Toward an Animal Standpoint in School? : Critical Animal Pedagogy as Sustainability Education

The overall aim of this thesis is to explore how critical animal pedagogies (CAP) can contribute to environmental and sustainability education (ESE) by addressing, challenging, and transforming current exploitative human-animal relations and their social, ethical, and environmental ramifications. It explores questions critical to subject matter education and contributes to ongoing debates regarding how nonhuman animals and human-animal relations can be introduced and addressed in ESE. It does so by exploring the potential of CAP to address, disturb, and disrupt exploitative human-animal relations and enable a re-thinking and re-learning of how to live together with other species. The project was carried out as a feminist activist ethnography, in which teachers, students, animal rights activists, and scholars collaborated by discussing, developing, and introducing CAP in Years 1-3 in two Swedish upper secondary schools. Theoretically, the thesis takes its point of departure in critical animal studies and its subfield CAP, or more specifically animal standpoint theory, reading these with and through feminist affect theory, feminist philosophy, educational philosophy, and poststructuralist theory and pedagogy. Starting from this theoretical framework, the thesis is concerned with the didactical conditions upper secondary education provides for working with CAP and how this context, particularly in ESE teaching, informs and possibly transforms what CAP is and can achieve. It explores the (im)possibility for nonhuman animals to emerge and be responded to as subjects and what human-animal relations are enabled or disabled. As such, this thesis contributes ethnographic fieldwork that provides insights into what happens when an openly normative and critical pedagogy standing in solidarity with nonhuman animals is introduced within ESE in upper secondary school. It analyzes possibilities for interspecies sustainability and justice to be envisioned and enacted and questions a sharp division between normative and pluralistic approaches in ESE. The thesis makes visible how an imagined human collective unwilling to change puts boundaries in place for how ethical human-animal relations that can be imagined. It also acknowledges openings in critically addressing animal exploitation within ESE. Drawing upon the overall insights from the project, the thesis argues for the importance of creating space for taking an animal standpoint in ESE and addresses the risks of reproducing and reinforcing speciesism and anthropocentrism if such a standpoint cannot be taken. It acknowledges the potential in engaging with animal rights material, learning more about other species, and asking students to start from the perspective of nonhuman animals. The thesis shows how CAP can contribute to ESE by increasing student engagement and enable critical reflections through engaging with interspecies sustainability.