The Matter of Place in the Formation of Religious Leaders: A New Materialist Account of Regional Difference in Online Theological Education

This presentation takes a new materialist approach to exploring the particularities of matter that entwine around the task of online theological education across regional contexts. Crucially, it appropriates Tara Page's new materialist pedagogy of placemaking for digitally networked theological education–in dialogue with writings on theological formation by Charles Foster, Willie James Jennings, and Katherine Turpin, Etienne Wenger's social theory of learning in practice, and indigenous insights on Land-based pedagogy from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robin Wall Kimmerer. It argues for the construction of curriculum with the differential practical mattering of learners in the online environment as its starting place, inviting students to pay increasing attention to their peculiarities of place and practices of placemaking.