JDS 2025: 2025 John Dewey Society Annual Meeting Johns Hopkins University, Kimpton Inner Harbor Baltimore, MD, United States, March 6-8, 2025 |
| Conference website | https://www.johndeweysociety.org/conferences/2025-Baltimore/ |
| Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=jds2025 |
| Abstract registration deadline | November 15, 2024 |
| Submission deadline | November 15, 2024 |
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John Dewey in Baltimore: Past, Present and Future
The 81st conference of the John Dewey Society,
co-sponsored by the Masters in Liberal Arts Program,
Johns Hopkins University,
and held in collaboration with
the Philosophy of Education Society Annual Meeting
Baltimore, MD (USA)
March 6-8, 2025
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Due: November 15, 2024
The John Dewey Society aims to foster intelligent inquiry into the pressing social problems of our time, especially pertaining to the place and function of education in resolving such problems, as well as to share, discuss, and disseminate the results of such inquiries.
The John Dewey Society invites paper and alternative session proposals for its annual meeting, to be held in Baltimore, MD in tandem with the Philosophy of Education Society Annual Meeting (Klimpton Hotel Monaco Inner Harbor). Come join us for scholarship, community, and experiential learning in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor!
To acknowledge the wide impact of Dewey’s work across philosophical scholarship, community organizing, education, and more, we issue a broad and open call. We seek submissions that take up the ideas and spirit of Dewey’s thinking in new and creative ways, as well as proposals that examine the roots of that thinking. We welcome papers and session proposals that apply Deweyan approaches to engage philosophical issues and analyze social, political, and educational situations. We request proposals that use a Deweyan lens to provide direction in challenging times and environments. We invite papers and session proposals that continue the Deweyan legacy by opening new conversations – critical and constructive -- about the continued relevance of the American Pragmatist tradition and its iterations throughout the world.
In 2025, we meet in Baltimore and, in a pragmatist spirit (see Spencer 2020), we seek to take seriously the reality of that actual place across time as we frame our conference theme and, by extension, our presence in Baltimore:
John Dewey in Baltimore: Past, Present, and Future
Some potentially provocative observations about Baltimore:
- Baltimore is the site of John Dewey’s doctoral studies – at the brand-new Johns Hopkins University -- between 1882 and 1884. JHU is the place where Dewey wrote a dissertation on Kant’s psychology, studied predominantly with neo-Hegelian George Sylvester Morris, and utterly failed to appreciate the potential of Charles Sanders Peirce’s logic. Dewey left Baltimore, following Morris to Michigan without (apparently) engaging the rich, if fraught, African American history of the city and before coming to know the women (especially Alice Chapman and Jane Addams) who would redirect his intellectual energy. But even in Baltimore, Dewey wrote to W.T. Harris about two elements that would mark his future work: first, “It is this question of method in philosophy which interests me the most just at present,” and, second, “Ethics and Education are pretty much identical in [G. Stanley Hall’s] broad and suggestive treatment of them,” a position that Dewey would come to articulate from a pragmatist perspective. As Dewey suggested in “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” all of this left a “permanent deposit in [his] thinking.”
- Baltimore is its own particular place, built in the colonial era on the tribal lands of the Piscataway and Susquehannock peoples, below the Mason-Dixon Line but north of DC, just west of Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad, with a once bustling harbor-turned-tourist attraction, and a pretty great baseball stadium. When John Dewey studied there, Baltimore had a population near 350,000. The population swelled to over a million around the time that Alain Locke organized the Black Arts exhibit of 1939 and W.E.B. DuBois took a home there to be near his school teacher daughter, and has dropped in recent years to 620,000 as white flight took hold and work at the docks disappeared. Unfortunately,the expanse of the city requires a larger tax-paying population to support its infrastructure.
- Much was happening in Baltimore in the period between 1870 and 1920, specifically the kind of social and economic developments (and upheaval) that would be of great interest to Dewey later on, i.e. to the Dewey who learned from Jane Addams in Chicago how to read the city and its inhabitants. Frederick Douglas and Thurgood Marshall are both sons of Baltimore. James Baldwin had family roots on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The DuBois Circle, an association of (always appropriate) activist Black women was founded in that period and persists to this day. But there was also required racial segregation in Baltimore at the start of the 20th century.
- Culturally and intellectually, Baltimore has a vibrant, though not always well known, Black history. The Baltimore Afro-American was founded as a vehicle for democratic community in 1893. Its rich African American heritage can be seen in the arts, from Alain Locke’s Baltimore exhibit in 1939 to today’s retrospective of the art of Joyce Scott at the Baltimore Museum of Arts. The historically-black Morgan State University (1864) was founded more than a decade before Johns Hopkins to ensure the education of freed and newly-freed African Americans. But that Black heritage is not immediately visible due to natural disaster, declining steel work, urban renewal, and a population shift from the east-side and well-paying shipping and factory jobs, to the west side of Baltimore with lesser economic opportunity. Redlining in the Roosevelt Administration and other public policies have contributed to Baltimore’s characterization as “a divided city.”
- If you don’t know the city of Baltimore, watch the critically-acclaimed HBO series “The Wire.” Shown over five seasons between 2002 and 2007, The Wire shines a light on the ineffective prosecution of drug trafficking, the demise of the city’s most important blue-collar industry (the docks), the inability of city politics to enact reform, the glaring lack of educational opportunity, and the failure of the media to make sense of all this -- all issues that fall under the Society’s mandate to study education and culture.
