A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement follows a fifth-century rule for common life into the memories of the community that hears it read aloud every week.
Twenty-three sisters of one Augustinian community, and the parts of their Rule they can say by heart
Fifteen centuries is a long way for a pathway to run. We were grateful to be allowed to walk a very small stretch of it, one weekly reading at a time.
— Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas
With that, Dr Sten Okwuosa introduces As in a Mirror, a new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement written with Dr Anouk Mensah and Ms Sunniva Balogun. The poster takes the Atlas’s long-standing interest in where a text goes after it leaves its author and carries it further back than the University has gone before: to the Rule of Augustine, which asks to be read aloud to its community once a week.
Working alongside the sisters of one Augustinian community, the team invited each member to recall the Rule chapter by chapter, then mapped what the weekly reading has laid down across a whole community’s span of years. The result is a careful, finely grained picture of a text held in common: some of it kept word for word, some of it carried instead in the daily rhythm of the house.
The study sits comfortably within the School’s commitment to the long view of improvement, in which a practice repeated faithfully over decades is treated as a source of understanding in its own right.
“The community were generous hosts,” said Dr Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities. “I hope we left the Rule in no worse order than we found it.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.16qurl.