PPE Research Fellow Focus: Philip Yaure

Philip Yaure, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and PPE Affiliated Faculty member at Virginia Tech, was a PPE Research Fellow at the Kellogg Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics during the academic year 2023-2024. The fellowship supported Dr. Yaure’s work on his second book project, Transformative Organizing: Race, Gender, and the American Labor Movement.

Transformative Organizing: Race, Gender, and the American Labor Movement, examines the innovative ways in which mid-20th century organizers in the American labor movement sought to build solidarity across racial and gender inequity in exclusionary workplaces and unions. The main question addressed by this project is: what does it mean to build solidarity in communities and workplaces fractured by oppression, where the idea of a common cause or interests cannot be taken for granted?

Dr. Yaure contends that the solution to this puzzle requires a reimagining of the core activity through which solidarity is built: organizing. Through archival research, he develops a conception of organizing as activity that transforms persons’ interests, generating novel commonality from which solidarity can be built.

As Dr. Yaure states: “Political philosophers and theorists have generally thought that solidarity is built on the basis of pre-existing unity: persons recognize a set of interests that they already share, and commit to struggle for one another in pursuit of these shared interests. Yet many political projects, especially those combatting identity-based forms of oppression, seek to build solidarity among persons whose interests are in conflict with one another. The conception of solidarity that I develop in this project shows that it is possible, through organizing, to generate shared interests where they are absent. Through extensive archival research, I trace this conception of organizing in the political thought of mid-20th century American labor organizers who found ways to build solidarity across racial and gender inequity in exclusionary workplaces and unions. These organizers started from hard-nosed recognition that workers in privileged social positions and identities had something to gain from racial and gender inequities; but these organizers refused to accept these dynamics as unalterable obstacles to organizing the working class. Theirs was a struggle to build solidarity by forging common interest anew.”

With the generous support of his PPE Research Fellowship, Dr. Yaure was able to present a chapter from this book project, “Contesting the Common Good: School Desegregation and the Boston School Bus Drivers Union,” at the Association for Political Theory and the PPE Society conferences in Fall 2023. This paper focuses on the role of the union of school bus drivers in Boston in the 1970s in supporting efforts to desegregate Boston’s public schools.

Dr. Yaure will continue his research and writing for Transformative Organizing, with the support of a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2024, and as a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress in the 2025-26 academic year.

“I’m very grateful to the Kellogg Center for its support of my work through the PPE Research Fellowship, which provided me with the invaluable opportunity to receive early-stage feedback on my research at academic conferences.”

To learn more about the Kellogg Center’s research fellowships, please visit this link.