Sacred materialities: transforming academic work through creative engagement with objects

This article proposes that engaging with posthuman spirituality can reveal new insights into how materiality generates meaning in academic workplaces. Posthuman theory can support an understanding of the materiality of meaningful academic work. This reframes spiritual engagement beyond anthropocentric doctrines, emphasising embodied and material entanglements with objects and environments. ‘Spiritual’ here refers to embodied, affective, and material entanglements within everyday academic spaces such as cherished books, meeting areas, digital collaboration forums, and other sites or artefacts treated with reverence and care. We creatively illustrate how attending to vital matter reconfigures academic workplaces as vibrant co-participants in spiritual meaning-making, enriching academics’ sense of purpose and belonging. Through post-qualitative inquiry, we explore how vital matter reconfigures academic workplaces by attending to the materiality of objects and spaces. These insights challenge neoliberal narratives of academic life, highlighting transformative possibilities of an inclusive, embodied spirituality that is inseparable from materiality.