What are Scholars For?
Negotiating Critical Analysis and Advocacy through Community-Engaged Research and Teaching
Keywords:
Public Humanities, Pedagogy, community engagement, religion and natureAbstract
Since the inception of the field, scholars of religion and nature have struggled to balance critical analysis and advocacy within their work. For some, the role of scholarship was to help promote the greening of religion and resolve the ecological crisis; while for others, such optimistic efforts bypassed critical analysis of the complex relationships between religions and environmental behaviors. Community-engaged approaches to scholarship and teaching offer useful avenues for negotiating this tension between advocacy and analysis. In this paper, I outline developments from the religion and nature field along with scholarship on community engaged research and teaching to suggest how educators and researchers can harness the privileged place of the contemporary university to better facilitate collaboration between stakeholders to both advance learning and address the specific needs of communities.
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