Dr. John Mullen is an Assistant Professor of Sustainability Education at Rowan University, with joint appointments in the Department of Educational Leadership, Administration, and Research (College of Education) and the Department of Geography, Planning, and Sustainability (School of Earth and Environment). He is a member of Rowan’s Catalysts for Sustainability initiative. His research develops an ecological philosophy of education at the intersection of environmental pragmatism, democratic social learning, and sustainability science. He examines how educational institutions cultivate the capacities for collective inquiry, ethical judgment, and action in response to ecological change.

 

He has published in venues including Nature Communications, Environmental Education Research, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Studies in Philosophy of Education, and Philosophy of Education. At Rowan, he designed and launched the Sustainability Education and Leadership Certificate of Undergraduate Study, a cross-disciplinary program that prepares students to integrate sustainability into professional practice while cultivating leadership, civic agency, and institutional transformation.

 

Some of his recent publications include:

 

The revenge of place: Reorientations in place-based genealogies of education (coming out soon with Philosophy of Education)

 

(Re)membering place for the future: Learning how to be placed with Wendell Berry (coming out soon with Philosophy of Education)

 

Assessing global sustainability performance, imbalance, and coordination over space and time, Nature Communications

 

Philosophy as a way of life: Integrating Pierre Hadot’s spiritual exercises for practicing democracy and sustainability, Philosophy of Education

 

Ecosocial philosophy of education: Ecologizing the opinionated self, Studies in Philosophy and Education

 

Strange loops, oedipal logic, and an apophatic ecology: Reimagining critique in environmental education, Educational Philosophy and Theory

 

Dark places: environmental education research in a world of hyperobjects, Environmental Education Research

Education qua ecognosis: Reading Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles for an ecological philosophy of education, Philosophy of Education