A feminist posthumanist ecopedagogy in/for/with animalScapes

ABSTRACT

Extending and challenging Arun Appadurai's anthropocentric “scapes,” this article converses with feminist posthumanism, ecofeminism, and the political ecology of education to develop a more-than-human ecopedagogy in/for/with animalScapes. After outlining the article's theoretical framework, I briefly discuss the research cases informing ecopedagogies in/for/with animalScapes, each of which attends to embodiment, affect, and emotion, as well as the salience of political ecological/economic contexts. To conclude, I discuss the empirical and conceptual/theoretical limitations of this ecopedagogy, tentatively exploring how some of these limitations might be partially surpassed in practice, as well as in environmental education research tasking itself with decentering the human.

KEYWORDS:

• animals
• ecopedagogy
• feminism
• political ecology
• posthumanism
• scapes

Notes

1. I use “in/for/with” animalScapes to highlight how ecopedagogies are enacted in animalScapes, as well as with a multiplicity of human and nonhuman others. Following C. L. Russell and Bell (1996), the word “for” suggests that teaching is a political act, whereas “with” denotes the attempt to foster deep connections in animalScapes. Further, “with” also decenters the educator by acknowledging that teaching is not a solitary act, but rather occurs with many other agentic entities. I also use the terms “more-than-human” and “nonhuman” synonymously here, recognizing that each is contested, albeit for different reasons.

2. I use the term “entity” here instead of “things,” which denotes objectness and “persons,” which tends to center human beings.

3. This conceptual framework is indebted to the scholarship of ecofeminist, Josephine Donovan (2006).

4. Erika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden (2015) emphasize that although there are unifying precepts uniting all posthumanisms (e.g., reactions against anthropocentrism or humanism), it is important to consider the diversity in posthumanist thought. The ecofeminist and feminist posthumanist lenses invoked in this article bring an explicitly critical perspective to posthumanism that addresses entities' differential power relationships, which are not included in the “distributed agency” of Jane Bennett's vitalism and the flat ontology of Bruno Latour's “hybridity”.” Also see Lloro-Bidart (2017c) for a discussion of these theories.

5. Ange Marie Hancock (2016) emphasizes that intersectional-like thought dates back to the 1800s, with the writings of activists like Maria Miller Stewart (1830) and Harriet Jacobs’ (1860) slave narratives. She also highlights the activism and scholarship of multiracial feminists who made important contributions to intersectionality.

6. For a more extended discussion of intersectionality and the environment, see Lloro-Bidart and Finewood (2018).

7. “Danny's Farm” is the petting farm on the Cal Poly, Pomona campus, which is one of four California State University campuses with Colleges of Agriculture (http://dannysfarm.org/). Students can also visit petting farms in their local communities.

8. In a follow-up interview two months later, Lisa confirmed that she was still vegetarian and that it was the course that inspired her to make this change. Although her family members participate in dog rescue, Lisa and her sister are the only ones who make connections between the dogs they rescue and the farm animals whom most people eat.

9. An extensive research literature debates the differences between affect and emotion, which there is not space to discuss here. See, for example, Vicki Kirby and Elizabeth Wilson (2011).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and University of California, Riverside.