Other Animals and Humans as Stakeholders in Educational Research: Challenging the Logics of Animalization and Dehumanization

• In Event: Ways of Transforming Human-Animal Relations Through Education and Schooling: Translating Existing Theories Into Practice

Abstract

Scholars embracing diverse theoretical traditions, including Black vegan feminism (Harper, 2010, 2012; Ko & Ko, 2017), critical animal theory (Repka, 2017), critical race theory (Boisseron, 2018; Deckha, 2006, 2010, 2012; Kim, 2015), ecofeminism (Adams, 1990/2015; Bell & Russell, 2000), ecojustice (Lupinacci & Happel-Parkins, 2015, 2017), and feminist posthumanism (Lloro-Bidart, 2017, 2019), have explored how animalization, dehumanization, and objectification operate as logics of oppression that intersect in complex ways with cultural and social constructions of species, class, gender, and race. Legal scholar Maneesha Deckha poignantly notes, for example

In India and Africa, too, colonial control grew out of a reliance on the animal-human spectrum. Black Africans were animalized through comparisons with apes and monkeys or situated as ‘pests’ to be criminalized; colonial legislation governed Indians as ‘criminal animals.’ These are but a sampling of the array of international instances by which violence was enacted against colonized human beings through the differentiating logic of animalization, racialization, and dehumanization (2012, p. 39).

In the context of environmental education, Connie Russell and Keri Semenko (2016) have demonstrated how insults like “fat cow” operate in Western cultures to animalize fat women, whereas feminized cartoons of dairy cows perpetuate the myth of the happy dairy cow, thereby erasing the suffering these animals endure in concentrated animal feeding operations. Drawing on intersectional theories informed by Black feminism and ecofeminism, they suggest a “fat pedagogy” that remains attuned to the intersecting ways in which oppressions occur—in this case along the axes of animality, body size, and gender. Meneka Repka (2017), who studied the experiences and perspectives of vegan students in Canada, revealed that youth have some understanding about how human and animal liberation are connected and also desire to learn more as they express dismay with the myopic visions of single-issue pedagogy and praxis. And finally, Lloro-Bidart’s (2019) study of her own undergraduate critical food studies course evinced the ways in which students engaging with intersectional curricula are able to identify and perhaps challenge the systemic marginalization of minoritized people, other animals (including insects), and the environment.

Although there are clear and significant differences among these theoretical traditions, they coalesce in their focus on the interrelatedness of systems of oppression, including how they impact other animals and humans. In this paper, I thus begin by providing a brief overview of the perspectives highlighted here, particularly as they relate to theorizing other animals and humans as stakeholders in educational research. More specifically, I contend that any pedagogy working to center other animals must address the problematic ways in which animalization and dehumanization are mutually co-constitutive and also affect marginalized groups of human beings. By drawing on prior research in the field, as well as my own ethnographic research in diverse educational contexts, I conclude by exploring potential practical transformations in curriculum and pedagogy.

Author

• Teresa Lloro, California State Polytechnic University - Pomona