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'Our Feet Are Mired In The Same Soil': Deepening Democracy With The Political Virtue Of Sympathetic Inquiry, Jennifer Lynn Kiefer Fenton

Dissertations (1934 -)

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’. I argue that in order for participatory democracy theory to imagine and construct genuinely inclusive deliberative spaces, it must be grounded in a relational ontology and pragmatist feminist social epistemology. The literature has largely developed deliberative inequality in terms of access (e.g., participation costs) and ‘impoverished capacities’ for political participation (e.g., political-process …