Identity and Memoir, Jarrad A. Felgenhauer

I taught this class, Identity and Memoir, in the spring of 2023 as a section of the Philosophy of the Human Person course at Seattle University. Philosophy of the Human Person is one of two philosophy courses each student is required to take as part of their general education core. Students in the course come from many diverse backgrounds, experiences, and academic interests; most have never taken a philosophy course before. This raised a particular pedagogical problem I was having trouble resolving: how do I design a philosophy class for folks who have no previous background or interest in philosophy in a way that they can deeply engage and get something meaningful out of the material? Previous experience taught me a ‘traditional’ survey approach, one in which we examined how different philosophical traditions approached the course, came with the baggage of being disconnected from students’ daily lives and lived experiences.

This provided me with an opportunity to revamp how I approached the class. Instead of a survey style, I decided to structure each term of Philosophy of Human Person around a specific theme that could integrate philosophical insights into contemporary issues (whether global, national, or local) and/or speak directly to their own lived experiences and sense of identity. To put this differently, my pedagogical goal has no disciplinary or doctrinal aim; rather, it is simply to show students how studying philosophy makes a legitimate contribution in helping them better understand themselves and the social world around them. For Identity and Memoir, my wager was that this unique narrative genre would provide an accessible medium in which students could recognize philosophical themes expressed in the authors’ lives and more importantly relate them to their own lived experiences and the social events around them.

Specifically, I chose memoirs that were meant to shake and disrupt students’ habitual sense of identity and what it meant to be ‘human.’ These memoirs were In My Own Moccasins by Helen Knott; Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe; Educated by Tara Westover; Making Love with the Land by Joshua Whitehead; and The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. Each of these approached the matter in a different way, but all raised questions about the fluidity, ineffability, contradictions, and social positionality (e.g. race, class, sex/gender identity, nationality, ethnicity age, etc.); elements of identity that are baked into the stories of human life.

I chose assessment activities that tried to reflect these aims. I had students keep a running journal throughout the term in which I asked them to reflect, compare, and contrast the experiences of the authors with theirs. Most importantly, I wanted them to analyze the life events detailed in the text and whether or not they revealed key philosophical themes like the positionality and/or contradictory nature of human identity. Additionally, for every entry, I asked them to leave a question which they would then share with others in small group discussions. This was perhaps the most difficult activity of the course because it forced students to be vulnerable both in the sense of sharing a point of view with others and also because that point of view showed others their own positionality with respect to their life story. Over time, however, students reported how this exercise helped them recognize what sort of presuppositions they were carrying with them and recognize how the memoirs were relating differently to people with different experiences. For the final project, folks were asked to write their own (abridged) memoirs. At first, this exercise was unsettling for some. But being unsettled was partially the point of the activity: I wanted folks to examine the events that disrupted their sense of self and sense of belonging, creating the conditions for intersecting notions of identity. I think that many students recognized this and had positive feedback the deeper they engaged in the writing process.

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Jarrad A. Felgenhauer

Jarrad A. Felgenhauer is an Associate Teaching Professor at Seattle University.  His primary research specialization is in 19^th-21^st century continental philosophy, especially German Idealism and Poststructuralism. He is fascinated by the intersection(s) of metaphysics and history, particularly the kind of metaphysics that we need to account for real ontological disruption in historical continuity.