Education Commons^™

A Newcomer's Guide To Kabbalah, Ernest M. Oleksy

The Downtown Review

Kabbalah is a mystical and highly spiritual form of Judaism. Popularized by its endorsement by high-profile celebrities like Madonna, the average layperson knows enough about Kabbalah to recognize it as a vaguely familiar term, but not much else. This article strives to serve as an entry-point for both an intellectual and a popular audience to help familiarize readers with core components of Kabbalah and to help to begin fostering an appreciation for this very sophisticated faith. Matters of history, philosophy, science, doctrine, and more pertaining to Kabbalah will be discussed in this article

Should Deliberative Democratic Inclusion Extend To Children?, Christopher Martin

Democracy and Education

To what extent should the child’s point of view be included when a political community endeavors to make just decisions, and why? Democrats are committed to a principle of political inclusion grounded in equal respect for persons. Yet we regularly deny children the right to vote and we often just assume that the citizens doing the hard work of democratic deliberation are adults. As I will show, electoral conceptions of democracy can plausibly reconcile this tension in a way that requires no serious adjustment to the principle of inclusion. However, I also argue that a similar reconciliation seems unavailable to …

The [Not So] Hidden Curriculum Of The Legalist State In The Book Of Lord Shang And The Han-Fei-Zi, Brandon R. King

Comparative Philosophy

This paper loosely draws some parallels between the experience of a subject in a so-called “Legalist” state with that of a contemporary student in Western schooling today. I explore how governance in the Book of Lord Shang and the Hanfeizi can be interpreted as pedagogy. Defining pedagogy in a relatively broad sense, I investigate the rationalizations for the existence of the state, the application of state mechanisms, and even the concentration of the ruler’s power all teach subjects habits, attitudes, and sensibilities in a similar fashion to what Philip Jackson called the “hidden curriculum”. Through his framework of “crowds, praise, …

What We Have Heard And Know, David Carscaddon, Laura Carscaddon

Journal of Counseling and Psychology

The following was the commencement address given at the May 12, 2018 afternoon graduation ceremony at Gardner-Webb University. Following a discussion on the essence of what a university is, the address focused on the purpose of obtaining a university education and its relationship to the university motto, Pro Deo et Humanitate.

A Blend Of Absurdism And Humanism: Defending Kurt Vonnegut’S Place In The Secondary Setting, Krisandra R. Johnson

Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research

This essay argues that Kurt Vonnegut blends a unique humanist stance into his absurdist plots and characters, ultimately urging readers to confront the absurd with a kindness and human decency his protagonists often find rare. As a result of this absurd and humanist synthesis, I defend and promote Vonnegut’s place in the secondary English curriculum, despite his rank on many banned books lists, since his characters’ journeys correlate thematically with the growth and process of postmodern adolescents and encourage moral responsibility without sentimental manipulation.

Focusing on Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and Slaughterhouse-Five as primary sources, specifically …

The Cost And Value Of Your Education, T. Perry Hildreth

Journal of Counseling and Psychology

This brief address explores the issue of the dominance of the economical way of valuing education over a more traditional idea of education as moral formation. An education in a Christian liberal arts university uniquely gives priority to the idea that education should shape the student's moral understanding and consequent actions. The address is an invitation to consider how one, professionally and personally, might serve members of a culture shaped largely by the idea that human meaning and purpose are reducible to economic value as merely producers and consumers.

Therapeutic Approach In Moral Education: A Critical Assessment, Jan Habl

Pro Rege

This study aims to critically assess the so-called therapeutic approach in moral education, which emerged in the postwar twentieth century, in the western part of the world. The proponents of the approach used different terms to express its essence: value clarification method, or sometimes the decision-making method or the critical thinking method. These philosophies of education have the common feature of a personalistic, non-directive, or client-oriented approach to the individual. Therefore, I will refer to them here as therapeutic. There are many advocates, but some of the most notable should be named: Carl Rodgers, Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, Sidney B. …

Zhuang Zi And The Education Of The Emotions, Jeffrey Morgan

Comparative Philosophy

This paper examines and defends a conception of the education of emotions found in the Zhuang-Zi. I begin by exploring four principal features of Zhuang Zi’s philosophy as it relates to the emotions: his epistemological perspectivism, his view of the self, his ethics of wandering and natural spontaneity, and his playful non-seriousness. Together these four features allow us to discern a general orientation to the education of the emotions, including a normative account of a good emotional life as well some suggestions for a pedagogy for the development of such a life.

