Richard V. Kahn

as of 2007.

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.

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. [Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, 2005, Oppositional Politics and the Internet: A Critical/Reconstructive Approach. "Cultural Politics", Vol 1. No. 1.] 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. [Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, 2006, Reconstructing Technoliteracy: A Multiple Literacies Approach. In "Defining Technological Literacy: Towards an Epistemological Framework", John Dakers (ed.), Palgrave.] Additionally, their work on resistance movements against corporate globalization has been included in "The Blackwell Companion to Globalization" [Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, 2007, Resisting Globalization. In "The Blackwell Companion to Globalization", George Ritzer (ed.), Blackwell.] 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. [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.]

With Levana Saxon, the Education Coordinator for Rainforest Action Network, Kahn has established the [http://ecopedagogy.org 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 [http://greentheoryandpraxis.org 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. [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.]

Beginning in 2003, he became a primary member of the [http://criticalanimalstudies.org 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. [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.]

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. [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.] 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).

External links

* [http://richardkahn.org Richard Kahn's Website]

ee also

*Critical Theory
*Educational Theory
*Critical Pedagogy
*Ecopedagogy
*Cultural Studies

References