Richard V. Kahn

See: http://richardkahn.org

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Richard Kahn (born October 29, 1969) is Core Faculty in Education at Antioch University Los Angeles. His research specializes in theorizing and promoting ecopedagogy, a radical 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, where he conducted classes on the philosophy, history, and sociology of education, media and cultural studies, and ecoliteracy matters.[1] During this time he served as the faculty advisor of Students for a Democratic Society, 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) and the forthcoming books Ecopedagogy: Educating for Sustainability in Schools and Society (2010), Education Out of Bounds: Reimagining Cultural Studies for a Posthuman Age (2010), and 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.[2] Drawing upon influences such as Herbert Marcuse, Ivan Illich, and Paulo Freire, as well as contemporary movements for radical politics and critical pedagogy, 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.[3] 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.[4] A long-time vegan activist who coined the slogan "Don't get mad, get vegan!", Kahn regularly works on behalf of animal, ecological and social justice causes.[5]

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, and Hobart College 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 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 and then was enrolled briefly in the Philosophy, Cosmology & Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco, where he worked with Brian Swimme 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 in 2001 to work with the critical theorist Douglas Kellner. He obtained his PhD there in 2007. At UCLA, he also studied with noted theorists such as Peter McLaren, Sandra Harding 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, 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.

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.[6] 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.[7] Additionally, their work on resistance movements against corporate globalization has been included in The Blackwell Companion to Globalization[8] 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.[9] 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, 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, 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.[10]

Beginning in 2003, he became a primary and founding member of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies, co-founded by the philosopher Steven Best, 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.[11] 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 (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 unless a wide variety of emancipatory groups could achieve solidarity and move beyond single-issue polemics in the name of a democratic society.[12]

Kahn is also well known for his critical engagement with groups such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and Earth Liberation Front (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.[13] 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.[14]

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.[15] 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.[16][17][18] 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.[19]

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."[20]

References

1. ^ Richard Kahn, University of North Dakota, accessed November 19, 2009.

2. ^ This can be documented by the supporting references from a wide range of international figures for his recent book on the Ecopedagogy Movement, such as Moacir Gadotti (Director of the Instituto Paulo Freire in Sao Paulo, Brazil), Edmund O'Sullivan (Emeritus Professor of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Canada), Peter McLaren, Madhu Suri Prakash, Bill Ayers, and many others. Numerous international scholars serve on the board of Kahn's Ecopedagogy Association and support the Green Theory & Praxis Journal as editors, board members, authors, and readers. Further, his inclusion on the cover of The Critical Pedagogy Reader, next to major scholars in the field such as bell hooks, serves as evidence that his work in ecopedagogy is widely accepted as leading.

3. ^ On the relationship between the US/UK governments and "ecoterror" charges, see for instance, Goodman, Jared S. (2008). "Shielding Corporate Interests From Public Dissent: An Examination of the Undesirability and Unconstitutionality of 'Eco-Terrorism' Legislation," Journal of Law and Policy Vol. 16; or Best, Steven (2007). "The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act: New, Improved, and ACLU Approved," The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 3, No. 3.

4. ^ Kahn, Richard (2005). "Radical Ecology, Repressive Tolerance and Zoöcide," in Best, Steven and Nocella, Anthony (eds.) Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth, AK Press.

5. ^ Iacobbo, Karen and Iacobbo, Michael (2006). Vegetarians and Vegans in America Today, Greenwood Publishing, p. 97.

6. ^ Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, 2005, Oppositional Politics and the Internet: A Critical/Reconstructive Approach. Cultural Politics, Vol 1. No. 1.

7. ^ Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, 2006, Reconstructing Technoliteracy: A Multiple Literacies Approach. In Defining Technological Literacy: Towards an Epistemological Framework, John Dakers (ed.), Palgrave.

8. ^ Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, 2007, Resisting Globalization. In The Blackwell Companion to Globalization, George Ritzer (ed.), Blackwell.

9. ^ Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, 2007, Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich: Technology, Politics and the Reconstruction of Education. Policy Futures in Education, Vol. 5, No. 4.

10. ^ Richard Kahn, 2003, Paulo Freire and Eco-Justice: Updating Pedagogy of the Oppressed for the Age of Ecological Calamity. Freire Online Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1.

11. ^ In this respect his numerous writings to date theorizing Critical Animal Studies should not necessarily be confused with what others often claim is representative of the field.

12. ^ Steven Best and Richard Kahn, Trial By Fire: The SHAC7, Globalization and the Future of Democracy. Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2.

13. ^ Richard Kahn, 2006, The Educative Potential of Ecological Militancy in an Age of Big Oil: Towards a Marcusean Ecopedagogy. Policy Futures in Education, Vol. 4, No. 1.

14. ^ (2007; committee: Douglas Kellner (chair), Peter McLaren, and Steven Best). An updated version is set to be released as Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement (Peter Lang Publishers, 2010).

15. ^ Richard Kahn, 2008, From Education for Sustainable Development to Ecopedagogy: Sustaining Capitalism or Sustaining Life? Green Theory & Praxis: The Journal of Ecopedagogy, Vol. 4, No. 1.

16. ^ Richard Kahn and Brandy Humes, 2009, Marching Out From Ultima Thule: Critical Counterstories of Emancipatory Educators Working at the Intersection of Human Rights, Animal Rights, and Planetary Sustainability. The Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, Vol. 14, No. 1.

17. ^ Richard Kahn, 2009, Towards an Animal Standpoint: Vegan Education and the Epistemology of Ignorance. In E. Malewski and N. Jaramillo (eds.), Epistemologies of Ignorance and the Studies of Limits in Education (Information Age Publishing).

18. ^ Richard Kahn, 2009, Operation Get Fired: A Chronicle of the Academic Repression of Radical Environmentalist and Animal Rights Advocate-Scholars. In A. Nocella, S. Best, and P. McLaren (eds.), Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic-Industrial Complex (AK Press).

19. ^ Richard Kahn, 2009, Producing Crisis: Green Consumerism as an Ecopedagogical Issue. In J. Sandlin and P. McLaren (eds.), Critical Pedagogies of Consumption, (Routledge).

20. ^ See http://www2.und.edu/our/news/story.php?id=2953.