- Thursday, November 17, 2022
- 3:30 PM–5:00 PM
- Hiemenga Classroom 336
Dr. Emmalon Davis, Calvin philosophy alumna Professor of Philosophy at University of Michigan, will return to Calvin for a guest lecture.
In her brief public political career (from 1831-1833), abolitionist Maria Stewart advanced a multi-genre manifesto advocating for the complete liberation of African descendants in America. In Stewart’s work, however, one can trace two seemingly opposed philosophical trajectories. On one hand, Stewart espouses an insurrectionist approach rooted in a kind of militarism and violence. On the other, she employs a pacifist logic of moral persuasion that relies on appeals to the rationality and sympathy of others. In this project, I attend to the question of how to read Stewart without obscuring or disregarding apparent contradictions in her politics. My query is motivated by an interest in how attention to Stewart’s thought can inform contemporary approaches to paradoxes arising at the intersections of public political theorizing, private acts of resistance, and collective organizing.
About the Speaker
Emmalon Davis is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She specializes in ethics, social and political philosophy, and epistemology. Much of Davis’s work explores the social processes through which knowledge is collectively developed and disseminated within and across communities. In particular, she looks at how race and gender oppression exert a distorting influence over these processes. Davis’s work has appeared in academic journals such as Hypatia, Ethics, and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. She is currently working on a project exploring the political philosophy of black feminist abolitionist Maria Stewart. This research is supported by fellowships from the ACLS and from the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, where she is in residence for the academic year. Davis received her Ph.D. from Indiana University, Bloomington in 2017, and her BA from Calvin College in 2010. Before coming to Michigan in 2019, she was an assistant professor at The New School for Social Research.