Beyond Reflexivity and Advocacy
Pre-Conference Homework
Scott L. Pratt
What are the top five questions/obsessions/visionary hopes/productive doubts/topics that
currently occupy your contemplations about research? [Approximately 1 page]
I’ve been occupied with two large writing projects and have been focused on these (roughly) five issues:
(1) The process of canon formation in the American philosophical tradition and its implications for ongoing
research;
(2) an effort to understand ontology, epistemology, and ethics in terms of agency in light of
(3) a genealogy of agency in North America and my hypothesis that the dominant conception of agency
emerged from the policy and practices of the genocide of American Indians after the U.S. Civil War;
(4) developing a non-Native interpretation of the Indigenous philosophical tradition of resistance whose
formulations of agency are a live alternative to the dominant conception; and
(5) seeking ways of applying the resulting conceptions of ontology, epistemology and ethics to the work of
philosophers and social scientists.
List five books/articles/performances/installations/experiences that have been very useful to your
recent thinking about the conference themes? (They can be recent or classic readings, academic or not
academic, artifacts, performances, events, ceremonies, etc.) Say briefly why each of these has been significant
to you. Please provide links, jpegs, or pdfs where appropriate. [Approximately 1 page]
1. “Philosophy and Civilization” by John Dewey. Philosophy, Dewey wrote, "sustains the closest connection
with the history of culture, with the succession of changes in civilization. It is fed by the streams of tradition,
traced at critical moments to their sources in order that the current may receive a new direction…. But
philosophy is not just a passive reflex of civilization that persists through changes…. [P]hilosophy marks a
change of culture. In forming patterns to be conformed to in future thought and action, it is additive and
transforming in its role in the history of civilization." Philosophical method, then, is understood as one
necessarily connected with self-reflexive praxis bound to particular histories that will have real consequences
in experience. Dewey’s conception of philosophy as transformative culture-work provides a starting point for
rethinking the philosophical canon and seeing philosophical praxis in new ways. As my colleague, Erin
McKenna, and I finish our revisionist history of American Philosophy, I am interested in the lessons from
this history as a starting point for examining not just philosophical method, but the widely shared methods of
inquiry at work in understanding and transforming American communities today. Combined with Dewey’s
pragmatism (especially as developed in Experience and Nature and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry), philosophy must
be seen as a critical and constructive project that can affirm radical pluralism and projects of liberation and
decolonization.
2. God is Red, by Vine Deloria, Jr. It was in the work of Deloria that I came to understand the radical
alternatives presented at the intersection of American Indian and European American thought. Combined
with other key works in 19th and 20th century American Indian thought including work by Charles Eastman,
Zitkala-Sa, Luther Standing Bear, Gerald Vizenor, George Tinker and others, it is clear that even as the
dominant culture seeks to eliminate cultural and ontological difference, there stands a philosophical tradition
of resistance that speaks to both American Indian and non-Native peoples. What is common across these
philosophers is a shared conception of agency that can support a fundamental shift in how mainstream
philosophers and social scientists think about their work and its implications.
3. Meeting the Universe Halfway, by Karen Barad. It is easy to imagine (especially in the critiques of Western
thought by indigenous philosophers) that European descended philosophy has little to offer in the context of
decolonizing projects. A closer look at the tradition, however, suggests that even as the dominant strand of
philosophy and culture developed and affirmed a narrow conception of agency in support of its colonial
projects, there remained a resistant strand of thinking within European descended philosophy. Barad’s
conception of agential realism (drawn from Neils Bohr on one hand and contemporary feminist critical
theory on the other) holds that the world is agential at every level. Her work, combined with recent material
feminism (particularly the work of Donna Haraway), provide a crucial starting point within the dominant
tradition for understanding the tradition’s limits and marking contact points with other philosophies that can
support shared efforts to transform experience.
4. The Problem of Christianity, by Josiah Royce. Royce is a largely forgotten philosopher born in Grass Valley,
California in 1855 and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1916. His fate in the discipline is usually
attributed to his philosophical idealism (though he called himself a pragmatist) but it probably had more to do
with his radical theories of community and agency, which challenged dominant conceptions then and now.
Despite his invisibility, Royce’s work on community provided a framework for W. E. B. Du Bois’s
conception of race and Alain Locke’s vision of democracy. It also was a resource for the Civil Rights
movement and a source for Martin Luther King’s conception the “Beloved Community.” And Cornel West
called on Royce’s conceptions of failure and sacrifice as a way to transform Deweyan pragmatism into a view
that could respond to racial oppression and foster diverse communities. At its center, Royce’s theory of
community undercuts the essential commitments of Enlightenment philosophy to the priority of autonomous
individuals, objective truth, and transcendent moral imperatives. In their place, Royce presents rationality as
purposive agency that is not reserved for human individuals or possible outside of the complex relations of
communities (who are also agents). Using C. S. Peirce’s semiotic theory, Royce offered a unique conception
of the structure of communities that has implications for qualitative research design and its place as part of
liberatory and decolonial projects.
5. The Long Road of Woman’s Memory, by Jane Addams. Addams’s work represents the application of
pragmatism to the problems of the community. Long Road is a work of theory and practice: at once presenting
a conception of socially transformative research and a case for its practice and, at the same time, a work that
addressed the problems faced by the immigrant women of the Halstead Street neighborhood in Chicago in
1915. Addams marks the first of a long line of American thinkers—including Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
Dewey, Du Bois, D’Arcy McNickle, Rachel Carson, leaders of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements,
community activists including Mary Parker Follett, Saul Alinsky, and Cesar Chavez among many others—
who view social science research as continuous with social reform. Recovering the work of these historical
figures can be a corrective to the narrowness that has come to characterize present theory and can offer fresh
insight into how we can go forward.
What are five questions you would like to pose to fellow participants at the conference? (These may be
directed to specific persons, disciplinary groups, or to all participants.) [Approximately 1/2 page]
Given that fostering agency is an important way to look at the goals of education (whether the goal is to
foster good citizens or projects of humanization or critical thinking), it is important to understand what
agency means. In this context, I’d offer the following questions:
1. What is an agent?
2. What is the place of purpose in your understanding of agency?
3. How does your conception of agency afford and constrain your research?
4. What responsibilities do you, as an investigator, have in the context of your work as a result of your
conception of agency?
5. In the process of theory-building, what are the implications of your conception of agency for how the
process is conducted across sharp differences (e.g. how are non-Native scholars to proceed in engaging
indigenous theories of agency)?
What intersections of two (or more) categories of the conference readings are you finding most
compelling and why? [Approximately 1/2 page]
While I think that there are strong connections between the New Materialism and work among Indigenous
philosophers, I think that the intersection between them deserves careful attention. Vanessa Watts’s paper,
“Indigenous place-thought and agency amongst humans and non-humans,” is a key text in this context. She
argues that agency “circulates” differently in Indigenous worlds (here Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe) and in
the “Euro-Western” world. Echoing the work of many American Indian philosophers from a variety of
traditions, Watts observes that agency in the Western world is narrowly confined to humans while in
Indigenous worlds, “all elements of nature possess agency, and this agency is not limited to innate action or
causal relationships.”
It is easy to see how this view stands in sharp contrast with the dominant liberal model of human agency.
What is important for our conversation is that Watts also sees a tension between Indigenous conceptions of
agency and the conceptions of agency that have emerged in New Materialism. For example, Watts quotes
Alaimo: “Dirt demonstrates an agency without agents, a foundational, perpetual becoming that happens
without will or intention or delineation.” And she concludes about Kirby’s conception that while action by
humans must be understood as purposive, actions by other “natural agents” are “random and therefore
unintentioned.” Watts’s concern is that despite recognizing non-human agency, Alaimo and Kirby, and in
different ways Latour and others, preserve a hierarchy between human and non-human agents and adopt a
form of what she calls “subjugated agency.” The lesson from Watts is that a broader conception of agency is
required if New Materialist theory is to learn from Indigenous theory. Agency, in this case, will need to
include a general conception of purpose that does not assume the priority of human purposes or the authority
of human agency over the rest of “nature.”
Can you provide five key words you would like to see and hear less of in fields of social inquiry? No
explanation required, but you may offer commentary if you wish. [Approximately 1/2 page]
Since I write in Philosophy, five terms I would like see mentioned less often in my field are:
Autonomy, Mind, supervenience, Kant, and Neo-pragmatism.
Can you provide five key words you would like to see and hear more of in fields of social
inquiry? No explanation required, but you may offer commentary if you wish. [Approximately 1/2 page]
Community, purpose, Indigeneity, American genocide, and responsible philosophical method.