Helena Pedersen

Helena Pedersen is associate professor in Education at the Department of Pedagogical, Curricular and Professional Studies, University of Gothenburg. Her research focuses on critical animal studies, critical theory, educational philosophy, and post-anthropocentric theory and methods. She is author of Schizoanalysis and Animal Science Education (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and Animals in Schools: Processes and Strategies in Human-Animal Education (Purdue University Press, 2010), the latter which received the Critical Animal Studies Book of the Year Award in 2010.

She has published in journals such as Emotion, Space and Society; Educational Philosophy and Theory; Studies in Philosophy and Education; Culture, Theory and Critique; Policy Futures in Education; and In Analysis: Revue transdisciplinaire de psychanalyse et sciences. Pedersen was Co-editor of the Critical Animal Studies book series (Brill, 2009-23) and has been a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society (IAS-STS), Graz; Queen’s University, Canada; Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley; and University of Kassel. She is also co-founder of the network GU-CAS: University of Gothenburg’s Network for Critical Animal Studies in the Anthropocene. Zoocurriculum is her third book.

The primary task of the education system is not to disseminate knowledge and skills. It also constantly produces and shapes subjectivities, which are usually presumed to be exclusively human. This monograph-in-progress reads education as a set of animality-producing as well as animality-exploiting practices and settings. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach that draws on cultural theory, psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and sociology, the book traces the presence of animals in education across different subjects, modalities, and scales in Western societies. The questions guiding this inquiry are: what are the educational qualities of animal bodies and behaviors, what are the premises of their use, what learning objectives are they expected to assist in achieving, through what affective states, and what results are expected? What are the implications for the animals themselves?

Schools, preschools and universities are constantly shifting between being seen as a benevolent common good and a foundation for national prosperity, and as disciplinary institutions, political battlefields and bearers of societal crises, or even crime scenes.

The animal body is a site where such tension plays out although this is frequently overlooked. It is also part of the fantasy of education as a panacea for fixing all kinds of social, scientific, and environmental problems. However, such attempts are destined to disappoint, as Deborah Britzman has pointed out. Education is an impossible profession and knowledge processing is inherently difficult, conflictual, and anxiety-producing.

Pedersen argues that using animals as pedagogical resources (e.g. school dogs, encounters with wildlife in outdoor education, and representations of animals in popular culture narratives about education) highlights something urgent about the predicaments of our time, enabling an in-depth understanding of education as a societal and cultural institution. One tentative conclusion suggests that animals are made useful for teaching purposes by creating a comforting order in the classroom, which offers a temporary sense of control in an increasingly chaotic, unbearable, and incomprehensible world. However, this sense of control is fragile and in constant tension with the inherently uncontrollable nature of education.