Abstract

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 fostering and sustaining relationships across difference, engaging with soft systems mapping, and 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.