Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T11:45:18.217Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Storied Social Change: Recovering Jane Addams's Early Model of Constituent Storytelling to Navigate the Practical Challenges of Speaking for Others

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2021

Jennifer Kiefer Fenton
Jennifer Kiefer Fenton*
Affiliation:
The Center for Urban Research, Teaching, & Outreach (CURTO), Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin53233, USA
*
Corresponding author. Jennifer.Fenton@marquette.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay recovers Jane Addams's (1860–1935) practice of constituent storytelling as a resource for contemporary social-change-nonprofit professional practice and activism. Whereas feminist theorizing is rich with resources for theorizing about constituent storytelling, Addams, as both a publicly engaged philosopher and a social-change-nonprofit professional, is uniquely situated to provide practical ways forward for social-change practitioners navigating the lived complexities of speaking for others in light of spatial stratification, subordinating structures, and epistemic exclusion. As a hybrid activist-scholar situated across diverse spaces, Addams serves as a bridge between feminist theorizing about speaking for others, and practices of it among social-change-nonprofit professionals and activists. I show that Addams reveals new ways of thinking about the practice of constituent storytelling for social-change-nonprofit professionals. Namely, in this lived context, speaking for others entails speaking for them through one's own story. Responsible constituent storytelling names oneself as a speaker, owns one's own social standpoint in this rhetorical naming practice, and orients the story through one's own journey—a journey inevitably riddled with failures and faulty assumptions—toward democratic neighborship with the Other across difference.

