Richard V. Kahn
Encyclopedia
Richard Kahn is Core Faculty in Education at Antioch University Los Angeles
Antioch University Los Angeles
Antioch University Los Angeles is a small private liberal arts school currently located in Culver City, California. The school is a campus of Antioch University.-Background:Antioch College was founded in 1852 in Yellow Springs, Ohio...

, where he specializes in ecopedagogy
Ecopedagogy
The ecopedagogy movement is an outgrowth of developments in critical pedagogy, a body of educational ideas and practices influenced by the philosopher, Paulo Freire...

, a form of education for sustainability. From 2007 through 2010, he was an Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Research at the University of North Dakota
University of North Dakota
The University of North Dakota is a public university in Grand Forks, North Dakota, USA. Established by the Dakota Territorial Assembly in 1883, six years before the establishment of the state of North Dakota, UND is the oldest and largest university in the state and enrolls over 14,000 students. ...

, where he conducted classes on the philosophy, history, and sociology of education, media and cultural studies, and ecoliteracy matters. During this time he served as the faculty advisor of Students for a Democratic Society
Students for a Democratic Society (2006 organization)
Students for a Democratic Society is a United States student organization representing left wing beliefs. It takes its name and inspiration from the original SDS of 1960-1969, then the largest radical student organization in US history...

, and mentored doctoral students in ecopedagogy and other forms of critical pedagogy. He is the author of Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement (2010), which was awarded the 2010 American Educational Studies Association Critics Choice Award, the just released Education Out of Bounds: Reimagining Cultural Studies for a Posthuman Age (2010), and the forthcoming Ecopedagogy: Educating for Sustainability in Schools and Society (2011). He also serves as the Editor for the open access journal, Green Theory & Praxis: The Journal of Ecopedagogy.

A critical theorist of education, Kahn is internationally recognized as a leading voice in the organization of the ecopedagogy movement. Drawing upon influences such as Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...

, Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich was an Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and "maverick social critic" of the institutions of contemporary western culture and their effects on the provenance and practice of education, medicine, work, energy use, transportation, and economic development.- Personal life...

, and Paulo Freire
Paulo Freire
Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was a Brazilian educator and influential theorist of critical pedagogy.-Biography:...

, as well as contemporary movements for radical politics and critical pedagogy
Critical pedagogy
Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education described by Henry Giroux as an "educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive...

, his work theorizes the need for education to critically engage with sociopolitical movements, particularly the animal and earth liberation movements that have been decried as "ecoterrorist" by United States and United Kingdom government authorities. In this context he has coined the concept of "zoöcide," a term (rhyming with "suicide") that is related to genocide and ecocide, but which goes beyond those ideas to speak about the manner in which contemporary capitalist society is expunging experiences of "zoë," a "multidimensional and multiplicitous realm of indestructible being" associated with sacred relationships to nature. A long-time vegan activist (actually: veganarchist
Veganarchism
Veganarchism or vegan anarchism, is the political philosophy of veganism and anarchism, creating a combined praxis that is designed to be a means for social revolution. This encompasses viewing the state as unnecessary and harmful to animals, both human and non-human, whilst practising a vegan...

) who coined the slogan "Don’t get mad, get vegan!", Kahn regularly works on behalf of animal, ecological and social justice causes.

Education

Kahn was born in White Plains, NY and raised in Westchester County, where he lived until attending Rutgers College, the New College of Florida
New College of Florida
New College of Florida is a public liberal arts college located in Sarasota, Florida. It was founded originally as a private institution and is now an autonomous honors college of the State University System of Florida.-History:...

