Facilitating ‘Sacred’ Spaces for the Co-Creation of Environmental Justice Knowledge

Drawing from Tweed’s concept of sacred space as “differentiated, kinetic, interrelated, generated, and generative,” I explore how publicly engaged scholars create ‘sacred’ spaces as dynamic meeting grounds between communities and the classroom by bridging knowledge gaps between academic spaces and the public sphere (2014). With the aim of shedding light on marginalized experiences and knowledge, I investigate deliberative pedological practices (Blanchet & Deters 2023; Akin & Talisse 2014) employed in my own classroom as a way of facilitating this middle ground, set apart from the ‘mundane’, that exemplifies the complexities of the humanities in action. I discuss the roles faith-based guest lecturers and anonymous paper exchanges with incarcerated students. Such examples are rooted in community-level responses (religious and secular) and the reinvisioned co-creation of knowledge production through identification of environmental justice issues and the populations impacted by them.