- In 2022, David Simon, The Wire’s creator, offered “We Own This City,” a kind of docudrama epilogue to “The Wire,” that focused on the corruption and brutality in Baltimore’s police force through and after the “rough ride” death of Freddie Gray in 2015. But Baltimore is also the place where artist Joyce Scott could organize her west side Upton neighborhood to get “people in the community to come in and do beadwork with [her]” so that together, they processed the momentousness of the events surrounding Gray’s death — and connected across generations. Scott’s vision of art as a communal vehicle for social change brings a clear Deweyan sensibility to the culture of present-day Baltimore.
- In 2019, only 70% of high school seniors in Baltimore City graduated, a large majority of high school students were not reading at grade level and chronic absenteeism remained a significant challenge. In response, Baltimore has, citing Dewey among other roots, concentrated on developing community schools, schools which take a more holistic approach to educating and supporting young people and their families, to help students stay healthy, thrive socially and succeed academically.
- And Baltimore’s future? Climate change is a clear, present, and largely unaddressed danger to a city on the water. Some would tie Baltimore’s economic future to improved public transit both inside the city and outside -- linking to DC and Philadelphia, to micro-investment throughout the city, or to population growth (partly through Baltimoreans returning to their roots). The political, economic, and social status of the African-American majority is a constant concern. At the same time, Baltimore “has been recognized as one of the most welcoming cities in the United States for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and gender non-conforming individuals.” In this city, hope and optimism are mixed with despair and disaffection.
If we take Baltimore as place seriously, if we acknowledge that philosophizing is always a function of who we are and where we are located, what kinds of questions, issues, and topics are ripe for consideration? We invite you bring your questions (and answers) to Baltimore. We pose three questions here:
- How did the Hegelian Dewey of Baltimore become the pragmatist Dewey of Chicago?
- Does Dewey – and the pragmatism his work inspires -- provide resources for justice (racial, economic, etc.) in communities like Baltimore? Can pragmatism – Dewey’s or others’ – enable us to reimagine equitable futures for Baltimoreans?
- What is it about community schools that bring Dewey’s ideas to life and, more importantly, that bring the education of the young to fruition?
In short, how might Dewey’s physical presence in the Baltimore of the past and our presence in the Baltimore of the present inform, illuminate and/or improve the Baltimore of the future?
We join in Baltimore with the Philosophy of Education Society whose conference theme is “Education and the Future of the Future.” Should education be future oriented as Dewey sometimes seems to suggest or is Dewey scholar Jeff Frank correct that “we learn to live fully in the future only by practicing living fully in the present?”
Finally, we are delighted to announce that V. Denise James will be our 2025 John Dewey Lecturer. Dr. James, a professor of philosophy at University of Dayton, practices a Black feminist visionary pragmatism. She brings the resources of pragmatism to help frame and attempt to resolve urban issues, and is beautifully situated to bring light to our theme.
Accepted submissions can be considered for publication in one of the journals sponsored by the John Dewey Society, including Education & Culture, the Journal of School & Society, and Dewey Studies. Authors are encouraged to submit completed papers to the respective journal editor. In addition, presented papers will be eligible for consideration for the JDS/Educational Theory Outstanding Paper Award. That Award carries with it a $500 prize, with publication (after review) of the paper in Educational Theory. Details re publication and prizes are available on the JDS website.
How to Submit
We will employ EasyChair for proposal review (EasyChair.org). The system will open for proposals on September 15, 2024 and all proposals are due by midnight EST, November 15, 2024, via the EasyChair system. Questions about submissions may be directed to Andrea English, President-Elect and Program Chair (Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor at University of Edinburgh), andrea.english@ed.ac.uk. Proposals accepted for presentation will be notified no later than January 5, 2025. Full papers should be completed by February 20, 2025 so that discussants can prepare remarks.
Please use the following link to create an account and submit a proposal in EasyChair:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=jds2025
Proposal Guidelines
For papers:
The following information should be provided in EasyChair.
(1.) The title of your paper
(2.) Your name, title, and institutional affiliation (if any)
(3.) Your address, phone, and email address
(4.) An abstract of up to 100 words
(5.) The status of your JDS membership (current member, interested in joining, needs more information, etc.)
(6.) Are you a graduate student who is interested in being considered for the John Dewey Society Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award?
(7.) Upload a document in Word or pdf. That document should have all identifying information removed for anonymous review. In that Word document, please provide the following:
(1.) The title of your paper
(2.) A descriptive summary of your paper (maximum length 1000 words), explaining your paper and its significance. List several references to place your contribution in the broader scholarly conversation.
For alternate sessions of all kinds:
The following information should be provided in EasyChair.
(1.) The title of your session (PLEASE SPECIFY as ALTERNATE SESSION)
(2.) Organizer’s name, title, and institutional affiliation (if any)
(3.) Organizer’s address, phone, and email address
(4.) An abstract of up to 100 words
(5.) Names and affiliations of all other participants, including the status of their JDS membership (current member, interested in joining, needs more information, etc.)
(6.) Upload a document in Word or pdf. That document should have all identifying information removed for anonymous review. In that Word document, please provide the following:
(1.) The title of your session
(2.) A descriptive summary of your paper (maximum length 1500 words), explaining the type of session, the activities involved, and the role each participant plays in the session. List several references to place your contribution in the broader scholarly and practice-based conversation.
Please note: The John Dewey Society is striving to make this conference an inclusive and accessible environment. If you would like to request accommodations or have questions about accessibility features of the facility, please contact Andrea English, JDS President-Elect, at andrea.english@ed.ac.uk, in advance of your participation. Requests for Sign Language interpreters and/or CART providers should be made at least one month in advance, if possible.
Thank you for your interest in progressive education, social amelioration, and the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey!