Barbara Lowe

This chapter focuses on the complementary nature of the theory and practice of Jane Addams (1860–1935) and George Herbert Mead (1863–1931). When applied to intractable contemporary problems, the application of their combined insights “bends toward justice.” Both were theorist-activists who embraced a relational and interdependent conception of the self and insisted that, with empathetic understanding, progress toward justice could be incrementally achieved. This approach has contemporary relevance, particularly in today’s polarized society. Our social circles have narrowed, becoming more insular, our political institutions have become more divisive, and the economic gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen. Addams and Mead’s work help us see why these divisions are problematic and suggest possible paths for moving toward more just social, political, and economic arrangements.

“The Growth of Feminist Pragmatism: Opening Channels for Cooperative Intelligence” tells of four academic conferences. One of the tenets of pragmatist philosophy is that a person’s intellectual growth is fostered through collaborative engagement with others. These four conferences confirm that observation. Charlene Haddock Seigfried’s initial work of identifying feminist pragmatists from pragmatism’s founding era has now grown into a much larger project of international scope. The first conference discussed in this essay, titled “Exploring Jane Addams,” was hosted at the University of Dayton (Ohio, USA) in November 2002. Its interdisciplinary scope matched the wide range of Addams’s thoughts and activism. A second conference, “Feminist Pragmatism in Place,” was held in October 2012, also hosted by the University of Dayton. Speakers drew on pragmatism’s emphasis on social and historical context to explore the significance of location for feminist reflection. A third conference, “Looking Back to Move Forward,” held in November 2019 at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York (USA), drew deeply on Rochester’s history of social justice activism on behalf of marginalized groups, including women, Native Americans, and African-Americans. Finally, the essay discusses the first “Women in Pragmatism: International Conference” held in Europe, at the University of Barcelona in January 2020. The conference was truly international in its scientific and organizing committees, and in its program with speakers from ten countries. The essay concludes with reflections on the potential for growth as well as challenges for feminist pragmatism.

Recognizing the importance of meaningful reflective writing as an integral component to the portfolios used in the first-year program (FYP), faculty questioned whether a newly developed electronic portfolio offered any pedagogical benefits over the existing traditional paper portfolio. Of particular interest for this work was whether the use of ePortfolios might positively impact students’ metacognitive skills. A study conducted with students and faculty in the FYP evaluated student understanding of purpose, significance, and relevancy in their reflective writings. Findings indicate that while both types of portfolios, electronic and traditional paper, contribute positively to students’ learning related to “connections to the course,” students completing an ePortfolio show heightened levels of metacognition in relation to “connections to learning” and “connections to career or personal goals."

Social justice goals are usually sought in civic or community settings in which stakeholders represent competing frameworks about what is just, good, and true. Modeling for students a way to identify these competing frameworks, and then intervene in deliberations to achieve just ends, is the focus of our assignment sequence. We examine civic deliberations over removing racist public symbols in this assignment for first-year students enrolled in linked rhetoric and philosophy courses. We read broadly in theories of public memory and civic identity, examine in depth one community’s deliberation, and reflect on public symbols in our home communities. The final joint assignment asks students to identify the principles that should guide deliberations about contested public symbols. We found that the assemblage of ideas that the students select from these pre-drafting activities shapes what they think is possible in the work of social justice; in other words, their own standpoint enables and limits what they see in the assemblage of ideas, sometimes limiting the arc of social justice insights and solutions, and sometimes unleashing it. For this reason, reflective writing is a necessary entwined process, one that can develop better awareness of how students’ epistemic norms shape their ability to imagine social justice ends. To most fully realize social justice knowledge, students must not stay bound within the contours of particular deliberations or inward reflection. Instead, assignments must enlarge the context, asking students to make bigger inquiries into history, context, and relations of domination.

a few months into the covid-19 pandemic, Marilyn Fischer and Judy Whipps were commiserating about an isolated future that seemed to stretch out with no end in sight. They came up with the idea of starting their own Scholars Circle, inspired by the November 2019 Feminist Pragmatist Colloquium in Rochester, New York. At that conference, participants could submit abstracts of work at any stage of development. Participants were grouped in small circles of three or four, with each person sharing their work and giving feedback and suggestions to the others. Participants at that conference were uniformly enthusiastic about how this format enriched their thinking and gave them a sense of support and camaraderie. As one of...

