Fellow, University of Calgary
Duration of stay: May 5, 2026 to August 24, 2026
In cooperation with Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst
Funded by Research Centre Normative Orders and the Insight Development Grant Toward Narrative Democracy: A New Ethical Model of Inclusive Belonging, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Government of Canada)
Agnes Tam is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. Her research develops social tools — social norms, we-reasoning, and narrative — to socialize political ideals such as progress, democratic agency, and belonging. Her research is unified by the commitment to recenter the social — the contingent, the informal, the everyday — in political philosophy. Since the completion of her PhD at Queen’s University under the supervision of Will Kymlicka in 2020, she has published extensively on rethinking moral progress as social norm change rather than the discovery of objective moral truths or the construction of universally valid moral norms. Her current research explores the connection between social norms and belonging, the normativity of social norms, and the role of narration in social norm compliance and change. She is co-founder of the new Ethics of the Social (EOTS) research network (https://ethicsofthesocial.com/) with Emily McTernan (Professor, Political Science, UCL) and James Wilson (Professor, Philosophy, UCL), and Co-Convenor, with Martin Wagner (Professor, German Studies, University of Calgary), of the Interdisciplinary Working Group on the Ethics and Politics of Narrative at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities.
Events during the visit
2026
“Ethics of Interaction: Meaning not Norm,” International Social Ontology Society Annual Meeting, Kraków (July 2026)
“Social Normativity of Social Norms: A Relational Account,” International Social Ontology Society Annual Meeting, Kraków (July 2026)
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Publikationen
Tam, Agnes, and Martin Wagner. “Local Legends: Narrating Everyday Belonging in Shared Places of Wonder.” Belonging (forthcoming). DOI: 10.1177/30290805261470118.
Tam, Agnes. “Social Movements as Agents of Change?” Philosophia 53 (2025): 1769–1786.
Tam, Agnes. “Trust, Belonging, Right-wing Populism.” In Trust and Extremism, edited by S. Dieleman and A. Mack. Vancouver: UBC Press (forthcoming).
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.