Richard V. Kahn

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Richard Kahn
Richard Kahn

Richard Kahn (b. October, 29, 1969) is a critical theorist of education who is internationally recognized as a leading voice in the development of the Ecopedagogy movement. Drawing upon influences such as Herbert Marcuse, Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire, as well as contemporary movements for radical politics and critical pedagogy, he is well-known for theorizing the need for education to critically engage with sociopolitical movements – particularly the animal and earth liberation movements presently decried as “ecoterrorist” by United States and United Kingdom governmental 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.[1] 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. He is an Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Research at the University of North Dakota as of 2007.


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[edit] Background

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. Kahn became increasingly dissatisfied with the uncritical spirituality of the Institute and hence 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. 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.

[edit] 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 philosophy of education 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.[2] 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.[3] Additionally, their work on resistance movements against corporate globalization has been included in The Blackwell Companion to Globalization[4] 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.[5]

With Levana Saxon, the Education Coordinator 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, for which Kahn serves as Executive Editor. 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.[6]

Beginning in 2003, he became a primary member of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies, co-founded by the philosopher Steven Best, for which he serves as organizational Secretary. After the arrest of 7 leading animal liberation activists who headed up the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) campaign in the United States, 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.[7]

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.[8] 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 (2007; committee: Douglas Kellner (chair), Peter McLaren, and Steven Best).

[edit] External links

Richard Kahn's Website

[edit] See Also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Richard Kahn, 2005, Radical Ecology, Repressive Tolerance and Zoöcide. In Steven Best and Anthony Nocella (eds.), Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth, AK Press.
  2. ^ Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, 2005, Oppositional Politics and the Internet: A Critical/ Reconstructive Approach. Cultural Politics, Vol 1. No. 1.
  3. ^ Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, 2006, Reconstructing Technoliteracy: A Multiple Literacies Approach. In Defining Technological Literacy: Towards an Epistemological Framework, John Dakers (ed.), Palgrave.
  4. ^ Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, 2007, Resisting Globalization. In The Blackwell Companion to Globalization, George Ritzer (ed.), Blackwell.
  5. ^ 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.
  6. ^ 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.
  7. ^ 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.
  8. ^ 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.