The public pedagogy of neighborhood Facebook communities: negotiating relations with urban coyotes

Abstract

Community and city Facebook pages have proliferated in popularity in the last several years, offering a forum for residents to openly and publicly negotiate relations with urban wildlife, including coyotes. Contemporary shifts in North American coyote geographies (and the concomitant rise in community social media sites) thus open up interesting possibilities for exploring how public pedagogies might challenge problematic human-nature and urban-wild binaries. We begin this article by articulating why studying urban coyotes is an important task for the field of environmental education. Next, we develop our nascent theoretical framework of interspecies public pedagogy, which draws on theories of public pedagogy and naturecultures. We follow by methodologically situating this research within diverse ethnographic approaches, which we use to study Facebook community pages in two U.S. cities, Philadelphia, PA and Chino/Chino Hills, CA. Our analysis demonstrates how the pedagogical strategies residents employ encourage debates about how their lives are entangled with coyotes, land, and other people, and yet are limited in that they do not completely redefine the role of public urban spaces. Before discussing the implications of this research, we briefly explore some possibilities for interspecies public pedagogies in real-life public spaces, as well as in cyberspace.

Keywords:

• Animal-focused education
• coyotes
• multispecies ethnography
• naturecultures
• public pedagogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We use the word “human” in this paper recognizing that it is a monolithic term and that there are a variety of human beings who relate to other animals in a diversity of ways. Our intent is not to essentialize all human beings, but to use the term in the context of the cities we study, which are both located in the US, a contemporary settler colonial nation-state built on a system of forced removal of Indigenous people and through chattel slavery.

2 Biesta relies heavily on Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière here. Due to length limitations, their work is not discussed.

3 According to 45 CFR 46.102(f) in the U.S., the social media sites we analyzed represent public (not private) data. Therefore, participant consent was implied.