, and Hobart College
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Hobart and William Smith Colleges, located in Geneva, New York, are together a liberal arts college offering Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Science and Master of Arts in Teaching degrees. In athletics, however, the two schools compete with separate teams, known as the Hobart Statesmen and the...

 in Geneva, NY for his undergraduate years. At Hobart College, he studied under the philosopher and semiotician Eugen Baer as well as the philosopher of history Marvin Bram. While a student, he was awarded the Sullivan Prize in Philosophy as the department’s most promising and top student during his tenure. After graduating Summa Cum Laude with a B.A. in Philosophy in 1993, Kahn enrolled as a graduate student in the Great Books program at St. John's College
St. John's College, U.S.
St. John's College is a liberal arts college with two U.S. campuses: one in Annapolis, Maryland and one in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Founded in 1696 as a preparatory school, King William's School, the school received a collegiate charter in 1784, making it one of the oldest institutions of higher...

 in Santa Fe, NM. Completing his M.A. in Liberal Studies, Kahn spent a year abroad in Hungary before returning to the United States in 1995. In 1999, he earned an M.A. in Education at Pepperdine University
Pepperdine University
Pepperdine University is an independent, private, medium-sized university affiliated with the Churches of Christ. The university's campus overlooking the Pacific Ocean in unincorporated Los Angeles County, California, United States, near Malibu, is the location for Seaver College, the School of...

 and then was enrolled briefly in the Philosophy, Cosmology & Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies
California Institute of Integral Studies
California Institute of Integral Studies is a private institution of higher education founded in 1968 and based in San Francisco, California. It currently operates in three locations just south of the Civic Center district...

 (CIIS) in San Francisco, where he worked with Brian Swimme
Brian Swimme
Brian Thomas Swimme is on the faculty of the California Institute of Integral Studies, in San Francisco, where he teaches evolutionary cosmology to graduate students in the humanities. He received his Ph.D. from the department of mathematics at the University of Oregon for work in singularity...

 and David Ulansey, amongst others. Seeking a more overtly politicized form of integral educational philosophy, he transferred to the Social Sciences and Comparative Education Division of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...

 in 2001 to work with the critical theorist Douglas Kellner
Douglas Kellner
Douglas Kellner is a “third generation” critical theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School. Kellner was an early theorist of the field of critical media literacy and has been a leading theorist of media culture generally...

. He obtained his PhD there in 2007. At UCLA, he also studied with noted theorists such as Peter McLaren
Peter McLaren
Peter McLaren is a Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles . He is the author and editor of forty-five books and hundreds of scholarly articles and chapters...

, Sandra Harding
Sandra Harding
Sandra G. Harding is an American philosopher of feminist and postcolonial theory, epistemology, research methodology and philosophy of science.She has contributed to standpoint theory and to the multicultural study of science...

 and Carlos Torres, worked as the Ecopedagogy Chair of the Paulo Freire Institute, UCLA, and taught for two years as a Teaching Fellow for the General Education Cluster theme, Global Environment: Multidisciplinary Perspectives.

Academic career

While Kahn’s early work at CIIS related to the indigenous politics, spirituality and pedagogy of entheogenic substances, particularly the botanical Salvia Divinorum
Salvia divinorum
Salvia divinorum is a psychoactive plant which can induce dissociative effects and is a potent producer of "visions" and other hallucinatory experiences...

, his work since that time has become more centrally concerned with theorizing oppositional social movement politics and developing a radical ecoliteracies curriculum known as Ecopedagogy
Ecopedagogy
The ecopedagogy movement is an outgrowth of developments in critical pedagogy, a body of educational ideas and practices influenced by the philosopher, Paulo Freire...

.

Kahn has published regularly with his mentor Douglas Kellner and their work on technopolitics and oppositional Internet cultures (e.g. technopolitical subcultures of bloggers, wikists, cell phone and PDA users) is widely cited as an early theory promoting the radically democratic possibilities, as well as challenges, of such innovative software and hardware. More recently Kahn and Kellner have extended their work to engage with the concept of technoliteracy, and they have argued for multiple, culturally-specific forms of technoliteracy over and against merely functional corporate and state forms of computer and information-communication technology literacies. Additionally, their work on resistance movements against corporate globalization has been included in The Blackwell Companion to Globalization and they have comparatively examined the critical views on educational technology held by Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich, the two philosophers that Kahn has remarked compose a kind of “Janus figure” of radical pedagogy. In 2009, he was elected Chair of the Ivan Illich Special Interest Group of the American Education Researchers Association. He also founded The International Journal of Illich Studies (ISSN 1948-4666).