Animal Victims Of Domestic And Family Violence: Raising Youth Awareness, Lyla Coorey, Carl Coorey-Ewings

Animal Studies Journal

In the last two decades, there has been a growing interest in connections between animal abuse and intra-familial violence. Research from the United States (US) has promoted awareness around this connection, and the implications, including for household companion and other animals, when identifying, assessing risk and responding to domestic and family violence (DFV). Compared with the US, United Kingdom (UK), New Zealand (NZ) and Canada, Australia’s inclusion of animals in its DFV services’ responses is minimal. Furthermore, a preventive perspective to minimise adult abuse of both humans and their animals, that highlights animal abuse in domestic violence school awareness programs, …

Alexis Wright’S Literary Testimony To Intersecting Traumas, Meera Atkinson

Animal Studies Journal

This article proffers a reading of Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), hailed as ‘the first truly planetary novel’ (Gleeson-White), arguing that Wright’s poetics of transgenerational trauma witnesses to intersected trans-species injustices and traumas. Exploring the way Wright testifies to entanglements of human-nonhuman trauma, I challenge entrenched humanist and speciesist preoccupations in trauma theory to address trauma transmissions with particular focus on trauma as a social and political force generated by patriarchal imperialism. In doing so, I show how Wright’s fiction serves as a form of advocacy for nonhuman sentient beings.

Peta, Patriarchy And Intersectionality, Nick P. Pendergrast

Animal Studies Journal

This article explores one of the key issues of debate within the contemporary animal advocacy movement: whether the movement should focus only on animal-related issues or take an intersectional approach, which includes engagement with other social justice issues. This intersectional perspective, highlighting similarities between different forms of oppression and their interlinked nature, is advocated for in Critical Animal Studies and ecofeminist literature. Scholars in these related areas have extended the concept to include nonhuman animals. This theory has an academic background but can also be useful to guide activism, including animal advocacy. The question of whether animal advocates adopt an …

Why Is It Important To Use Flagship Species In Community Education? The Koala As A Case Study, Rolf Schlagloth, Flavia Santamaria, Barry Golding, Hedley Thomson

Animal Studies Journal

Our paper investigates the conservation and planning implications of the use of an individual flagship species. The koala was chosen, as an example, in a community education intervention in a regional Australian city. Educating the community to accept changes in planning laws aimed at the protection of a single species such as the koala has never been an easy task. We examine the approach used to educate the Ballarat community in doing just that. We outline the power of this iconic Australian mammal, the koala, in promoting conservation and changes in planning regulations. We highlight the flow-on conservation and educational …

Should We Eat Our Research Subjects? Advocacy And Animal Studies, Yvette M. Watt, Siobhan O'Sullivan, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey

Animal Studies Journal

This paper examines data from a survey of Animal Studies scholars undertaken by the authors in 2015. While the survey was broad ranging, this paper focuses on three interconnected elements; the respondents’ opinions on what role they think the field should play in regard to animal advocacy, their personal commitment to animal advocacy, and how their attitudes toward advocacy in the field differ depending on their dietary habits. While the vast majority of respondents believe that the field should demonstrate a commitment to animal wellbeing, our findings suggest that respondents’ level of commitment to animal advocacy is informed by whether …

The Good Life, The Good Death: Companion Animals And Euthanasia, Eva Meijer

Animal Studies Journal

In this paper, I investigate the relevance of a relational approach to nonhuman animal euthanasia, focusing on companion animals. Recent scholarship in animal ethics, political philosophy and different fields of animal studies argues for viewing other animals as subjects, instead of as objects of study. Seeing other animals as subjects with their own views on life, with whom humans have different relations and with whom communication is possible, has ethical, practical, and epistemological implications for thinking about nonhuman animal euthanasia. In what follows I aim to shed light on some of these implications, focusing on euthanasia in the case of …

What If I Want To Put A Cow Down With A Gun? Sociological Critical Media Analysis Of Non-Companion Animals’ Representation In Rural Australian News, Angela T. Ragusa

Animal Studies Journal

Although sociology of animals is a contemporary specialisation examining human-animal interactions, little research explores rural animals. Content analysis of non-companion animals’ news visibility in a rural Australian newspaper in 2016-2017 found 311 articles represented 3 categories of news-reporting. Findings evidence human lexicon, not animal news-reporting, greatly reducing animals’ substantive media presence and socially-legitimated cultural attitudes and journalism practices normalised humans’ power to treat rural animals in ways benefiting humans. Animals were depicted as dangerous, harming humans and each other, requiring killing for environmental management (legitimated by culling and food production claims), as commodities for human entertainment, products, and/or cultural rituals. …

[Review] A Transnational History Of The Australian Animal Movement, 1970-2015 Gonzalo Villanueva, A Transnational History Of The Australian Animal Movement, 1970-2015, Christine Townend

