What does Jane Addams's approach to social change offer to publicly engaged scholars and activists today? This essay explores several dimensions of Addams's work that have been misinterpreted and overlooked, putting these aspects of her work into conversation with research on endeavors to move higher education toward civic democratic engagement. The goal is to visualize opportunities and strategies for more inclusive and democratic engagement with issues across local, regional, and global communities. In particular, this essay explores how Addams's place-based, boundary-spanning methods of engagement provide strategies for more inclusive and collaborative philosophical activism, including (1) fostering and sustaining relationships across difference, (2) engaging with soft systems mapping, and (3) using synthetic imagination in crafting transdisciplinary engaged narratives. In conjunction with research on social change and creative innovation, Addams's work highlights the potential value of collaborative and democratic endeavors across difference as a means toward more radical imaginaries and relational revolution.

My mother is losing her mother to Alzheimer's disease. Although my mother feels loss, I am connecting through my (maternal) grandmother to our ancestors, including a deceased father and paternal grandmother. I am also connecting to a daughter who has lost her mother, through a (maternal) grandmother who, through her loss of memory, is more open to kin networks than my mother. Through deepening connections to my maternal grandmother and to my daughter, I feel I am losing my mother. I look to revolutionary mothering as a way to reconnect shattered bonds and find lost mothers. This article honors the important work of Saidiya Hartman, Dorothy Roberts, and countless revolutionary mothers.

In what sense do people doubt their understanding of reality when subject to gaslighting? I suggest that an answer to this question depends on the linguistic order at which a gaslighting exchange takes place. This marks a distinction between first-order and second-order gaslighting. The former occurs when there is disagreement over whether a shared concept applies to some aspect of the world, and where the use of words by a speaker is apt to cause hearers to doubt their interpretive abilities without doubting the accuracy of their concepts. The latter occurs when there is disagreement over which concept should be used in a context, and where the use of words by a speaker is apt to cause hearers to doubt their interpretive abilities in virtue of doubting the accuracy of their concepts. Many cases of second-order gaslighting are unintentional: its occurrence often depends on contingent environmental facts. I end the article by focusing on the distinctive epistemic injustices of second-order gaslighting: (1) metalinguistic deprivation, (2) conceptual obscuration, and (3) perspectival subversion. I show how each reliably has sequelae in terms of psychological and practical control.

The COVID-19 pandemic affects everyone, a statement that is true by definition, yet woefully unhelpful in our understanding of it and its effects today and in the future. Thus we find ourselves in a moment unprepared for the fast-approaching, unanticipated future. Under stable conditions, we might operate with a “good working model of an anticipated ‘future’” to speculate on our preparedness for the possible (Adams, Murphy, and Clarke 2009, 247). Or we may speculate in order to reimagine social relations within new ethical frameworks (Jones 2015). We anticipate what we imagine and envision as possible (Adams, Murphy, and Clarke 2009). We are writing and thinking about this not under stable conditions, but in the early moments of the COVID-19 pandemic when anticipation of and speculation about what is to come is being challenged and contradicted daily in the news cycle by government officials, experts, and everyday citizens. Our thinking, as well as this contribution to the scholarship on the COVID-19 crisis, is defined by an ineluctable tension about what is and what might be. In this musing, we attempt to flesh out just one aspect of the COVID-19 crisis: the anticipatory and speculative nature of COVID-19 thinking. We direct our attention during this time of crisis to how different forms of ethical thinking are joining up, interweaving, and braiding. By framing ethics in the context of anticipation, our aim is to capture threads of anticipation and speculation that may be used to tether attempts to create the future with, after, or beyond the novel coronavirus and/or the next crisis.

Mary Parker Follett was a feminist-pragmatist American philosopher, a social-settlement worker, a founding figure in the community centers movement, a mediator of labor disputes, and a theorist of political and social organization and management. I argue that she is a model for a certain kind of public philosopher, and I unpack the respects in which she serves as such a model. I emphasize both her virtues as a public thinker and the role played in her work by the process of integration and the creative process.

This essay collects four decades of my own reflections, as an anthropologist and feminist, on gender and coloniality across various contexts in Latin America. It also highlights the decolonial methodology and vocabulary that I have had to develop in my various roles as scholar, public intellectual, and expert witness over the years. Briefly, what I present here is a decolonial feminist perspective that argues for the existence of a patriarchal political order in communal societies before colonization. Yet, in my view, precolonial gender has a dual structure that is plural in essence and differs markedly from the binary gender structure of colonial-modern societies, which works in terms of a One and its marginalized others. As I argue, the capturing and transformation of precolonial dual gender structures by the modern gender system exacerbates inequality, increases violence against women, and disempowers them politically. For that reason, I speak of “low-intensity” and “high-intensity” patriarchal systems.

In her highly influential 1984 study Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, Kristin Luker speculates that opposition to legal abortion among women was likely to be strongest among those who were full-time homemakers without a college education (Luker 1984, 163). But despite a marked decline in that demographic group and a well-documented rise in public support for gender equality since then, the rate of support for legal abortion has remained stubbornly fixed at between fifty and fifty-five percent (Shields 2012). This tepid support has coincided with a steep decline in abortion services in rural states, and ever more sweeping restrictions on abortion being tested in the courts (Rose 2006, 89). Karissa Haugeberg's Women against Abortion and Katie Watson's Scarlet A both seek to address this state of affairs, albeit in markedly different ways. Haugeberg provides a historical chronicle of the motives and strategies of certain key women activists in the fight against legal abortion, with an eye toward how their concerns “came to serve as blueprints to legislators and judges who continue to craft policies and laws that erode women's right to abortion” (Haugeberg, 8). Katie Watson draws upon her experience as an attorney and bioethicist to write a guide “intended to encourage and equip you to engage in respectful, productive, private conversation about your experience with, and opinion of, abortion” (Watson, 37). Though both authors reveal their support for legal abortion, both are concerned to understand the motives and goals of those who fight against it.

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.