Plato’s Republic and Black feminist thought

ABSTRACT

In 2019 I designed and taught two iterations of “Plato and Black Feminist Thought”, a special topics version of a course on Plato. It combined a reading of the Republic with texts from the Black feminist tradition with thematic connections to Plato's dialogue. The course seemed to be highly successful both in promoting student engagement generally and as an approach to teaching Platonic philosophy in particular. In this paper I describe the course in detail and offer an account of my experience teaching it, as well as some student perspectives.

KEYWORDS:

• Plato
• Republic
• teaching
• Black
• Feminist

Acknowledgements

I'm grateful to my students for their contributions to the course itself and their feedback on it, as well as to Sukaina Hirji, Sophia Connell, Anwar Uhuru, and an anonymous referee for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).