Philosophical and Cultural Fieldwork: Experiential Study in Comparative Philosophical Worldviews.

How do practices of meaning-making across different cultural contexts reveal alternative ways of relating to uncertainty, the unknown and what do these practices teach us about expanding moral possibility in contemporary American life?

I am investigating how different cultures live with uncertainty, and how these practices shape moral imagination. Drawing from American Pragmatism and Continental philosophy, I study meaning-making not as a cognitive process but as a lived response to the unknown. My research is emergent and experiential: I travel, observe, and learn alongside communities whose practices reveal alternative orientations toward uncertainty—resonant with thinkers like Bloch, Fanon, Muñoz, Moten, Arendt, and Rasdjarmrearnsook. I am ultimately interested in how these modes of living-with-the-not-yet can expand moral possibility within contemporary American philosophical political and educational life.

Rather than beginning with a predetermined framework, this project is emergent. This project does not aim to collect ethnographic material, nor data, but aims to unfold through documented encounters using narratology. In these encounters, I seek to make the ordinary strange and to be attuned to the metaphysical and existential tendencies that exist in these events, hoping to reveal how meaning, agency, and moral imagination are constructed. Bruner (1987) posits that narrative imitates life and life imitates narrative, where the essence of narratives is seen as “world-making” and hence, “life-making” (Bruner, 1987). This idea guides my use of narrative as a tool for construction to guide the “life narratives up to the present but directing it into the future” (Bruner, 1987).