This page expands more on the values I mention on the homepage and how I am striving to achieve them.

Community and justice

Community

Everyone knows that present-day America has serious issues. The more I think and read about those issues, the more I learn that the root cause is the lack of community. The American dream has been framed around individuals pursuing their own goals; suburban neighborhoods don't have community, but rather isolated people on separate journeys who just happen to live nearby. A community, by contrast, provides ideas of common good and collective responsibility. A healthy community is like a healthy family: each person cares about others, and no individual's good can be separated from the good of the group. Another way of saying this is that a community has solidarity.

Justice

Injustices and debates about justice also stem from a lack of community. Debate about justice are neverending. In the English-speaking world, the main figures in debates on justice try to frame their views in objective, universal terms so that any rational person would agree with them; yet disagreement is endemic. The solution? Don't buy in to the debate. Most philosophers don't understand that justice is a practice—we develop traits of justice by participating in the social practices of our community. You can only understand justice by buying into a cultural community, and fighting for justice is a practical, social, and cultural endeavor.

Organizing

So, how do you build community, and how do you fight injustice? My best guess comes from my time as a graduate student: we have to create strong, robust networks which connect ordinary people like you and me. We have to recognize that the only way we can get the power to improve our lives is by building it, one person at a time. This means having lots of one-on-one conversations and encouraging everyone to step out of their isolation and join the rest of us. This is difficult, exhausting work, and it takes moving past surface-level disagreements for the sake of solidarity. But I do not know of any alternative.

My strengths

My growth areas

My reading

I've developed my views on these values largely with the help of these books:

Virtue and learning

Justice and peace literacy are examples of virtues, which are character traits or habits of thinking and behavior that define who you are. The loss of thinking in terms of virtue and character is deeply connected to the loss of American community. This is because American culture has replaced virtue-thinking with decrepit views of a good life:

To actually build community, we need to develop virtues and participate in social practices such as playing music and games together or group reading and discussion. We have to be able to learn from others and learn from our mistakes in order to develop the justice, honesty, courage, etc. required for our common good. I have recently become especially interested in developing social structures where dialogue and mutual learning can take place.

My strengths

My growth areas

My reading

I've understood the importance of virtue and learning mostly from these books:

Collaboration and leadership

The meaning of leading and following

As I begin to switch my career path from academia to impactful organizational work, I am faced with the question of how to be an effective collaborator in that context. In many contexts, working with others is often implicitly or explicitly understood hierarchically, in terms of leaders with authority and followers who obey the leaders. But Dr. Hailey Traini's graduate course on leadership informed me of the dangers of this view. The course covered the meaning of leadership from a variety of perspectives and taught me that there is a critical difference between leadership and authority. We get authority when people trust us to effectively do our job and pursue our common goals. But you can be an authority figure without actually pursuing change, collaborating with others, and experimenting. In this light, leadership is less of a position in an institutionalized hierarchy and more of a collaborative practice in which people are mobilized to help the organization thrive. This is further exemplified by understanding the relationship between leading and following. Like leadership, followership is a collaborative practice in pursuit of the organization's purpose. Courageous followers assume responsibility for themselves and the organization and seek out opportunities to fulfill their potential. Followership goes hand-in-hand with leadership, and I want to be able to effectively play both roles.

My strengths

In Dr. Traini's leadership course, I tested my ability in a variety of different leadership skills and identified several strengths:

My growth areas

The leadership course also highlighted several growth areas for my skills as a leader and follower:

My reading