A Hermeneutics of Love for Community-Based, Participatory Action Research

Abstract

This article presents a broad humanistic-existential framework in support of community-orientated, participatory action research. Beginning with Pink Floyd’s The Wall as a pedagogic illustration of the aporia of community, three dispositions are offered for the community researcher: communitas, allopathy, and munificence. Each disposition is shown to be supported by particular shared burdens (hospitality, alterity, finitude, and supplementarity) within existence. From this theoretical framework, a model is provided for what is designated as a hermeneutics of love as a research practice in communities.

Extreme States and Extreme Conditions: On Homelessness and the Ontico-ontological Difference

“…Moreover, the homeless woman’s caution to passersby and Charles’ generosity with his fellow patients are examples of Dasein as Mitsein—as being with , standing in solidarity with or accompanying (Watkins, 2015) others in extreme conditions. Far from being solipsistic activities, these actions demonstrate the engaged hospitality of communitas (McInerney, 2016).…”

Presenting an existential foundation for community-based research using Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar.

“…Jean-Luc Nancy (1991) suggests "Death is indissociable from community, for it is through death that the community reveals itself" (p. 14). What Nancy shows is that death invigorates us to come together and make meaning of our lives, for it is our finite incompleteness and knowledge of our mortality that we share as a relational burden of existence (see also McInerney, 2016). For Nancy, we can have no "operative," ideal community to trust (Young, 1990), and instead, our common-being lies in the facticity of being singular, finite beings.…”

“…My (Bob McInerney) recent interests have been in establishing an existential-humanistic foundation within community psychology (Goss & McInerney, 2016; McInerney, 2016). I teach a course on this foundation and add poststructural concepts that provide a basis for community research and intervention.…”

“…If community is understood as a momentary calling, vulnerability, and obligation, this communal experience is facilitated by our willingness to be provisional in our response and tentative in our self-assuredness. Our focus below is to expand upon a research practice that mirrors communitas (see McInerney, 2016). We seek a place to stand in order to intervene with and on behalf of others while concurrently embracing a liminal self on the breach of knowing and not knowing just what to do.…”

Student Activism in the Neoliberal University: A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Analysis

“…In general, the field prioritizes interventions that address both the individual and the various contexts in which they live and work (Vera & Speight, 2003). In this vein, humanistic psychologists have recently contributed to the development of community action research methods that are “inherently activistic” (Goss & McInerney, 2016, p. 287; McInerney, 2016), theory on the practice of influential activists and movements (Selig, 2016), a philosophical grounding for social ethics (Robbins, 2016), a vision for possible socially just futures and a “good” society (Cooper, 2016), phenomenological research on social justice identity development (Dollarhide, Clevenger, Dogan, & Edwards, 2016), and connections between humanism and critical and queer theory (Goodrich, Luke, & Smith, 2016). In an analysis of the Black Lives Matter protest movement, Hoffman, Granger, Vallejos, and Moats (2016) argue,When the existential nature of social justice issues and the protest movements are better understood, the understanding of these movements deepen while concurrently demonstrating that within existential–humanistic psychology, we should be committed to engaging these issues.…”