The Public Pedagogy of Neighborhood Facebook Communities: Negotiating Relations With Urban Coyotes

• In Event: 64.064 - Democratizing Social Media for Ecological, Environmental, and Social Justice in a Post-Truth Era

Abstract

Local community Facebook pages have proliferated in popularity in the last several years. On these sites residents not only post items for sale and request recommendations for top notch local eateries or reliable car repair services, but they also openly and publicly negotiate relations with maligned urban wildlife like coyotes. We have chosen to examine the case of coyotes because they have incorporated themselves into nearly every major city in North America, occupying a liminal position in these contexts (Flores, 2016). Further, while EE researchers have become increasingly interested in human-animal relationships, little empirical attention has been directed to pedagogic relations with urban wildlife more generally, and especially to urban apex predators. Since residents explicitly and implicitly educate each other about coyotes on these sites, community Facebook pages can be operationalized and theorized as sites of public pedagogy, which Sandlin, Wright, and Clark (2011) refer to as the “various forms, processes, and sites of education and learning that occur beyond the realm of formal educational institutions” (p. 4; see also Freishtat, 2010). Indeed, Reid (2010) notes that the “public-pedagogic effect from social media” (p. 196) impacts how we build communities, the communication practices we employ, and even our sense of identity.

In this paper we begin by providing background about the two cities we analyze, including the use of community Facebook pages: Philadelphia, PA and Chino/Chino Hills, CA. Next we provide an overview of the theoretical framework guiding our analysis, which draws on educational philosopher Gert Biesta’s (2012) three forms of public pedagogy: (1) pedagogy for the public, where instruction of the citizenry to think, act, and be in certain ways is key; (2) pedagogy of the public, where outcomes of learning are not pre-determined and learning, though necessary, is emergent; and (3) public pedagogy as enactment or concern for ‘publicness’ or ‘publicity,’ which creates the conditions for human togetherness and freedom. We also draw on a rich body of scholarship in EE that challenges the anthropocentrism and humanism of educational theory (e.g., Bell & Russell, 2000; Corman, 2012, 2017; Corman & Vandrovcová, 2014; Kuhl, 2011; Lloro-Bidart, 2015; Lukasik, 2010; Pedersen, 2010; Russell, 2005; Snaza, 2015) to include animals as active subjects in our analysis. We then use this framework to conduct a digital multispecies ethnographic analysis (e.g., Lloro-Bidart, 2017, 2018a; Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor, & Blaise, 2016; Pink et al., 2016) to show how these community Facebook pages serve as public spaces and/or spheres where residents debate and negotiate how to share their city with coyotes, engaging primarily in acts of pedagogy for the public and pedagogy of the public. We conclude by discussing how contemporary shifts in coyote geographies, coupled with the rise of Facebook community pages, open up interesting possibilities for public pedagogies that might challenge problematic human-nature and urban-wild binaries (Pedersen, 2010), particularly as they relate to situating apex predators within cityscapes.

Author

• Teresa Katrina Lloro-Bidart, California State Polytechnic University - Pomona