Faculty Highlights: Dr. Rosanne Kennedy

Every month I want to highlight faculty members who live out the core values of Union Institute & University on a day to day basis. I am especially impressed with how these individuals integrate the principle of social responsibility into their lives and work.

Dr. Rosanne Kennedy is one such exemplary, Union leader whom I want to showcase this month. 

Dr. Kennedy is a member of the core faculty in the Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies program, in the Public Policy and Social Change concentration, at Union Institute & University. She has been teaching at Union since 2010, leading seminars in ethics and social justice, and on topics ranging from modern political theory, democratic theory, and feminist theory to human rights. Dr. Kennedy received her Ph.D. and MA in Politics from the New School for Social Research and her BA in History from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, Rousseau and the Perversion of Gender (2010), was awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize for the best dissertation in Politics from the New School and the American Political Science Award for the best dissertation in women and politics.

Dr. Kennedy is active in presenting and publishing her research, both in the United States and abroad. A revised version of her dissertation appeared as her first book, Rousseau in Drag: Deconstructing Gender and was published with Palgrave in 2012. You can learn more about Dr. Kennedy’s book by clicking: Rousseau in Drag: Deconstructing Gender. 

Dr. Kennedy said that her understanding of social responsibility “inheres in the term itself—especially in the word responsibility—meaning respons[e] and responsiveness to others. My research is a response to historical and contemporary inclusions and exclusion. I read texts (in the broadest sense) with a critical eye towards the ways in which certain groups have been constituted as central and others as marginal and other. My response or intervention is not simply to make these groups more “visible” but to interrogate the mechanisms of marginalization: What or whom has been included and what or whom has been excluded? What forms of life have been authorized and what forms de-authorized? […] My interest thus in both the history of ideas and contemporary political movements is to find ways to intervene, challenge, and respond to those exclusionary practices that continue to define our society (and by extension others) despite our ostensible commitments to egalitarianism and freedom. 

My understanding of social responsibility in teaching is along another axis. I understand responsiveness to students not as a critical interlocutor (or at least not solely) but as someone who responds and encourages students to develop their interests and positions and to reach their own intellectual and critical potential. However, one of the most amazing and expanding experiences of teaching at Union, and one of its singular joys, is that I am more often the one who has been changed, challenged, or incited to think differently. Our students are so diverse. In addition to the important but obvious markers of difference, such as sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, immigration or citizenship status, able-bodiedness, class position, religion, geographical location which our students represent, they also bring an incredibly rich diversity of perspectives. And I think that another form of responsiveness or responsibility that we have is to be open to being changed in our encounter with others, no matter where they come from intellectually, subjectively, or geographically and to incorporate these encounters into our own practices.”