With Levana Saxon, a former Education and Grassroots Action Director for Rainforest Action Network
Rainforest Action Network
Rainforest Action Network is an environmental organization based in San Francisco, California, USA. The organization was founded by Randy "Hurricane" Hayes and Mike Roselle in 1985, with the financial help of Fund for Wild Nature....

, Kahn has established the Ecopedagogy Association International in order to develop and promote the Ecopedagogy movement. As of 2008, the Association has served as the home of the journal, Green Theory & Praxis (ISSN 1941-0948). Kahn’s work in Ecopedagogy began with his critique of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the most widely known of educator Paulo Freire's works. It proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between teacher, student, and society...

, which posits a fundamental dichotomy between humans, as beings of freedom and self-reflective thought, and animals as creatures belonging to a perpetual non-emancipatory state of nature.

Beginning in 2003, he became a primary and founding member of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies, co-founded by the philosopher Steven Best
Steven Best
Steven Best is an American animal rights activist, author, talk-show host, and associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso...

, for which he served as a Director until July, 2009 when he resigned and left the organization (with Best) in order to found a more radical vision. Perhaps the high moment of his work there occurred after the arrest of 7 leading animal liberation activists who headed up the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty
Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty
Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty is an international animal rights campaign to close down Huntingdon Life Sciences , Europe's largest contract animal-testing laboratory. HLS tests medical and non-medical substances on around 75,000 animals every year, from rats to primates...

 (SHAC) campaign in the United States. Then, Best and Kahn released an essay in defense of the SHAC7 that theorized the counter-revolutionary nature of the increasingly corporate-state and predicted further activist repression such as has happened with the unfolding Green Scare
Green Scare
The Green Scare, alluding to the Red Scares periods of fear over communist infiltration of US society, is a term popularized by environmental activists to refer to legal action by the US government against the radical environmental movement....

 unless a wide variety of emancipatory groups could achieve solidarity and move beyond single-issue polemics in the name of a democratic society.

Kahn is also well known for his critical engagement with groups such as the Animal Liberation Front
Animal Liberation Front
The Animal Liberation Front is an international, underground leaderless resistance that engages in illegal direct action in pursuit of animal liberation...

 (ALF) and Earth Liberation Front
Earth Liberation Front
The Earth Liberation Front , also known as "Elves" or "The Elves", is the collective name for autonomous individuals or covert cells who, according to the ELF Press Office, use "economic sabotage and guerrilla warfare to stop the exploitation and destruction of the environment".The ELF was founded...

 (ELF), which he views as limited forms of militant pedagogical praxis against anthropogenically-induced planetary ecological catastrophe and the ongoing mass extinction of non-human animals. This idea was further developed in his doctoral dissertation entitled, The Ecopedagogy Movement: From Global Ecological Crisis to Cosmological, Technological, and Organizational Transformation in Education.

In 2008, his essay, "Towards Ecopedagogy: Weaving a Broad-based Pedagogy of Liberation for Animals, Nature and the Oppressed People of the Earth," was included in The Critical Pedagogy Reader (2nd. ed.). Another essay from this year, "From Education for Sustainable Development to Ecopedagogy: Sustaining Capitalism or Sustaining Life?," maps the differences between Education for Sustainable Development as a form of neoliberal socio-environmental pedagogy and ecopedagogy as a curricular project radically integrating technical, cultural, and critical literacies on behalf of sustainability and democracy. More recent essays have found him beginning to integrate ideas from multiculturalist, critical race, and feminist theorists in his work, such as the concepts of intersectionality, the epistemology of ignorance, and the animal standpoint, as well as the methodological approach of counter-storytelling. In other work, he has interrogated environmentalism and education for its individualist and consumerist focus and called instead for an ecopedagogy capable of understanding and opposing industrial capitalism's "treadmill of production" -- a concept he enlists from environmental sociology
Environmental sociology
Environmental sociology is typically defined as the sociological study of societal-environmental interactions, although this definition immediately presents the perhaps insolvable problem of separating human cultures from the rest of the environment...

