Political animals : emotion, materiality, and media in the learning of animal liberation activists

This learning sciences dissertation uses sociocultural learning theory to understand political learning in the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of an animal liberation network called Direct Action Everywhere (DxE). It asks, how do humans come to understand politically the other animal species in the ways they do? It draws on research from other social sciences and the humanities in the posthumanist and nonhuman turns to consider how human learning occurs under conditions of vulnerability and in concert with multiple forms of nonhuman agency. Based on in-person and online participant observation conducted between 2014 and 2017, open-ended interviews of 20 current and former activists, and an analysis of media artifacts, it addresses how learning involves changes in identity, ideology, and practice across scales. It is structured according to three focal lenses: emotion, materiality, and media. Whereas emotion is often approached in learning research as a driver or inhibitor of separate learning processes, this dissertation applies a practice view on emotion, considering how practices of emotion are sometimes targets of learning in their own right. It introduces the concepts of guided affect experiences and casual emotion work to describe different means by which activists shape their own and others' emotions, with implications for identity, ideology, and practice. Materiality is the central theme in an analysis of activists' ideological development. Conventional conceptualizations of animals and tools in learning research often render them as "dead" material for human agency. Attending closely to the flows, frictions, and expectations of socio-material arrangements, this dissertation find that activists' ideological development is strongly shaped by encounters with nonhuman agency, including nonhuman animals and other things. The concept of ideamatter is proposed, describing human sense making as an outcome of mutating configurations of heterogeneous materials and the practices they organize. Building on research at the intersection between the learning sciences and critical pedagogy, this dissertation then explores the place of nonhuman animals in Freirean notions of "reading and writing the world." Approaching the body as a lexical medium, it expands the conversation on multiple literacies and critical consciousness to include embodied encounters between humans and nonhuman animals. Activists learn to read and write the signs of these encounters as a privileged site of ethical learning. Across the lenses of emotion, materiality, and media, this dissertation develops a vision of learners and learning that tempers the Enlightenment ideals of autonomy, reason, and strong agency that still haunt sociocultural theory and empirical investigations. Instead, we find that learners are more porous and susceptible than we often imagine. Implications for the ethics of learning research, educational practice, and learning environment design are discussed.

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Goldman Shelley V. 
Ardoin Nicole M. (Nicole Michele) 
Barron Brigid 
McDermott Ray (Raymond Patrick)