The seminar engages Black, queer, Indigenous, and feminist approaches to the study of religions, inquiring whether the contemporary university facilitates or stymies the pursuit of these critical approaches. Each of these papers examines collaborative pedagogies involving multiple stakeholders, from incarcerated citizens, to Indigenous groups and other community-based organizations focused on “bottom-up” knowledge production.
More science communication and top-down policies are not enough to confront the climate crisis, and on their own often leave marginalized communities behind. As such, new modes of information output, research approaches, and knowledge production are needed. One example of such an approach is in Southern California, where a research initiative called the Wildland-Urban Interface Climate Action Network (WUICAN) is attempting to meet the all-encompassing threat of climate change with a networked response that is collaborative, extensive, and attentive to centers of knowledge production. WUICAN is a consortium of Tribal leaders, community-based organizations, university researchers, and faith groups engaged in climate action that centers community needs and challenges hierarchical structures. By developing new models of co-governance, capacity building, and a focus on community-based research, this approach seeks bottom-up collaboration over top-down solutions. A critical component of this initiative is an Interfaith Climate Action Working Group, which I will explore in my discussion.
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.
This paper is a case study in community engaged learning in a course on religion and environmental justice taught by the author. It presents and critically analyzes a project carried out in collaboration with multiple stakeholders, including an Indigenous group, the university’s community engagement office, public school teachers, and an interdisciplinary environmental institute. Aiming to begin to fill a gap identified by the Ramapough Lunaape in New Jersey in conversation with the author, the class partnered with the Ramapough to produce curricular materials for New Jersey public school teachers on Native Americans, spirituality, relationship to sacred sites, and environmental justice. This case study describes and analyzes the project and derives several conclusions aimed at informing community engaged coursework in religion and the environment.