Author Background  
 

Joel Federman, Ph.D., is an author and social theorist. He is a faculty member at Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, teaching courses in its "Social Transformation" and "Organizational Systems" concentration areas. He has a doctorate in political philosophy from the University of Southern California, and currently lives in San Francisco.

His writing and teaching focuses on helping people to reinvision their individual and collective potential, to see themselves shaping a better world. He is currently writing a book, The Politics of Universal Compassion, that explores the possibility of achieving a global revolution of values. Draft excerpts of that book can be found on this website.

He also does consulting, research and writing in the related areas of violence prevention, media violence, diversity education, peace and conflict studies, and cross-cultural conflict resolution. He is the author of Rating Sex and Violence in the Media: Media Ratings and Proposals for Reform, a report of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and Empowering Diversity a middle school violence prevention curriculum commissioned by the Santa Barbara County Board of Education.

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 1999 study of a middle school violence prevention curriculum developed by Court TV, the National Middle School Association, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T BIS. In 1998, he initiated the Center's Civility Clearinghouse, a web-based resource for information regarding the topic of civility.

Dr. Federman 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 the Los Angeles Times; the Encyclopedia of Communication and Information; the Yearbook of the UNESCO International Clearinghouse on Children and Violence on the Screen; Campaigns and Elections; and Humanities in Society. He has appeared on CNN, the NBC and CBS Nightly News, and C-Span.