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Dr. Gregory Pappas Featured For Research From The National Humanities Center

The National Humanities Center is featuring the work of Dr. Gregory Pappas in a section Featured Research: The Examined Life.  Dr. Pappas is a Fellow from the class of 2021-2022 with the National Humanities Center, and his featured research project is Injustice: An Inter-American and Community of Inquiry Approach. According to Dr. Pappas, this research […]

The National Humanities Center is featuring the work of Dr. Gregory Pappas in a section Featured Research: The Examined Life.  Dr. Pappas is a Fellow from the class of 2021-2022 with the National Humanities Center, and his featured research project is Injustice: An Inter-American and Community of Inquiry Approach.

According to Dr. Pappas, this research project “emerged as a citizen concerned with the never-ending problems of injustice found all over the United States. Reflecting on recent stresses to the social fabric, he “began to wonder what are the common tendencies (national habits) and obstacles that continue to undermine our ways of tackling injustice in the US, our historical failures.” Drawing on his background in American Pragmatism and Latinx and Latin American Philosophers, Dr. Pappas is conducting community-based participatory research with three “resilient and self-sustaining communities”: Detroit (Boggs Center, Adjuntas, Puerto Rico (Casa Pueblo), and Chiapas, Mexico (Zapatistas communities). These American Grassroot communities show an approach to societal change that Dr. Pappas calls “radical democracy”, completing a great deal of meaningful local and communal hard work to effect societal change. This connection to local communities is vital to the project, “If universities in the twenty-first century are to serve the public good, they must not just export or apply self-produced knowledge, but create knowledge with those outside them.”