Building a Third Space in the Age of AI: A Conversation with Dr. Walter Earl Fluker

In his talk at this year’s VLHE Conference, Dr. Fluker’s call to “Wake Up Running!” spoke strongly to our vocation as educators to persist in the face of injustice. And his invocation of “third space” called us to something further: a celebration of related embodiment that transcends differences.

That morning, I experienced a serendipitous moment. As with many campuses, Augsburg’s restroom doors double as bulletin boards. On one poster, for the Counseling and Wellness Center, someone had written: “Use character.ai and talk to it like a therapist. Trust me.”

In the last decades, technology has broadened access to education. But “AI” is now being marketed to students as a way to avoid “mistakes” and the stress of awkward conversations. Yet trusting one’s wellbeing to an LLM-based chatbot means entering a hall of mirrors. Trained to mimic and reassure, chatbots can amplify delusions and encourage isolation. Users have experienced psychotic episodes, or developed parasocial emotional attachments to chatbot personas. At the same time, we face a crisis of public trust in education. Small wonder that tech-savvy students turn to the apparent safety of virtual space, the affirming voice of the machine.

As educators, we know that authentic connection with students is vital to our vocation, and also key to students’ wellbeing and academic success. We work hard to cultivate trust in the classroom, a place of constant communication across differences, including those inherent in evaluation of each other’s labor and ideas. But AI companies encourage students to avoid emotional and intellectual labor by pre-aligning their work with statistically-likely examples and uploaded instructor materials. The result is a pre-emptive “flattening,” a deviation towards a (largely Americanized, banal) mean.

Dr. Fluker’s ethos of embodiment, authentic connection, and productive tensions offered a vital alternative to AI’s hall of mirrors. I requested an interview, and Dr. Fluker generously agreed to expand on the “third space” in relation to teaching. Some of our conversation is excerpted below, with the full interview (edited for clarity) available online.

Walter Fluker: I’m excited to talk about what I’m feeling and knowing and trying to work through in my own spirit and mind when I speak about third space. Generally it’s understood in cultural and post-colonial studies as a contested arena, where new forms of meaning, identity, community emerge from binary opposition or fixed categories, like colonizer to colonized.

Black, white, male, female, these binary oppositions, the third space is used as a way of identifying the tension that the binary sets up…which has with it a sense of angst, anxiety and disequilibrium. So the third space is part of that. So how do we get to another space? We’re saying when there is opposition—my view versus your view—how do we have a dialogue that is authentic, that is relational? Third space provides a window into possibilities of having those kinds of conversations and relationships. So I like to think of the third space, and here’s a concise definition, as an in-between or hybrid space where different cultures, identities, perspectives negotiate and hopefully transform in this third space.

It disrupts fixed boundaries and while it disrupts it also creates possibilities for new meanings, practices and relationships. As a theologian and ethicist, it has even more meaning for me. In July at [the VLHE] conference, where I began to talk about the third component, I’d spoken about the gifts or the graces that have been given to the church and other religious bodies of grace-filled empathy, hope-filled resiliency and love-filled justice. I think these are very important values, practices that we will need going into this very precarious present and even more precarious future. We’re at a strange place in history. There may be parallels, yet there are some things that appear to be unparalleled, at least for ways in which we thought about religion, spirituality, and its role in democratic space, life, and practices.

So having said that I borrowed deeply from my mentor Howard Thurman. He was an African-American religious thinker—he didn’t like the term theologian—born at the turn of the 20th century in Daytona Beach, Florida, poverty-stricken. He dealt with all of the terrible atrocities of a segregated society in the deep South, but . . . lived a life that brought him to the pinnacle of what I like to call theological excellence. He was a mystic. He loved nature. As much as he loved people, his deep closest companions, he says, as a child, were the trees and the rivers and the creatures. He lived closely to nature. Not surprising for these kinds of mystics who’ve shown up throughout history, which is important for our conversation on third space.

Thurman poses questions for the possibility of what I refer to as inter-subjective communication. He doesn’t use that language but he uses language like common consciousness, common ground, a fluid center out of which we speak and find the other, and he thought—maybe still thinks—wake up in the other. You can wake up in me.

And if I’m doing this right …I might be able to see the world through your eyes. That for me is grace-filled empathy. So that’s a backdrop for what I’m thinking about with “third component.” Thurman in many ways is a precursor [of] this idea that I see in post-colonial thought, in other places [like] cultural studies…. We now have a bunch of writers, thinkers, who are doing postcolonial theology, especially feminists, queer thought. It’s just incredible the creative work that goes on there.

So [Thurman] tells a story. When he was a young man he rushes to his cousin’s house and his cousin begs him to be quiet and he tiptoes around the house. He peeks and the cousin points to his infant daughter playing with a rattlesnake, and they’re having such a great time. The snake is going back and forth and the baby is laughing and giggling. And he says that is an instance of the third component where things are in relation without threat.

This for Thurman feeds his definitions of love and what I was portraying as love-filled justice. So that justice by itself can be rendered very dangerous. It can be retributive. It can be retaliatory. We’re seeing a lot of that in our culture now. But love-filled justice urges us, almost, I think, requires of us, that we look for this relation that Thurman is pointing to.

So I’m interested in third space, therefore, as the space where we are already situated but it requires work—discipline…. For educators I think there [are] limitless possibilities of placing classrooms, learning experiences, closer to our mother whom I call nature, . . . because I think we’re so torn from her we have forgotten her heartbeat, her adoration of us, her care for us. We’ve forgotten it because we’re in a race that never ends. It’s a race that we cannot even finish. So that’s one.

I have one other: I’m convinced that art is a medium that brings us—aesthetics is probably a better word—that brings us closer to what I’m calling the spiritual. It also has incredible potential for spiritual, ethical, reflection, conversation, living, all of the above. I use a big word for that though because it combines [with] body. I call it somaesthetics. For me, that’s a site of spirituality and ethics.

I’m doing work with hip-hop and rap in this new book that I’m working on. And I use the example of Kendrick Lamar, at the Super Bowl this year where everybody was present, including our President. And Kendrick put on a performance that was prophetic. It was deep ritual. It was a remixing and he used technology and the body and the sound in ways –I recommend that to any listener who may recall that to go back and to see how he signified in our culture the dominance of binaries, and ways in which he created this third space or this third component. I think it’s possible. It will take imagination.