Dr. Kimberly Harris: Truth in Form: Du Bois' Aesthetic Epistemology & the Deweyan Social Imagination

Name: Dr. Kimberly Harris: Truth in Form: Du Bois' Aesthetic Epistemology & the Deweyan Social Imagination
Start: 2025-11-18T12:00:00-06:00
End: 2025-11-18T13:00:00-06:00
Location: 605 Agriculture Drive, Carbondale, IL, United States, Illinois 62901

Schedule

Tue Nov 18 2025 at 12:00 pm to 01:00 pm

UTC-06:00

Location

605 Agriculture Drive, Carbondale, IL, United States, Illinois 62901 | Carbondale, IL

All are invited to the lecture by visiting researcher Dr. Kimberly Harris on Tuesday, November 18, from noon to 1:00pm, at the Center for Dewey Studies, room 0044 in the Morris Library basement. Dr. Harris is an Alwin C. Carus Grant recipient working at the Special Collections Research Center. The title of her lecture is "Truth in Form: Du Bois’s Aesthetic Epistemology and the Deweyan Social Imagination."
A summary of the lecture: "W. E. B. Du Bois's relationship to John Dewey illuminated Du Bois's integration of aesthetics into social scientific inquiry. While Du Bois engaged Dewey's view of truth as something that emerges through communal inquiry and contributes to the reconstruction of social life, he adapted this pragmatist framework to the particular demands of a racially stratified society. For Du Bois, truth required not only empirical rigor but also forms of expression capable of countering distortion and cultivating recognition where racial ideology and block perception. Du Bois understood beauty as one such medium of truthful inquiry. The data visualizations he produced for the 1900 Paris Exposition shows how aesthetics form organized complexity, conferred dignity, and intervened against racist misrepresentation. In this sense, beauty functions for Du Bois as both a methodological and ethical instrument, enabling truth to accomplish the transformative work he believed it must do."
Dr. Kimberly Harris is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Corcoran Department of Philosophy at the University of Virginia, and the author of The Truth of Race: The Philosophical Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois.