Joel Federman

Joel Federman, Ph.D., is a writer, teacher, and activist. He is Chair of the Department of Transformative Social Change at Saybrook University. He has a doctorate in political philosophy from the University of Southern California, and currently lives in San Francisco.

Dr. Federman's teaching and writing focuses on helping people to reenvision their individual and collective potential, to see themselves shaping a better world. He is currently writing a book on those themes, to be titled The Beloved Community of the Earth: Toward a Politics of Universal Compassion. Though primarily providing a positive vision of global civil society movements that are working to realize values such as universal compassion, nonviolence, democracy, human rights, social justice, and environmental sustainability, the book will also present those movements in contrast to growing authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia in various parts of the world.

Dr. Federman has made numerous presentations at regional, national and international conferences. He made a presentation on "Emerging Global Solidarity Efforts to Address Racism, Xenophobia, Climate Injustice, and Authoritarianism," at the Society for the Study of Social Problems 2022 Virtual Conference, "Reimagining Our Worlds from Below." He participated in a TCS Education System (TCSES)-sponsored Globe Talk Dialogue, "Addressing Collective Angers and Despair: Finding Critical Hope in 2022," along with Kumi Naidoo, former Secretary General of Amnesty International, and Anlené Taljaard, PhD, Programme Coordinator, Department of Theology and Ethics, Cornerstone Institute, South Africa. Dr. Federman was an also a presenter and panel chair at the Peace and Justice Studies Association's 2022 Annual Conference, at the University of Mt. Union in Alliance, Ohio. His presentation was entitled, "Solidarity Across Movements for Democracy, Human Rights, Peace, and Climate Justice."

Dr. Federman also does research and writing in the related areas of violence prevention, media violence, diversity education, and cross-cultural conflict resolution. He is also interested in exploring ways that new communication technologies can be used in the service of transformative social change. Dr. Federman is developing a case study of civil society activism toward democratic reform in Egypt. To further this research, he traveled to Egypt in August 2011, and met with democracy activists and others.

During the fall 2025 semester, Dr. Federman will teach TSC 6610 Social System Transformation Theory. . He also teaches TSC 6510 Theory and Practice of Nonviolence, TSC 7116 Global Civil Society Activism and Social Change, and is a member and/or chair of several dissertation, thesis and essay committees.

A former Co-Director of the Center for Communication and Social Policy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Dr. Federman was project director for the National Television Violence Study. For that three-year effort (1995-98), he coordinated a team of more than 200 individuals at four major research universities -- the Universities of California, North Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin -- to produce the most comprehensive study of television violence to date.

Dr. Federman was also project director and co-author of the Choices and Consequences Evaluation, a study of a middle school violence prevention curriculum developed by CourtTV, the National Middle School Association, and Time Warner Cable. In 1998, he initiated the Center's Civility Clearinghouse, a web-based resource for information regarding the topic of civility. He is the author of Empowering Diversity, a curriculum for middle school students commissioned by the Santa Barbara, California Board of Education.

Dr. Federman is a member of the Academic Council of the American Friends of Combatants for Peace, a bi-national, egalitarian grassroots movement of Palestinians and Israelis, who are dedicated to nonviolence. He has led numerous cross-cultural conflict resolution workshops, including a year-long Palestinian-Jewish dialogue at the University of Southern California. He is a former member of the board of directors of the Peace and Justice Studies Association, a national consortium of university-based peace and conflict studies programs.

His writing has been published in Common Dreams; the Los Angeles Times; the Encyclopedia of Communication and Information; Tikkun Magazine; the Yearbook of the UNESCO International Clearinghouse on Children and Violence on the Screen; Alternet; Campaigns and Elections; and Humanities in Society.

Pronouns: he/him