The “right to belong” is a human right in two ways. First, there is the right to belong in a limited sense, i.e., to the extent necessary for individuals to secure all other human rights, such as those recognized by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Second, there is a deeper aspect of the right to belong, that which is necessary to flourish as a human being. To establish, first, that the right to belong in a limited sense should be a human right, I draw upon Hannah Arendt’s claim that stateless persons are without rights, as only communities can grant them. I argue that this limited level of belonging is a necessary but insufficient condition for human flourishing. Full human flourishing requires belonging on a deeper level. To articulate the nature of this deeper level of belonging I draw on Simone Weil’s definition of the “need for roots” and John Dewey and Jane Addams’ constructions of the self as social. I then show how “belonging” in a deeper sense necessarily connects with how a person is perceived and received by individuals and institutions in a community and argue that full perception by and participation in a community is necessary for humans to flourish. Thus, the right to belong imposes an ethical obligation on other members of the community to perceive undocumented immigrants as full human persons with the potential to lead flourishing lives.

María Lugones’ concept of oppression and resistance, while being consonant with the American Pragmatist tradition, also furthers this tradition in important ways. Specifically, Lugones’ theory adds to our understanding of what it means to be oppressed as a necessarily transactional being by clarifying how oppression is woven (or “spatially mapped”) into our lived existence. In addition, her work offers an enhanced and more nuanced, interpersonal account of how, even in significantly oppressive situations, resistance is possible in and through the creation of “active subjectivity,” or what John Dewey might call “ethereal identities.” With active subjectivity, individuals mapped into otherwise oppressive locations are able to create “relational identities that did not precede the encounter,” doing so in the “in-between spaces” of our mapped existence, allowing for liberating resistance and coalitions that would not otherwise be possible.

St. John Fisher College's “health-care humanities” co-major, scheduled for implementation in Fall 2007, provides a systematic introduction to humanities for students pursuing degrees in the health sciences. The major includes a core focus on bioethics, an emphasis on methods, and opportunities for students to pursue internships. Providing a cultural and intellectual context for empirical and vocational programs, the health-care humanities co-major creates a focus for courses in philosophy, history, English, and religious studies and an interdisciplinary focus for the College’s mission-driven emphasis on social justice and diversity. The program will capitalize on rich local resources, including a major teaching hospital with a thriving medical humanities program; ultimately we hope that it will provide a curricular focus that distinguishes St. John Fisher locally and nationally. We will provide an overview of the program and discuss two courses, one in philosophy and one in history, that will be included in the program.

This paper calls into question the assumptions implicit in many traditional theories of moral agency; namely, the assumption that moral agency requires the agent to be disinterested, disengaged, and psychically distant in order to be a good moral agent, an agent worthy of moral praise. I explore the nature of what it means to be a moral agent and, more broadly, what it means to live well as a human being and apply this analysis to education. The arguments made are grounded in a naturalistic-transactional understanding of how the human being comes to be and continues to be in this world and spells out some of the implications of this understanding of the human individual for education. In addition, I suggest specifi c strategies for capitalizing on the transactional potential of the educational relationship between student and teacher. I argue that, if we take the human being to be a transactional being, i.e., an entity that comes into existence and continues to exist necessarily in and through co-constitutional exchanges with both human and non-human entities, then the role of education becomes central to this development of the individual. Further, it also becomes clear that education must be of a particular nature if it is going to foster the immediate and ongoing development of that individual as a fl ourishing human being. However, we must fi rst explore briefl y what is problematic about our traditional conception of education in order to see that change is required.