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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
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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

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