| 1. |
- Pedersen, Helena
(författare)
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Animals on Display : The Zoocurriculum of Museum Exhibits
- 2010
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Ingår i: Critical Education. - : Institute for Critical Educational Studies. - 1920-4175. ; 1:8
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Museums have been viewed as valuable education resources as well as sites of reproduction of colonialist narratives about the “other.” This article, based on ethnographic field studies of school visits to museums and drawing on postcolonial critique in visual culture and critical education theory, analyzes two different museum exhibitions and the human-nonhuman animal relations they produce. Different agendas seem to be at work at the two museums; one inviting a conventional zoological gaze of “exoticism,” and the other interrogating issues of power inherent in human-nonhuman animal relations. I argue that the pedagogical messages produced by particularly the natural history museum are part of a generic zoocurriculum; a species-coded hidden curriculum structuring human-animal boundary work by delimiting and separating human and animal subject positions. However, student responses to both museum displays indicate that their own interpretive framework largely operated in the opposite direction as the stuffed and dismembered animals seemed to invoke reflections on mortality that facilitated students’ self-identification with them.
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| 2. |
- Pedersen, Helena
(författare)
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Education Policymaking for Social Change : a post-humanist intervention
- 2010
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Ingår i: Policy Futures in Education. - : Symposium Journals. - 1478-2103 .- 1478-2103. ; 8:6, s. 683-696
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The humanist tradition in Western education systems is increasingly coming under critical scrutiny by posthumanist scholars, arguing that Enlightenment humanism accommodates a number of serious shortcomings such as being essentialist, exclusive, and unable to meet its own criteria of value pluralism, tolerance, and equity for all. This article formulates some challenges posed to formal education by posthumanist theory, addressing international education policymaking for social change. Based on an analysis of a number of education policy documents produced by UNESCO, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Bank, the European Commission, and the Nordic Council of Ministers, it elicits five pervasive ideas about the relationship between education and social change that are frequently appearing in contemporary rhetoric of education policymaking: ‘the knowledge society’; ‘the democratic society’; ‘the multicultural society’; ‘the globalized society’ and ‘the sustainable society’. Inspired by critical discourse analysis, the article identifies a number of research questions focused on each of these five ideas and explores possible responses, inflected by a range of recent cross-disciplinary posthumanist scholarship, that deconstruct conventional assumptions about the idea of education in general and of education policymaking in particular. It concludes with a discussion of what subject positions and repertoires are, or are not, allowed to emerge in education policymaking for social change.
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| 3. |
- Pedersen, Helena
(författare)
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Is 'the Posthuman' Educable? On the convergence of educational philosophy, animal studies, and posthumanist theory
- 2010
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Ingår i: Discourse. Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. - : Routledge. - 0159-6306 .- 1469-3739. ; 31:2, s. 237-250
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Formal education in Western society is firmly rooted in humanist ideals. ‘Becoming human’ by cultivating certain cognitive, social, and moral abilities has even symbolised the idea of education as such in Enlightenment philosophical traditions. These ideas are increasingly coming under scrutiny by posthumanist theorists, who are addressing fundamental ontological and epistemological questions about defining an essential ‘human nature’, as well as the elastic boundary work between the human and non-human subject. This paper responds to the ongoing discussions on the diverse articulations of posthumanism in education theory and animal studies by investigating possibilities of a shared conceptual framework that allows for a productive dialogue between them. By analysing some of the meanings attached to the notion of posthumanism in education theory and animal studies, the paper begins to identify some instabilities of humanist traditions/ideals of education and explores posthumanist challenges to research on the institutionalised production, mediation, and development of knowledge.
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| 4. |
- Pedersen, Helena
(författare)
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Terror from the stare : visual landscapes of meat production
- 2010
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Ingår i: Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. - 1756-9575. ; :14, s. 34-38
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In his latest book, Terror from the Air, the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk investigates how air, as a fundamental life-sustaining element, has been given a pivotal role in post-war forms of terrorism, genocide, and chemical warfare. Here, I re-phrase Sloterdijk's book title to address not acts of breathing, but acts of viewing. My purpose is to discuss how different modalities and manipulations of visual perception (both human and animal) are implicated in routines of physical violence toward animals - more specifically, in the process of their becoming-meat.
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