This 4-hour workshop, Experiential Religious Studies Pedagogies for Flourishing Animal & Multispecies Futures, convenes instructors in religious studies—particularly those teaching animals and pluralist religion courses—to cultivate concrete, transferable pedagogical practices capable of creatively engaging the current state of multispecies destruction.
We aim to craft experiential, interactive, and reflective assignments that thread the needle between action and reflection while navigating embodied experience, tendencies among students for conflict avoidance, balancing empirical animal data with theoretical arguments, intersectional overlap with race, gender and species violence, and overlooked forms of knowing among more-than-human entities and marginal people.
Over four sessions, presenters/participants will frame a course, scaffold skills and trust-building, evaluate assignments, and draft their own embodied encounter-reflection assessment. Participants will leave a pedagogy packet of sample assignments, rubric elements, interactive techniques, and a new network of teaching colleagues committed to advancing experiential religious studies pedagogies for multispecies flourishing.