Richard Kahn is Core Faculty in Education at Antioch University, where he oversees, teaches, and advises for the Master’s in Education, Leadership and Change degree program. He recently completed a three-year term as an elected member of the Executive Council for the American Educational Studies Association, and as a Board Member of the organization’s prestigious journal, Educational Studies. He serves on numerous other journal editorial boards, and has previously served as Co-Editor of Issues in Teacher Education, for the California Council on Teacher Education; as Editor of Green Theory and Praxis: The Journal of Ecopedagogy; and as Book Review Editor for the Journal for Critical Animal Studies (a journal and field he helped to found). He is also the Founding Editor of The International Journal of Illich Studies. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of four recent books, including:
- the award-winning Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement (Peter Lang, 2010), which has received a new Chinese translation in 2013, and a Korean translation, 2015;
- Education Out of Bounds: Reimagining Cultural Studies for a Posthuman Age (Palgrave, 2010), which is blurbed by Michael Hardt and is considered a foundational text in education theorizing the political valences of posthumanism for pedagogy;
- The Global Industrial Complex: Systems of Domination (Lexington Books, 2011), that includes chapters from authors such as Noam Chomsky, Andrea Smith, Vandana Shiva, Ward Churchill, Carl Boggs, Toby Miller, Cary Nelson, and Peter McLaren; and
- Greening the Academy: Ecopedagogy Through the Liberal Arts (Sense, 2012), that champions the reconstruction of the academy through a reinvigorated and radicalized educational movement for “humanitas” and which includes new work from noted figures such as Bill McKibben, David Greenwood, Timothy Luke, and Greta Gaard. The last two books won AESA Critics Choice Book Awards in 2013.
Working primarily within the traditions of critical theory and critical pedagogy, Kahn’s abiding scholarly interest is in researching the history of social movements as pedagogically generative forces in society, especially as they take the form of a worldwide movement of movements, and then also in critically challenging the role dominant institutions and ideology play in blocking people from teaching and learning in ways that might contribute to the realization of greater planetary freedom, community peace, and happiness-in-diversity.