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the research encounter. Moreover, in keeping with the auto/biographic approach adopted for thisthesis, this is about my interpretation of events and how they influenced my learning journey,my career pathway, my professional standing and prompted me to take further auto/pedagogicactions.Clearly, therefore, there needs to be an explicit statement of the interpretive process. As shouldbe clear by now, a theme that flows through this thesis is dependent on my engagement with,knowledge, understanding and utilisation of the theological discourse. From the 1960s there hasbeen a very clear hermeneutic applied to theological processes which owes much, in theoreticalterms, to the insights of Foucault (1972), Derrida (e.g. 1992) and their analysis of contexts and‘scriptures’. In political terms, theological analysis of contexts and the pastoral circumstances ofbelievers, depend extensively on the work of Gustavo Gutierrez (b. 1928). His hermeneuticcircle has been influential all the way through my career and now forms a part of the analyticalmethodology of the data emerging from this study.An updated ‘Hermeneutic Circle’ (after Gutierrez, 1971)Figure 15: The Hermeneutic Circle156Simon Hughes Ph.D. Thesis (October 2012)