In one of those unexplainable lateral leaps through curiosity-inducing links on the web, I found myself at the website of a former teacher, Paul Rabinow (Anthropology, UC Berkeley). He has, together with a few colleagues, formed the Antropology of the Contemporary Research Collabratory (ARC). They describe it this way:
"ARC is a collaboratory in the human sciences. Its aim is to develop techniques of collaboration, modes of communication, and tools of inquiry appropriate to an anthropology of the contemporary."
The image they've chosen on the top of their website shows a traditional science lab with an ocean teeming with life pouring in through the door. Whatever they meant with this picture, one key is the effort to collapse the distance between the experimental research in the lab and the complexity of life just outside. Yet the picture of a typical natural sciences lab belies the intention to be a quite different sort of laboratory that the typical science lab.
An important statement of their idea is the working paper: "What is a laboratory in the Human Sciences?"
Concerns that brought them to found this lab include:
1. Dissatisfaction with the model of the "individual project" that assumes that interpretive and authorial virtuosity is the mainspring of good work.
2. Interest in how the context of a laboratory could encourage active thinking about the nature of collaborative work, originality, authorship, and about the collective tasks such as concept building to what seem to be individual tasks such as ethnographic fieldwork or focused historical research. But this also means that new ways of thinking about how knowledge is generated and how credit is given are needed.
3. The laboratory, they think, can more fully recognize the diffuse character of authorship as it is formed through conversations, borrowed concepts, and exposure to the work of scholars working on related topics. In the laboratory setting, authorship is a "problem" because, as compared to the usual academic conference and its 'collected' work, the laboratory creates 'collective' work.
4. It follows, then, that the laboratory setting focuses on concept formation, on the experiment, on the question, and through such common work in experimentation and knowledge building it is depersonalizing rather than emphasizing the virtues and talents of an individual author.
I place this really exciting development in relation to work I've been involved with over the last five years working to contribute to the restructuring of Practical Theology (one result of our common work is the volume For Life Abundant). One of the key issues arising from our common work is to highlight the telos to academic work in practical theology that drives from research to ministry to discipleship to the life of the world. All our academic work in practical theology is, so to speak, for life abundant. Dorothy Bass, who led this seminar, and has done similar seminars over the last 10 years, has really emphasized collaborative seminar-based work, but the results in the end are still of the 'collected' sort, not really able to recognize the fullness of the 'collective' nature of what we've done, even if we've stretched the 'collected' sort very far towards the 'collective' in this new book.
It seems that the potential for a laboratory in practical theology would offer the same sorts of benefits Rabinow and his colleagues suggest, but it would also, within practical theology, give a common focus to the usually disparate work of those working in various sub-areas: preaching, pastoral care, youth and family ministry, congregational leadership, mission, worship, education, social ethics, and so on. The lab would join our work around at least 1) common conversation about problems to address, e.g. living in a secular age, pop culture and the media explosion, the climate crisis, terror and security, globalization, etc; 2) common conversation about concept formation and methods for gaining insight; 3) more integrated and multi-faceted proposals for faithful engagement of such problems; 4) a more realistic space for training students since the issues in life and ministry are confronted as wholes, not as, say, discrete problems for preaching or leadership.
Well, lots more for conversation here, but I've been leaning this direction for a very long time, and feel like this model at ARC is pushing me off the fence to really seek to make something like this work.
anon and peace,
Chris
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