Education Out of Bounds

Tyson E. Lewis and Richard Kahn argue for a new critical theory of the monster as an imaginary other on the margins of human and animal. Through a unique combination of critical, posthumanist, and educational theories, the authors engage in a surreal journey into the worlds of feral children, alien reptoids, and faery faiths in order to understand how social movements are renegotiating the boundaries of community. Part philosophy of imagination, part political theory, and part pedagogical critique, this book is a twenty-first century bestiary - a catalog to navigate the monstrous world in which we live. Praise: 'By engaging an encyclopedic range of figures from the philosophical tradition and popular culture, Lewis and Kahn lead us on a fascinating journey to discover the monsters that populate our posthuman world. We are confronted by horrible and fearsome beasts of violence, exploitation, and destruction, but we also recognize ourselves in creative monsters that blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman life. Most impressively, Lewis and Kahn propose paths to train the monsters of our world, a monstrous education, a pedagogy for the beautiful monsters we can become.'-Michael Hardt, co-author of Commonwealth 'Our cultural fascinations with the monstrous and its omnipresence in our contemporary Western imaginings play center-stage in this provocative exploration of a zoophilic exopedagogy. From the feral, to the alien, to the faery, Tyson Lewis and Richard Kahn put pressure on our affective comfort zones by asking us what it means to love the monstrous amidst and within us. The answer comes through their theoretically vast and conceptually rich exploration of a radical democratic pedagogy of the unrepresentable.' -Davide Panagia, Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies, Trent University, Co-Editor of Theory and Event, and author of The Political Life of Sensation