Animal Studies Journal

This is a book that every student of politics would enjoy reading, and indeed should read, together with every person who wishes to become an activist (not necessarily an animal activist). This is because the book discusses, in a very interesting and exacting analysis, different strategies used to achieve a goal; in this case, the liberation of animals from the bonds of torture, deprivation and cruelty. Gonzalo Villanueva clearly has compassion for animals, but he is careful to keep an academic distance in this thoroughly researched, scholarly book, which is nevertheless easy to read. After each chapter of the book …

[Review] Stray: Human-Animal Ethics In The Anthropocene Barbara Creed, Stray: Human-Animal Ethics In The Anthropocene, Siobhan O'Sullivan

Animal Studies Journal

Barbara Creed is well known for her contribution to the field of Film Studies, as well as feminist thought more generally. Books such as The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993, Routledge) and Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny (2005, University of Melbourne Press) established Creed as a leading international thinker. They also attest to Creed’s willingness to push boundaries and to take on challenging and controversial topics. In recent years Creed has turned her attention to the lives of nonhuman animals, and the multitude of ways in which humans engage with, oppress, and may learn from their nonhuman …

Provocations From The Field: Female Reproductive Exploitation Comes Home, Carol J. Adams

Animal Studies Journal

Sexual violation and reproductive exploitation happen to vulnerable bodies. After studying systems of female reproductive servitude and visiting ‘parlors’, exhibitions, and auctions where females are sold into captivity, Dr. Kathryn Gillespie of the University of Washington found relentless ‘sexually violent commodification of the female body’. Meet Carly (not her real name). Carly was torn from her mother shortly after birth, and while her umbilical cord hung from her, was auctioned off. She lived a life of physical and social isolation until her captors felt she was sexually mature. She was immobilized by chains or with a specially designed containment device, …

Bloodlines – Mammalian Motherhood, Biotechnologies And Other Entanglements, Lynn Mowson

Animal Studies Journal

This paper outlines my current sculptural research project bloodlines focusing on the ways in which dairy cows are entangled with multiple biotechnologies and the wider environment. bloodlines brings extant works such as fleshlumps, boobscape and slink, together with new works, to represent the dairy industry, the environmental impacts of animal agriculture and the biotech innovations of in-vitro meat and bio-fabricated leather. These works are linked together by a web of interconnected fluids: excreta, milk and blood. In this new work, I hope to make the links between the dairy industry and these extended concerns both visceral and visible.

Demystifying Dairy, Deidre Wicks

Animal Studies Journal

In this paper, I examine the dairy cow, her body and disposition, with a specific focus on the way we humans have designed her for our purposes, through the use of selective breeding and reproductive technology. I will also examine the consequences of this design for the health and welfare of the dairy cow and her calf. I will conduct this examination through the concept of ‘naturalistic mystification’, which I will use to challenge the dominant, hegemonic message, which presents the cow as natural, and milk as a nonharm product. Rather, I will demonstrate that the cow and her milk …

‘Machine Milking Is More Manly Than Hand Milking’: Multispecies Agencies And Gendered Practices In Finnish Cattle Tending From The 1950s To The 1970s, Taija Kaarlenkaski

Animal Studies Journal

During the last hundred years, mechanization has significantly changed the working circumstances of both humans and animals in cattle husbandry. In Finland, cattle tending was regarded as women’s work up until the mid-20th century. According to a common view, the proliferation of milking machines, starting from the 1950s, caused men to start working in the cowsheds. In this paper, I will examine how the agencies of cattle tenders, cows, and milking machines were constructed during the mechanization process from the 1950s to the 1970s. Special attention will be paid to gendered representations, and changes in the gendered division of work. …

[Review] Devries, Scott M. Creature Discomfort: Fauna-Criticism, Ethics And The Representation Of Animals In Spanish American Fiction And Poetry. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Critical Animal Studies, 4. 328pp., Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

Scott M. DeVries’ exhaustive overview of Spanish American Literature serves as a substantial introduction to Spanish American literature in relation to Critical Animal Studies and what DeVries terms Traditional Animal Studies. Motivated by the lack of Spanish American literature featuring in animal studies, his survey convinces of the richness of this literature. The neologism ‘fauna-criticism’ is underpinned by TAS and CAS for their ‘ethical advocacy in defense of nonhumans’ and for their theorising about animals which generates a ‘proper understanding’ of animals (25). The term is intended to avoid the ‘slippages of meaning’ (32) and the ‘baggage’ that has accrued …

An Auto-Ethnography Of Anti-Dairy Vegan Activism In New Zealand, Lynley K. Tulloch

Animal Studies Journal

This paper examines my experiences of anti-dairy activism in New Zealand. Using autoethnographic methodology, I discuss the emotional work and core strategies and tactics of Starfish Bobby Calf Project (hereafter called Starfish). Starfish is a grassroots vegan activist group that I founded in 2013. Its genesis began in my childhood, when I became aware of the plight of bobby calves while living in rural New Zealand. It combines both autobiography and ethnography to analyse the emotional process of becoming an activist and campaigning against dairying. In doing so I uncover the narratives that underpin the dairy industry and the larger …

