Living and Learning: To Be Within or Without of the Study

Earlier this spring I attended a session of the Collegium Institute’s Faith and Reason discussions titled, “The Beloved Community: Towards an Understanding of the Body of Christ in the World.” with guest speaker Dr. Chaz Howard.  The discussion was meaningful and vibrant as we dived into topics such as fraternity in humanity and how we can love others and ourselves in whatever position we are currently in. All the fellows who attended this chat were then gifted Dr. Howard’s newest book, The Bottom: A Theopoetic of the Streets. It documents his experience, literally and in figurative prose, of living on the streets and then becoming an activist for the homeless to document his findings and formulate this theology. His tactic of learning and living within the subject of the study is what surprised me, and I was unusually surprised that I was surprised.

We are often told in academia and arguments of higher learning to speak objectively. What does the data demonstrate? How are your biases skewing the analysis and findings? Yet Dr. Howard decided to enter the streets when questioned by a student, “How can someone write about the bottom when they have not been there?” Studies on societal topics such as homelessness are typically performed by polling or compilations of survey data, but this was a lived experience and it shocked me that a university professor would conduct a study this way. Why was it hard for me to accept a lived experience as a credible demonstration of reality?

From the academic perspective, anecdotes of individuals may lie at the margins of an aggregate population and misrepresent what experiences are most common, but these outliers are nonetheless observed. They are real. There are merits to both being separate from a study’s data as well as diving in. Perhaps we may achieve more by utilizing both perspectives. Social sciences take human experiences as measurements that may be difficult to put into words, but simply studying metrics or data of a given population does not demonstrate the real impacts it has on those lives. We must remember that a true level of learning arises from being within the study and living it rather than just being without in the name of objectivity.

Let us then recall the stories that lie within the data. The numbers that we are presented with may change, but they are lifeless. The people that are affected matter, and their voices deserve to be heard within a democratic society. Encourage social scientists to include the anecdotes, describe what lies at the margins of any population, and provide a holistic narrative for future understanding and academic studies. How we better people’s lives is the constant subject of debate, but our mutual goal is still to make others and the world better off. This service only comes with the exigency, direction, and reality it requires when we remember the humanity within the debate.