.

In light of his many endeavors, Kahn was invited to deliver the University of North Dakota's annual Graduate Dean's Lecture in the Social Sciences and Humanities on March 9, 2010. His talk was entitled "Education as the Avatar of Sustainability?", which discussed how sustainability education is "a moral challenge that demands both personal and institutional transformation."

The imagery and spectacle of the movie Avatar additionally figure prominently in his most recent work. In his latest book with Tyson Lewis, Education Out of Bounds: Reimagining Cultural Studies in a Posthuman Age, they note that Avatar is the ultimate megaspectacular representation of what Kahn has theorized as "zoë." In the movie's depiction of a lush spiritual world of nature (i.e. Pandora), animated by a supraconsciousness (Eywa) that seeks to sustain itself through relationships predicated upon love and care, Kahn and Lewis argue that Avatar appears to be the most popular vehicle to date for an emerging cultural politics of "zoöphilia." Still, they conclude that the vision proffered by the film is extremely limited and even reactionary in scope. Instead, Kahn and Lewis gesture to a renewed and radical interpretation of St. Francis of Assisi as closer in spirit to the type of zoömorphic pedagogy for consciousness alternation that they believe is necessary for a truly sustainable society today. Further, in a 2010 essay published in Teacher Education Quarterly, entitled "Love Hurts: Ecopedagogy Between Avatars and Elegies," Kahn points out that the film appears to have worked at a sociological level as form of spectacular ritual by which audiences can consume sustainability and desublimate life-affirming instincts. Here, he muses upon the work of Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich was an Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and "maverick social critic" of the institutions of contemporary western culture and their effects on the provenance and practice of education, medicine, work, energy use, transportation, and economic development.- Personal life...

 and so concludes that sustainability educators today would do better to turn away from romantic narratives celebrating the need for heroes to overcome tragedy in order to take up an "elegiac pedagogy" of the disappearing commons that can teach people how to properly mourn and honor the mass number of beings now routinely and wrongfully committed to death.

In 2011, this message has also been a central concern of major Earth Week talks he has given at the Maharishi University of Management
Maharishi University of Management
Maharishi University of Management , formerly known as Maharishi International University, is a non-profit, American university, located in Fairfield, Iowa. It was founded in 1973 by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and features a "consciousness-based education" system that includes the practice of the...

 and Santa Monica College
Santa Monica College
Santa Monica College is a two-year, public, junior college located in Santa Monica, California.Santa Monica College was first opened in 1929 as Santa Monica Junior College. Current enrollment is over 30,000 students in more than 90 fields of study...

. In other speeches he continued to promote ecopedagogy internationally, such as in his invited talks for the University of Norway.

Selected works

  • Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement. Peter Lang, 2010. ISBN 9781433105456.
  • (with Tyson Lewis) Education Out of Bounds: Reimagining Cultural Studies for a Posthuman Age. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ISBN 0230622542.
  • Ecopedagogy: Educating for Sustainability in Schools and Society. Routledge, 2011. ISBN 0415803780.

See also

  • Ecopedagogy
    Ecopedagogy
    The ecopedagogy movement is an outgrowth of developments in critical pedagogy, a body of educational ideas and practices influenced by the philosopher, Paulo Freire...

  • Critical Animal Studies
    Critical animal studies
    Critical Animal Studies is a term increasingly used by a wide range of academic groups who variously link it to what is otherwise known as "Animal Studies" , "Human-Animal Studies" , or "Posthumanism." Yet, there are key differences in terms of the ideological and methodological approaches to...

  • Critical Pedagogy
    Critical pedagogy
    Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education described by Henry Giroux as an "educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive...

  • Critical Theory
    Critical theory
    Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...

  • Educational Theory
  • Cultural Studies
    Cultural studies
    Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its historical foundations, conflicts, and defining traits. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural...


External links

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