Tony Kashani, Ph.D. is an Iranian American author, educator, philosopher of technology, and a cultural critic. Kashani is a subject matter expert and faculty, for several universities in the United States, focusing his interdisciplinary scholarship and pedagogy on humanities in the digital age and social justice. He was born in Tehran to Azerbaijani parents, an ethnic minority in Iran. He grew up speaking Farsi and Turkish, and after migrating at the critical age of fifteen to his adopted home of California, English became his primary language of intellectualism. Speaking three languages and being aware of three distinctly different cultures at once gave Kashani the impetus to seek a philosophy of cosmopolitanism, where one embraces all cultures and is at ease in most countries in the world. He received his bachelor’s degree in radio and television and later his master’s degree in cinema studies from San Francisco State University. He has a Ph.D. in Humanities with emphasis on culture studies from California Institute of Integral Studies. His writing, teaching, and intellectual activism are anchored in critical theory and pedagogy, influenced by writers such as Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Camus, Steinbeck, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and thinkers such as Fredrick Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Paulo Ferrier, Edward Said, Henry Giroux, John Dewey, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, Erich Fromm, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Kashani is the author of five books in Humanities; Deconstructing the Mystique, (2005, 2009, Kendall/Hunt Press), Hollywood’s Exploited: Public Pedagogy, Corporate Movies, and Cultural Studies (2010, Palgrave/MacMillan Press), Lost in Media: Ethics of Everyday Life (2013, Peter Lang Press), Movies Change Lives: A Pedagogy of Humanistic Transformation (Peter Lang Press, 2016), and Meditations on Resistance: An Inquiry into AI (2024, Peter Lang Press). His chapter on Critical Media Literacy in the 3 volume Handbook of Critical Pedagogy (2020, Sage Publications) is a deliberation on impact of new media on the human condition. Kashani is an advocate of global diversity. On that topic he writes,
Given that we live in the planetary age where we find ourselves interconnected and, in many ways, interdependent with one another on a global scale, there exist various conditions between the “self” and the “other.” I am sensitive to and take great care to pay attention to the reality of diversity in the planetary context. If the self builds solidarity with the other, harmony is achieved, and we can all live at ease with each other while engaging our differences. This requires sound ethics of virtue, mainly courage and compassion.
Presently, Dr. Kashani is completing his upcoming book Meditations on Resistance: An Inquiry into AI, Critical Media Literacy, and Social Justice (Lang Press, 2023) and gathering research for (Deus Ex Machina) manuscript on the paradox of being human in the digital age. On a personal side, he is a practicing Black Belt in Karate and as a student of Zen philosophy believes in balancing his life with mindfulness to result in a harmonious mind/body/spirit existence. He lives with his family in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Dr. Kashani’s personal website is www.tonykashani.com
His podcast address (also available on iTunes and Apple Podcasts) is www.techumanity.online