Type
Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , Spring 2021 , pp. 391 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abdullah, Shaila. 2009. Saffron dreams: A novel. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Modern History Press.Google Scholar
Addams, Jane. 1893. The subjective necessity for social settlements. In Philanthropy and social progress: Seven essays, ed. Addams, Jane, Woods, Robert A., Huntington, Father J. O. S. Professor Giddings, Franklin H., and Bosanquet, Bernard. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Company.Google Scholar
Addams, Jane. 1902/2002. Democracy and social ethics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Addams, Jane. 1907/2005. Newer ideals of peace: The moral substitutes for war, ed. Sporer, Paul Dennis. Chester, N.Y.: Quanterness Press.Google Scholar
Addams, Jane. 1910/1990. Twenty years at Hull House with autobiographical notes. New York: The MacMillan Company.Google Scholar
Alcoff, Linda Martín. 1991. The problem of speaking for others. Cultural Critique 20 (Winter): 5–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bohman, James. 1996. Public deliberation: Pluralism, complexity, and democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Choudhury, Shakil. 2015. Deep diversity: Overcoming us vs. them. Toronto: Between the Lines.Google Scholar
Critchlow, Donald T., and Parker, Charles H., eds. 1998. With us always: A history of private charity and public welfare. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Cooper, Terry L. 1979. The hidden price tag: Participation costs and health planning. American Journal of Public Health 69 (4): 368–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cooper, Terry L. 2006. The responsible administrator: An approach to ethics for the administrative role, 6th ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.Google Scholar
Davis, Allen F. 2010. American heroine: The life and legend of Jane Addams. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.Google Scholar
Davis, Emmalon. 2016. Typecasts, tokens, and spokespersons: A case for credibility excess as testimonial injustice. Hypatia 31 (3): 485–501.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deegan, Mary Jo. 1988. Jane Addams and the men of the Chicago school, 1992–1918. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books.Google Scholar
Dessel, Adrienne, and Rogge, Mary E.. 2008. Evaluation of intergroup dialogue: A review of the empirical literature. Conflict Resolution Quarterly 26 (2): 199–238.10.1002/crq.230CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dewey, John. 1996. The collected works of John Dewey, 1882–1953 [electronic edition], ed. Hickman, Larry A.. 37 vols. Charlottesville, Va.: Intelex Corp.Google Scholar
Dieleman, Susan. 2012. Solving the problem of epistemic exclusion: A pragmatist feminist approach. In Contemporary feminist pragmatism, ed. Hamington, Maurice and Bardwell-Jones, Celia. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 2002. The Jane Addams reader. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Fischer, Marilyn. 1995. Philanthropy and injustice in Mill and Addams. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 24 (4): 281–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fischer, Marilyn. 2004. Democracy and Social Ethics, and: The Long Road of Woman's Memory (review). Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18 (1): 85–88.10.1353/jsp.2004.0004CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fischer, Marilyn. 2010. Jane Addams's feminist ethics. In Feminist interpretations of Jane Addams, ed. Tougas, Cecile. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Fischer, Marilyn. 2019. Jane Addams's evolutionary theorizing: Constructing “Democracy and Social Ethics .” Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gillman, Laura. 2013. Narrative as a resource for feminist practices of socially engaged inquiry: Marya Montero's In the Palm of Darkness. Hypatia 28 (3): 646–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamington, Maurice. 2001. Jane Addams and a politics of embodied care. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 15 (2): 105–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamington, Maurice. 2004. Embodied care: Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and feminist ethics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Hamington, Maurice. 2009. The social philosophy of Jane Addams. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Hassanein, Neva. 2008. Locating food democracy: Theoretical and practical ingredients. Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition 3 (2–3): 286–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Dan R., Huffman, Brandie L., and Jasper, Danny M.. 2014. Changing race boundary perception by reading narrative fiction. Basic and Applied Social Psychology 36 (1): 83–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knight, Louise W. 2010. Jane Addams: Spirit in action. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Knight, Louise W. 1991. Jane Addams and Hull House: Historical lessons on nonprofit leadership. Nonprofit Management & Leadership 2 (2): 125–141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leffers, Regina. 1993. Pragmatists Jane Addams and John Dewey inform the ethics of care. Hypatia 8 (2): 64–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levine, Jeremy R. 2016. The privatization of political representation: Community-based organizations as nonelected neighborhood representatives. American Sociological Review 81(6): 1251–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Make the Road New York (MRNY). n.d. Make the road New York. https://maketheroadny.org.Google Scholar
Mazzocco, Philip J., Green, Melanie C., Sasota, Jo A., and Jones, Norman W.. 2010. This story is not for everyone: Transportability and narrative persuasion. Social Psychological and Personality Science 1 (4): 361–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Medina, José. 2013. The epistemology of resistance: Gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
NPQ. 2018a. Museums: Nonprofits in the eye of the perfect narrative storm. Nonprofit Quarterly 25 (4): 48–62.Google Scholar
NPQ. 2018b. When someone steals your soul: Repatriating narratives in the nonprofit sector. Nonprofit Quarterly 25 (4): 28–30.Google Scholar
NPQ. 2019. When someone steals your soul: Repatriating narratives in the nonprofit sector [revised for online publication]. Nonprofit Quarterly, January 23. https://nonprofitquarterly.org/when-someone-steals-your-soul-repatriating-narratives-in-the-nonprofit-sector/.Google Scholar
SAIH (Norwegian Students' and Academics' International Assistance Fund). 2017. Radi-Aid Awards 2017. RadiAid: Africa for Norway. https://www.radiaid.com/radi-aid-awards-2017.Google Scholar
The Opportunity Agenda. 2015. Telling a new story: A collaborative checklist for social justice leaders using narrative strategies for change. https://www.opportunityagenda.org/explore/resources-publications/telling-new-story.Google Scholar
Ramasubramanian, Srividya. 2011. The impact of stereotypical versus counterstereotypical media exemplars on racial attitudes, causal attributions, and support for affirmative action. Communication Research 38 (4): 497–516.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, Rashad. 2018. Changing our narrative about narrative: The infrastructure required for building narrative power. Nonprofit Quarterly 25 (4): 36–43.Google Scholar
Saltmarshe, Ella. 2018. Using story to change systems. Stanford Social Innovation Review, February 20. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/using_story_to_change_systems.Google Scholar
Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. 1996. Pragmatism and feminism: Reweaving the social fabric. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. 1999. Socializing democracy: Jane Addams and John Dewey. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 29 (2): 207–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. 2002. Introduction to the Illinois edition. In Addams, Jane, Democracy and social ethics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Tomlinson, Barbara, and Lipsitz, George. 2020. Insubordinate spaces: Improvisation and accompaniment for social justice. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Treleaven, Sarah. 2017. Designing dignity in food banks. City Lab. Bloomberg, July 13. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/07/toronto-vegetarian-food-bank/533559/.Google Scholar
Villanueva, Edgar. 2018. Money as medicine: Leveraging philanthropy to decolonize wealth. Nonprofit Quarterly 25 (4): 44–47.Google Scholar
Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Young, Iris Marion. 1994. Gender as seriality: Thinking about women as a social collective. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19 (3): 713–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, Iris Marion. 2000. Inclusion and democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Walker, Margaret Urban. 2007. Moral understandings: A feminist study in ethics, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Weaver, Alaura. 2017. How changing the storyteller will cure the savior complex in social enterprise. Medium, December 11. https://medium.com/speaking-human/how-changing-the-storyteller-can-cure-the-savior-complex-in-social-enterprise-86ff0b864e4d.Google Scholar
Whipps, Judy. 2004. Jane Addams's social thought as a model for a pragmatist-feminist communitarianism. Hypatia 19 (2): 118–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whipps, Judy, and Lake, Danielle. 2017. Pragmatist feminism. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 edition), ed. Zalta, Edward N.. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/femapproach-pragmatism/.Google Scholar
Narratives, Working. 2013. Working Narratives. https://workingnarratives.org.Google Scholar
Zingaro, Linde. 2009. Speaking out: Storytelling for social change. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar