Tess Varner

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...

This essay invites a recovery of "wildness" as a way for philosophers to respond to the present moment which includes: an ongoing global pandemic, economic uncertainty, increasing cultural division, and a crisis in higher education broadly that persistently threatens the status of philosophy programs. Drawing on the American thinkers John William Miller and John Dewey and elaborating on their own philosophical defenses of liberal education, I propose a turn to wildness and freedom in our pedagogies through active and embodied philosophical pedagogy, including field philosophy. I offer two examples of courses that begin to invite wildness into the process of philosophical inquiry. The aim of this essay is to consider how wildness in teaching and learning and in doing philosophy might make philosophy stay alive.

This paper offers an overview of Grace Lee Boggs's community-based and person-centered philosophy and pedagogy, highlighting how education can foster social responsibility and create democratic habits in students, better equipping them to create radical change within their communities. The essay demonstrates Boggs's commitment to philosophical-activist pedagogy and its alignment with a feminist-pragmatist approach, which emphasizes lived experience, pluralism, complexity, and equality, as well as praxis. The essay then considers how Boggs's philosophical activism can be enacted inside and outside the traditional classroom, concluding by describing an educational and activist project called Narrative 4.

If nations could overcome the mutual fear and distrust whose sombre shadow is now thrown over the world, and could meet with confidence and good will to settle their possible differences, they would easily be able to establish a lasting peace.in an age of empire, hospitality is, in many ways, politically subversive—challenging dominant and prolific racist rhetoric, anti-immigrant fervor, increasing nationalism, and more. Mutual fear and distrust are now commonplace. In what follows, I explore which practices of hospitality can be resistant toward that fear and distrust, and I use a pragmatist-feminist lens to consider hospitality's potential for producing political action and creating new realities.The language of...