Jane Drexler

In this essay, Drexler reflects broadly on our practices as philosophy teachers: how we think of our classrooms and design students’ learning experiences, how we evaluate ourselves and our teaching, and generally, how we keep walking into the classroom each semester. Based on a talk she delivered in 2020, Drexler’s contribution to this issue presents a series of “chapters” of an “enchiridion” for teaching: a handbook of loosely-connected reflections, principles, and strategies for teaching Philosophy as a Way of Life, and for teaching (philosophy) as a way of life.

This essay explores the value of oppositional, performative political action in the context of oppression, domination, and exclusionary political spheres. Rather than adopting Iris Marion Young's approach, Drexler turns to Hannah Arendt's theories of political action in order to emphasize the capacity of political action as action to intervene in and disrupt the constricting, politically devitalizing, necrophilic normalizations of proceduralism and routine, and thus to reorient the importance of contestatory action as enabling and enacting creativity, spontaneity, and resistance.

This essay explores the value of oppositional, performative political action in the context of oppression, domination, and exclusionary political spheres. Rather than adopting Iris Marion Young's approach, Drexler turns to Hannah Arendt's theories of political action in order to emphasize the capacity of political action as action to intervene in and disrupt the constricting, politically devitalizing, necrophilic normalizations of proceduralism and routine, and thus to reorient the importance of contestatory action as enabling and enacting creativity, spontaneity, and resistance.

This dissertation Politics Improper: Radical Democratic Feminist Political Theory, Hannah Arendt, and the Political Importance of the Inappropriate , draws on contemporary democratic feminist ethical and political theory, critical race theory and Hannah Arendt's work in an attempt to both understand and add to the theorization of political action. Framing this project primarily around the work of Iris Marion Young and Maria Pia Lara, and their indebtedness to Habermasian Communicative Ethics, this dissertation examines the theoretical possibilities, and limits, to the turn to Arendt in order to complement and fortify, or else to depart from, Habermas's theories of the public sphere. This dissertation argues that Young's and Lara's revaluations of contestatory political action is invaluable for democratic theory under conditions of oppression and domination. However, their adherence to a Habermasian conceptual framework ultimately reveals significant limitations to their revaluations of practices of dissent. ;By introducing the phrase "Politics Improper," this dissertation articulates a need to re-investigate oppositional, performative political action in order to determine what it can reveal about contemporary possibilities for deepening democratic practice. In utilizing Arendt's theories of action, and in focusing attention on the importance Arendt places on the sheer act of doing rather than behaving, particularly in the context of "dark times," I explore the extent to which deep democracy can be more fully understood by focusing on those elements of the "improper" inherent in oppositional performative acts. I gauge the "political importance of the inappropriate" through an Arendtian understanding of freedom as public and political, and as primarily concerned with doing, creating, and dispersing

: This essay explores the value of oppositional, performative political action in the context of oppression, domination, and exclusionary political spheres. Rather than adopting Iris Marion Young's approach, Drexler turns to Hannah Arendt's theories of political action in order to emphasize the capacity of political action as action to intervene in and disrupt the constricting, politically devitalizing, necrophilic normalizations of proceduralism and routine, and thus to reorient the importance of contestatory action as enabling and enacting creativity, spontaneity, and resistance.

This article explores the value of teaching Environmental Ethics as an introductory-level general education course for non-majors. It focuses on how philosophy can help students discern multiple voices within discourses, texts and thinking, and by doing so disrupt several untenable mental paradigms that new and underprepared students often bring with them to college: fixed and dualistic notions of truth, relativistic conceptions of difference, and decontextualized approaches to issues and ideas. This article also presents examples of class activities that are designed to foster multivocal thinking and that are also manageable for faculty with high teaching loads.