[Review] Malcolm Caulfield. Animals In Australia: Use And Abuse. Vivid, 2018. 336pp., Elizabeth Ellis

Animal Studies Journal

Reflecting on the last decade, Malcolm Caulfield argues that revelations of extreme cruelty in the live export and greyhound racing industries have ‘altered forever the animal welfare landscape in Australia’ (viii); at the same time, substantial progress in animal welfare has been lacking. Critical to his analysis is another recent development: the backlash by industry interests, supported by their political and media chums, to the articulated concerns of unprecedented numbers of Australians. This disjunction, between public disquiet about animal welfare and the absence of a ‘meaningful political response’ (35), underpins Caulfield’s important account of the use and abuse of animals …

How To Help When It Hurts? Think Systemic, Corey L. Wrenn Ph.D.

Animal Studies Journal

To resolve a moral dilemma created by the rescue of carnivorous species from exploitative situations who must rely on the flesh of other vulnerable species to survive, Cheryl Abbate applies the guardianship principle in proposing hunting as a case-by-case means of reducing harm to the rescued animal as well as to those animals who must die to supply food. This article counters that Abbate’s guardianship principle is insufficiently applied given its objectification of deer communities. Tom Regan, alternatively, encouraged guardians to think beyond individual dilemmas and adopt a measure of systemic reconstruction, that being the abolition of speciesist institutions (The …

[Review] Creatural Fictions David Herman, Editor. Creatural Fictions: Human-Animal Relationships In Twentieth- And Twenty-First-Century Literature, Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

David Herman has put together a landmark collection of essays in the Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature series. Drawing from the Animal Studies theories of Donna Haraway, John Berger, Jacques Derrida and Cary Wolfe, for instance, the collection has a lot to offer students new to Literary Animal Studies. Rigorous essays which further debates mean that the collection also has appeal for established scholars in the field. Creatural Fictions takes its title, Herman explains, partly from the creaturely theories Anat Pick turns to in Simone Weil, but the term ‘creatural’ is preferred in order to emphasise continuities between human …

From Disability To Eco-Ability [Review] Anthony J. Nocella Ii, Amber E. George, And J. L. Schatz, Editors. The Intersectionality Of Critical Animal, Disability, And Environmental Studies: Toward Eco-Ability, Justice, And Liberation, Nathan Poirier

Animal Studies Journal

The Intersectionality of Critical Animal, Disability, and Environmental Studies: Toward Eco-ability, Justice, and Liberation (hereafter, Intersectionality), edited by critical scholars Anthony Nocella II, Amber E. George, and J.L. Schatz, is the follow-up collection to an earlier anthology edited by Nocella II, Judy Bentley and Janet Duncan. Published in 2012, Earth, Animal, and Disability Liberation: The Rise of the Eco-Ability Movement was visionary in illuminating entanglements of the struggles that people with disabilities share with environmental and nonhuman animal oppression (similar to the realization of the shared oppression of women, animals and the environment that sparked ecofeminism). This connection is termed …

Animal Utopia: Liberal, Communitarian, Libertarian Or…? [Review Essay] Wayne Gabardi. The Next Social Contract: Animals, The Anthropocene, And Biopolitics, Dinesh Wadiwel

Animal Studies Journal

It would be difficult to be optimistic in the face of the political challenges that confront us. Globally, we have seen stark intensifications of economic inequalities and social stratifications, coupled with the rise of new nationalist and proto-fascist political movements. The environmental challenges are daunting: we now face a future where anthropogenic climate change will inescapably and deeply impact the earth’s systems. As I write, armed conflict continues to shape human affairs, generating continued misery and displacement; and instabilities have posed the possibility of new global conflicts, including a renewed threat of nuclear war. For non-human animals globally, the picture …

Animal Studies Journal 2018 7 (2): Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Editorial And Notes On Contributors, Melissa Boyde

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2018 7 (1): Cover Page, Table of Contents, Editorial and Notes on Contributors

‘White Power Milk’: Milk, Dietary Racism, And The ‘Alt-Right’, Vasile Stănescu

Animal Studies Journal

This article analyzes why milk has been chosen as a symbol of racial purity by the ‘alt-right’. Specifically, this article argues the alt-right's current use of claims about milk, lactose tolerance, race, and masculinity can be connected to similar arguments originally made during the19th century against colonialized populations and immigration groups. In the 19th century, colonizing populations classified colonized populations as ‘effeminate corn and rice eaters’ because of their supposed lack of consumption of meat and dairy. This article argues that a similar practice continues today. It also argues that there is a relationship between the dietary racism ideas popularized …