Fellow

Agnes Tam

Duration of stay: April 21, 2025 to December 31, 2025

In cooperation with Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst

Funded by University of Calgary, Research Centre Normative Orders, Insight Development Grant of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Government of Canada)

Agnes Tam is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. Her research focuses on the nature of collective agency and its roles in ethics and politics. She has published extensively on the role of collective agency in moral progress. Despite their conformist and partial tendencies, she argues that collective agents can rationally revise their particular social norms in alignment with universally valid moral principles. Her latest research explores what kinds of and how narratives unify and confer meaning on social norms and roles, and what happenswhengroup narratives break down. She is also the Equity Co-Chair of the Canadian Philosophical Association and the Co-Convenor of the Interdisciplinary Working Group on Ethics and Politics of Narrative at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities.

Research project: Towards Narrative Democracy: A New Ethical Model for Inclusive Belonging

In the age of migration, many societies are experiencing a crisis of belonging. Not only do immigrants and minorities experience alienation from their community, even the majority feel increasingly disoriented in their homeland. To address this, political philosophers-especially within the Rousseau-inspired civic republican tradition-argue that democracy is key to forging an inclusive community of belonging. While this project shares the civic republican view that collective participation in common life fosters belonging, it argues that the prevailing model of “deliberative democracy” is conceptually misguided. The argument is ontological: community is not fundamentally a contractarian relation, but a historical one. Joint deliberation on the terms of social cooperation that free and equal rational agents can endorse generates, at best, mutual respect among strangers, but it does not foster a sense of belonging among particular members of a community. As an alternative, this project proposes a new remedy-narrative democracy-which reconceives belonging as an emergent property of joint narration of shared history that diverse members can identify with


Events

1/7 Goethe University of Frankfurt, Normative Orders Research Center Colloquium

18/7 PPE Society London, Session Presentation

November Trento University, Colloquium Presentation

  • Publikationen

    Tam, Agnes (lead author, revised Feb 2024). “Progress.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Tam, Agnes & Kymlicka, Will (2023). “Being Popular and Being Just: How Animal Protection Organizations Can Be Both.” In The Ethics of Animal Shelters, eds. V. Giroux, A. Pepper, and K. Voigt. Oxford University Press. Tam, Agnes (2020). “Why Moral Reasoning is Insufficient for Moral Progress.” Journal of Political Philosophy, 28(1): 73–96. Tam, Agnes (2020). “The Legitimacy of Groups: Toward a We-Reasoning View.” Analyse & Kritik, 42(2): 343–368.

News from the research center

Event
14.07.2025 | Frankfurt

Utopie und Aufbruch der 1968er – Was von politischer Rebellion und individueller Selbstbefreiung geblieben ist

Panel Discussion

Die Diskussionsrunde mit Rainer Langhans, Christa Ritter, die seit 1978 zur Selbsterfahrungsgruppe um Langhans gehört, und dem Sozialphilosophen Martin Saar widmet sich utopischen Vorstellungen, die von der 1968er Bewegung ausgingen, und beleuchtet deren Ideale, Impulse, individuelle und gesellschaftspolitische Nachwirkungen.

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Event
10.07.2025 | Frankfurt am Main

Territorial Justice by Lea Ypi

Workshop

Workshop on the new book by Lea Ypi (LSE). With, among others: Andrea Sangiovanni and Ayelet Shachar.

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Event
01.07.2025 | Brussels

Europa in einer multipolaren Welt – Wie kann die EU den Herausforderungen gegenüber Großmächten begegnen?

Crisis Talk

Impuls von Prof. Dr. Nicole Deitelhoff mit anschließender Podiumsdiskussion

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News
22.05.2025

Does deliberative democracy have a future in the age of oligarchs, autocrats and patriarchs?

On June 3, Prof. Simone Chambers will give a lecture on the value of democracies and the future of the form of government.

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News
19.05.2025

What can a baroque tapestry tell us about colonial iconography?

Lecture by Cécile Fromone on May 21. The professor at the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, director of the Cooper Gallery at the Hutchins Center and author will talk about the long-forgotten African origins of iconography and its colonial dimension.

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News
05.05.2025

Normative Orders Newsletter 01/25 published

The newsletter from Research Centre Normative Orders collects information on current events, reports, news and publications several times a year. Read the first issue 2025 here.

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News
05.05.2025

"Hitler. History of a Dictator" by Sybille Steinbacher will be published on May 15, 2025

The historian's new book deals with Hitler's origins, the roots of his anti-Semitism and his rise to power.

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News
29.04.2025

Public lecture series “Racism in the police” begins on May 13, 2025

Racism in the police has various dimensions. In the lecture series “Racism in the police - empirical findings, methodological approaches and controversies”, three empirical studies on police work will be presented.

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