Attached as a .pdf is a draft of the third essay of my trilogy of summer work mixing forms of counterstorytelling and ecopedagogy. It is for a forthcoming book called Epistemologies of Ignorance and the Study of Limits in Education by Information Age Publishing.

As always, any comments are welcome and of course much appreciated.

No rush...

Richard

Marching Out From Ultima Thule: Critical Counterstories of Emancipatory Educators Working at the Intersection of Human Rights, Animal Rights, and Planetary Sustainability

Richard Kahn and Brandy Humes
 

I just finished a draft of the following essay, entitled Operation Get Fired: A Chronicle of the Academic Repression of Radical Environmentalist and Animal Rights Advocate-Scholars, that explores how the US academy is currently involved in making things difficult for scholars with radical interests in contemporary ecopolitics. As it has to do with the thematics of my blog and is connected to Freire's work, I would like to offer it here in advance of publication. Below is the intro and a link to the full piece as .pdf.

The news today is abuzz with Ted Kennedy's "heroic" feat of sailing his schooner in the annual weekend race event off of Nantucket Island and Martha's Vineyard called the Figawi Race Weekend. Such activity as this -- a bunch of New England yachtspersons spending the weekend in competitive racing and partying -- is of course easy fodder for class critique. But the real reason I am blogging is simply to let off some steam about the racist representations of the Figawi organization, the media's uncritical reporting on the same, and the longtime involvement of the DNC liberal elder statesman, Kennedy, in the organization.

Paulo Freire wrote that conflict is the midwife of consciousness. I would like to spend the next few blogs considering the meaning of political violence. In this first entry, I recount the tale of learning something about the ability of the nationally organized right-wing to lock down the terms of discourse in a small rural community in order to serve the larger political machinery.