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Outside the Ivory Tower
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| Bonnie Mann believes philosophy can be a path to social justice. |
Almost 25 years ago, Bonnie Mann took an Introduction to Philosophy course that redefined her life. The instructor taught a philosophical method based upon the reflection of experience and, throughout his course, challenged his students to explore the particular experiences of injustice, inequality and oppression. When that influential instructor later lost his job, Mann organized a sit-in and hunger strike protesting the decision. “This was my first experience with activism,” she says. But it certainly wasn’t her last.
After college, Mann spent over a decade working in battered women’s shelters, homeless shelters, and ESL classrooms. Committed to working for social change, she mostly focused on women’s issues, but also participated in anti-war and anti-racism movements. “I was profoundly conscious of the way that poverty constrains lives in the U.S.,” she says. “[The work] evolved out of a general sense that each of us bears some responsibility in fighting social injustice.”
Eventually, though, just as academia led Mann to activism, activism led Mann back to academia. “[As activists,] a crisis-response focus too often prevented us from thinking in any careful way about what we were doing,” Mann says. “I craved the kind of careful and rigorous thinking that I experienced in certain academic contexts.”
After graduate studies in Germany and New York, Mann joined the UO’s philosophy department in Fall 2003 as an assistant professor. She says she was drawn to UO because of its distinction of offering feminist philosophy as a core tradition.
“My entire focus as a scholar,” she says, “is on tracing, recuperating, developing, teaching a philosophical tradition — feminist philosophy — that is . . . intimately tied to the social movement we call feminism.” Instead of viewing social change and academic work as dichotomous pursuits, Mann sees a link between them. In her work, she seeks answers to the same questions of power, gender and justice that are asked by the feminist movement.
Recently, Mann presented a paper to the Symposium of the International Association of Women Philosophers, which critically analyzed the linguistic aesthetics of the “Shock and Awe” campaign in Iraq. Her next paper will deconstruct sex and gender distinctions, using UO women’s basketball games as one example. Mann will discuss “the embodied ‘style’ of the players [versus] that of the cheerleaders.” This fall, she teaches courses including Social and PoliticalPhilosophy: Power, War and Gender and Feminism and Philosophy.
After nearly a decade in social services, Mann embraces her return to academia. “I see my work now as a way of doing both things: the research provides the intellectual engagement and the teaching provides the social/intellectual engagement,” she says.
She acknowledges certain tensions between philosophy and politics. “Philosophy has traditionally defined itself in opposition to politics: a life of contemplation was held to be superior to a life of action, thinking was held to be superior to doing.” But Mann still believes, as she did years ago, that philosophy offers a path to social justice.
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1245 University of Oregon • Eugene, OR • 97403-1245
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Copyright © 2004 University of Oregon
Updated October 28, 2004
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