Foundation in Birmingham. The course is accredited by my very own Newman University with an award of a Certificate in Community Leadership. I did Citizens’ three-day training online last year and was really eager to spend more time learning about how community organising works. It was an intense time of personal and professional growth and vulnerability with some 50 other people, almost all of whom I had meaningful conversations with over the course of the week. There was so much that happened that it’s impossible to sum it up in a succinct way — suffice to say if you want to learn about community and relational leadership, this course is definitely worth your time. For me, though, there were three main takeaways:

1. You only get as much justice as you have the power to compel. This quote from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides was a key part of the learning from the very beginning, as we looked at how power works in society. An important part of community organising is power analysis: looking at where power sits in different organisations and how changes can be made by compelling people with power to act. This is a messy, pragmatic process that doesn’t suit idealogues well: you almost always have to compromise to win change. Justice is possible, but you can’t get justice by simply having the best, rightest beliefs. You have to be willing to work in increments towards your goals.
2. People act in their own self-interest, and if you want to make change, you have to understand the self-interest of the people you want to organise. Community organising is built on conversations we call one-to-ones, where people talk about who they are and what they want. By understanding what people in a community want and how they see themselves, organisers and leaders can act in the interest of the community and also have the broad support of that community, because they are asking people to act in the direction of the change the community wants.
3. Broad changes require broad support, and broad support requires broad-based organising. On Wednesday, we took a coach to London to support an action on Parliament Square where community organisers, activists, and workers met together to call for the government to pay social care workers the real living wage in England. MPs came out to meet us and we had an assembly in Methodist Central Hall in Westminster with nearly 400 people. Looking around the assembly, you could get a sense of how diverse civil society is in the UK. Seeing broad-based community organising in action, and people come together in an organised way and demand change was incredibly inspiring. While we haven’t one this campaign yet, you can see how we get there, by growing the base of the movement through specific, targeted actions on the people whose minds we need to change. The more people we have standing with us, the easier it is to speak loudly enough to be heard.

This past weekend Citizens UK hosted 15 incredible young leaders for a day’s training about leadership at Aston University. The students were really incredible and did an excellent job of engaging with the content and thinking together about how to win change and strengthen institutions, the core focus of Citizens UK’s work. As a part of the training, I spoke about the importance of one-to-one conversations and why we think they’re so important in community organising, both to understand other people and to articulate our own values. One-to-one conversations are about building public relationships between people and to better understand the self-interest of people within a community or organisation or institution.

I have had many one-to-ones over the last year, as I’ve been working in Bartley Green to expand and develop our organising capacity here. I know what I’ve been doing in one way, but getting the chance to talk about it and teach it to a new group of people really impressed on me how you don’t ever really know anything for yourself until you teach it to someone else. Speaking about the power of one-to-ones I was able to say something I believe strongly but had never really articulated: that people in our lives will only be as vulnerable as we are. If we want to have meaningful relationships where people open up and share what’s important in their lives, we have to be willing to do the same ourselves and be willing to be vulnerable when other people are not. Everything is complicated by power structures, our own positions and how people see us, and whether people we interact with are interested in engaging with us. The starting point, however, always needs to be a willingness to who our own weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and that is easier said than done.

I’ve been really pleased this week to be involved with Citizens as we work on one of our key priorities: fighting for a real living wage for all workers. It’s been so inspiring to hear how this campaign has changed people’s lives in a positive way and so happy to hear about the progress that the campaign has made around the city.

For the first several months of this project, I have been meeting people, taking walks, having meetings, and doing anything I can to expand my contacts past the most obvious connections I had known before the project started. I have been keeping notes on my interactions with everyone I meet. These notes have been my memories of things that have happened, or things people have told me. As I read write them, I have been trying to hard to stay as ‘objective’ as possible; that is, I’m trying to avoid evaluative language or write things that veer off into my own interpretations. But of course, simply remembering is a kind of implicit analysis. You can’t remember everything and what you remember is inevitably a complex mix of your own identity, the identity of the person you’re talking to, and the context of the conversation.

I have not decided yet what role these notes will play in my analysis, if they will simply act as a reference for me, or if I will try to do some more formal analysis of them. For now, I am moving into the more formal interviews for the project, with recordings and transcripts to analyse. The informal conversations, however, will play an important role in how I think about the interviews that I will now do and the things that these interviews will inevitably focus on. I’m confident that these conversations have been essential for the next step and for building the necessary background for showing me where the project should focus and where the analysis is needed.

I spent the last three days at the Citizens UK three-day leadership training and really enjoyed it. Lots to think about in terms of what a leader is and how change happens within communities. This year, all training has been done online and it will be interesting to reflect on the effect of Covid on religious identity and superdiverse communities going forward.