A Tenderness Approach to Philosophy

In this paper, I outline various pedagogical practices that I believe are important for diversifying the field of philosophy. I outline these practices through a discussion of knowledge and its production, the production of relations through collective acts, the creation of space in and beyond the institution, and finally moving beyond inclusion narratives. The various pedagogical practices that I outline have been developed in, and drawn from, a workshop titled the Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop. Ultimately, in this paper I utilize what I call a “tenderness approach to philosophy”—tenderness as devotion of time and concentration, as directional, relational, and embodied—in order to demonstrate how tenderness can be applied to a pedagogical context.