Publicly Engaged Scholarship

Learn about how I share my research in non-traditional settings. Julian Hayda with Lake Effect, Milwaukee's NPR WUWM 89.7 features me in his exploration of freedom, rights, and community in the context of COVID-19 anti-quarantine protests. ​​
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Protestors wave signs and American flags at a Reopen Massachusetts Rally outside of the Massachusetts State House on May 4 in Boston, Mass.
Read and Listen to the Interview Here
Activists Sue To Reopen Wisconsin, As Civil Rights Debates Rage On

Research Overview

My research broadly focuses on social and political philosophy. I am especially interested in analyzing “exclusion” in my work, which I argue has economic, social, and communicative dimensions. In both my more theoretical work and practical and applied work, I am particularly interested in defending the value of inclusive participatory processes on ethical, epistemic, and economic/pragmatic justifications. ​

  1. Historical Schools: Early 20th century conceptions of democratic socialism and the Social Settlement Movement
  2. Historical Influences: Jane Addams, John Dewey, Iris Marion Young, and Grace Lee Boggs
  3. Contemporary Schools: Critical Normative Democratic Theory and Feminist Pragmatist Ethics and Epistemology
  4. Applied Philosophy: Public Administration; Nonprofit Leadership; Organizational Democracy; Human Services; Clinical Ethics

Theoretical Foundations and Historical Inspiration

My more theoretical work aims to develop an Ethics of Inclusive Political Communication for contemporary participatory democracy theory. This work draws on American philosophers and progressive reformers, Jane Addams (1860-1935) and John Dewey (1859-1952) to develop and defend a feminist Pragmatist social epistemology for communicative democracy, in order to provide a philosophical framework in normative democracy theory that can make conceptual space to name and address the communicative dimensions of deliberative inequality. Much of this historical work is oriented towards contemporary literatures in Pragmatist feminism, critical social epistemology, and Iris Marion Young's (1949-2006) Communicative Democracy. ​
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Jane Addams leaving Mercy Hospital

What is Feminist Pragmatism? 

As I develop it, a feminist Pragmatist worldview rejects traditional Enlightenment and colonizing ideals of liberal individualism that reduces community to contractual relationships. Against this small view of humanity, a feminist Pragmatist worldview embraces values of:
  • Interconnection, interdependency, and community
  • Inclusion of diverse perspectives for identifying and defining problems
  • Incorporation of ongoing feedback loops in program development and implementation
  • Facilitation of safe space for coordinated, exploratory thought and experimental problem solving
  • Acknowledgement of one's own social perspective in those processes
  • Sensitivity to how social perspectives impact our standing to be seen as "knowers" in communities of inquiry.

Application and Community Engagement

In my more applied work, I bring this theoretical and historical body of research into conversation with contemporary professional practice in public administration and nonprofit professional practice and organizational structures. I am especially interested in mapping this research onto nonprofit professional practice at the intersection of human services and healthcare industries, and among professionals working with community-based organizations in the social justice and social change nonprofit sector. Why are democratic norms and practices like inclusion and accessibility, administrative transparency, and participation valuable? And how can organizations institutionalize inclusive organizational cultures, design safe channels for dissent, and empower vibrant avenues for feedback to obtain deeper organizational health and empower stakeholders into fuller agency?

Writing Samples​

Storied Social Change: Recovering Jane Addams's Early Model of Constituent Storytelling to Navigate the Practical Challenges of Speaking for Others [Forthcoming, Hypatia​]
Inspiration: This paper emerged from my time teaching a graduate seminar on Public Service Ethics at Marquette University. Students all were professionals working in the social change nonprofit sector, and many of their organizations worked in partnership with Milwaukee community members striving to live a dignified life despite the challenges of urban poverty and social, economic, and racial inequalities in the southeastern Wisconsin region. Together we struggled with concerns about elitist-saviorism and white-saviorism.  In these honest and thoughtful conversations we repeatedly returned to a question and challenge: Under what conditions, if at all, can social change nonprofit professionals and activists, tell the stories of their constituents and 'speak for others'? Linda Alcoff posed a similar question for feminist theory almost 30 years ago, “Is the discursive practice of speaking for others ever a valid practice, and, if so, what are the criterion for validity? In particular, is it ever valid to speak for others who are unlike me or who are less privileged than me?” This paper celebrates this journey with my students, and recovers Jane Addams's (1860-1935) practice of constituent storytelling as a resource for contemporary social change nonprofit professional practice and activism.
Jennifer Kiefer Fenton - Storied Social Change
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Unpacking Problematic Philosophic Assumptions in the Implicit Bias Project: Suggestions for Restructuring Research and Reframing Training [Presentation]
Inspiration: This working paper also emerged from my time teaching a graduate seminar on Public Service Ethics at Marquette University. In conversation before a class session, course participants working in the social change nonprofit sector vented frustrations with implicit bias training programs they had recently and previously attended. Together we unpacked this problem as a problem of a training program based in a "thin" conception of racism. In this working paper I suggest a restructuring of what it is we are talking about when we say, "implicit bias", and a reframing of training in response to that. Reframing this research project makes conceptual space to reveal and make central the patterns of social relations that produce the categorical content of these things we are calling "implicit biases" themselves - what we can call, "social-structural racism". This leads me to make 2 recommendations for social equity nonprofits and consulting firms interested to develop racial sensitive training programs:
  1. First, that they reframe the phenomenon they are describing (“implicit biases”) in terms of “habits of thought and patterns of communication”. 
  2. Second, that they situate such habits and patterns in a relational ontology through introducing the notion of “the collective social imagination” to discourse and training.
Jennifer Kiefer Fenton - Reimagining Implicit Bias Training
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"“Anyone can be Angry, That’s Easy”: A Normative Account of Anti-Corporate Anger"(2015). Business & Professional Ethics Journal, 34:3 (Fall): 329-351.
Abstract: Literature in feminist ethics and care ethics has emphasized the value of the emotions for resisting injustice, particularly anger, on the basis of their motivational force, epistemic insight, and normative content. I point to flaws in this approach and introduce an Aristotelian account of anti-corporate anger that establishes normative conditions for which to (1) evaluate the justifiability of the target of negative emotions and (2) evaluate the justifiability of the expression of negative emotions. I look to this account as the basis for defending a corporate culture account of corporate moral personhood. In closing I consider the Occupy Wall Street movement for further insights into the complex nature of anti-corporate anger and corporate moral personhood.
'Our Feet are Mired in the Same Soil': Deepening Democracy with the Political Virtue of Sympathetic Inquiry [Dissertation, Open Access]
Abbreviated Abstract: This dissertation puts American philosophers and social reformers, Jane Addams (1860-1935) and John Dewey (1859-1952), in conversation with contemporary social and political philosopher, Iris Marion Young (1949-2006), to argue that an account of deliberative equality must make conceptual space to name the problem of 'communicatively structured deliberative inequality'. Addams and Dewey, like Young, saw exclusion as a serious social and political problem, and they looked to democratic norms and practices as a resource for social justice. The project ultimately argues that in order for participatory democracy theory to imagine and construct genuinely inclusive deliberative spaces, it must be grounded in a relational ontology and a Pragmatist feminist social epistemology.