Douglas Kellner

Douglas Kellner (born 1943) is an academic who works at the intersection of "third generation" critical theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School and in cultural studies in the tradition of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, also known as the "Birmingham School". He has argued that these two conflicting philosophies are in fact compatible. He is currently the George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Kellner was an early theorist of the field of critical media literacy and has been a leading theorist of media culture generally. In his recent work, he has increasingly argued that media culture has become dominated by the forms of spectacle and mega-spectacle. He also has contributed important studies of alter-globalization processes, and has always been concerned with counter-hegemonic movements and alternative cultural expressions in the name of a more radically democratic society. More recently, he is known for his work exploring the politically oppositional potentials of new media and attempted to delineate what they term "multiple technoliteracies" as a movement away from the present attempt to standardize a corporatist form of computer literacy.

He has collaborated with a number of other authors, including (with Steven Best) on an award-winning trilogy of books examining postmodern turns in philosophy, the arts, and science and technology. He served as the literary executor of the documentary film maker Emile de Antonio and is now overseeing the publication of six volumes of the collected papers of the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse.

During the 1960s, Kellner was a philosophy student at Columbia University in New York and partook in student protests against the Vietnam War. During this time he came to believe in the political nature of knowledge as well as the relationship between history and the production of ideas. A historical understanding of philosophy's relationship to one's lived experiences became increasingly clear to Kellner through his research into German critical theory at the University of Tübingen in Germany. While studying there, he read the works of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Karl Korsch, Herbert Marcuse, and Ernst Bloch, all of whom were instrumental in a new form of Marxist criticism concerned primarily with questions of culture and subjectivity rather than with analysing production.