Total Liberation

Veganism as an ethics and a practice has a recorded history dating back to Antiquity. Yet, it is only recently that researchers have begun the process of formalising the study of veganism. Scholars who examine this theory and action are usually situated in sociology, history, philosophy, cultural studies or critical animal studies. The centrality and contested nature of place in the actions and discourse of animal rights activists however suggest an inherently spatial praxis. Slaughterhouses are deliberately closed and placed out of the sight; our familiar urban environment is filled with references to eating meat and exploiting animals, although normalised and rendered invisible. On the other hand, activists take to the street to defend animal rights and invite individuals to change their perception on everyday places and practices of animal violence. Animal liberation and veganism therefore embody an inherently spatial praxis – the desire to live without places of violence (White, 2015). As underlined by Harper (2010:5-6), ‘veganism is not just about the abstinence of animal consumption; it is about the ongoing struggle to produce socio-spatial epistemologies of consumption that lead to cultural and spatial change’. While an interest in domination over non-human animals has gained momentum within critical geography circles in the last two decades (Wolch and Emel, 1995; Philo and Wilbert, 2000; Emel et al., 2002, Gillespie and Collards, 2015; White, 2015), the scarcity of available literature highlights the need for geographers to further reflect on vegan activism and practice. As scholars-activists identifying with veganism, we seek to underscore what geographers can contribute to our understanding of critical veganism and vegan praxis.

In Education Out of Bounds, Lewis and Kahn argue for a new critical theory of the monster as an imaginary "other" on the margins of the human and the animal. Through a unique combination of critical, posthumanist, and educational theories, the authors engage in a surreal journey into how social movements are renegotiating the boundaries of community through expressions of posthuman love. Their cultural studies experiments both extend and challenge the critical theories of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Paulo Freire, and others concerned with questions of teaching and learning beyond the global cultural logic of capitalism. Part philosophy of imagination, part political theory, and part pedagogical critique, this book is a twenty-first century bestiary--a catalog to navigate the monstrous world in which we live.

CONTENTS

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction
These Monstrous Times: From Bestiary to
Posthumanist Pedagogy 1
Intermezzo
Marxism and the Bestiary 17
1  Victor, The Wild Child: Humanist Pedagogy and
the Anthropological Machine 41
2  The Reptoid Hypothesis: Exopedagogy
and the UFOther 73
3  Faery Faiths: Altermodernity and the Divine
Violence of Exopedagogy 101
Conclusion
A Monstrous Love Affair:
The Ethics of Exopedagogy 129
Notes  151
Bibliography 165
Index 179

From the inside flap:

The Boarman

This guy's no tame pig.
No even-toed ungulate or woodsy
grubber, he's the spear-skinned
hound, the boar-dog root and thistle
who kills the young and carries
mourning, hung cross a stick.
He looks at you and his Neptune
eye is a bent spoon of absinthe,
a gilled shadow that sees--then,
whorls ear and pupil into one. His
fossil jaw is the mollusk-dyed shade
of Tyrian emperor, ornate bruise pig-
ment, violet and feathered grackle.
The swine's got snout. He's all
beetle root and bone, horned with
the forest beard, a spiral of moth bristle,
victim of the crimson hog typhoid.
When he sleeps, tonight, in his bed
or sty, listen for the human moan
of dream, a purred sorrow, wet air
loosed from fang lock.
--Anne Keefe

From the Back Cover

"By engaging an encyclopedic range of figures from the philosophical tradition and popular culture, Lewis and Kahn lead us on a fascinating journey to discover the monsters that populate our posthuman world. We are confronted by horrible and fearsome beasts of violence, exploitation, and destruction, but we also recognize ourselves in creative monsters that blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman life. Most impressively, Lewis and Kahn propose paths to train the monsters of our world, a monstrous education, a pedagogy for the beautiful monsters we can become."
--Michael Hardt, co-author of Commonwealth

"Our cultural fascinations with the monstrous and its omnipresence in our contemporary Western imaginings play center-stage in this provocative exploration of a zoöphilic exopedagogy. From the feral, to the alien, to the faery, Tyson Lewis and Richard Kahn put pressure on our affective comfort zones by asking us what it means to love the monstrous amidst and within us. The answer comes through their theoretically vast and conceptually rich exploration of a radical democratic pedagogy of the unrepresentable."
--Davide Panagia, Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies, Trent University, Co-Editor of Theory and Event, and author of The Political Life of Sensation

About the Authors

Tyson E. Lewis is an Assistant Professor of Educational Philosophy at Montclair State University. He is the co-editor of Marcuse's Challenge to Education (2008), and his articles have appeared in journals such as Rethinking Marxism, Culture, Theory, & Critique and Educational Theory. He is also author of a forthcoming book on aesthetics and education.

Richard Kahn is the author of Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement (Peter Lang, 2010), as well as of the forthcoming, Ecopedagogy: Educating for Sustainability in Schools and Society (Routledge, 2011); and he is the Founding Editor of Green Theory & Praxis: The Journal of Ecopedagogy. His work has been collected in a wide variety of books and journals, including The Critical Pedagogy Reader (2nd edition); The Blackwell Companion to Globalization; and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. He is Core Faculty in Education at Antioch University Los Angeles. For more information about him and an archive of many of his writings, visit: richardkahn.org."