PPE Speaker Series: “The Scaffolds of Prospective Agency: Precarity and the First Question of Politics” with Jennifer Morton (UPenn)

Join us as we kick off the academic year with our first Speaker Series lecture on Tuesday, September 1 at 5:30pm in Chapman 125, featuring Jennifer Morton!

Jennifer Morton is the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Philosophy with a secondary appointment at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a senior fellow at the Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During the 2023-2024 year, she was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Jennifer is interested in how poverty and social class shape our agency. Her book Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility focuses on the ethical sacrifices that first-generation and low-income students make in pursuing upward mobility. It was awarded the Grawemeyer Award in Education and the Frederic W. Ness Book Award by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. It was also selected as Princeton President Eisgruber’s Pre-Read for the Class of 2025. You can learn more at: Hidden Brain podcast, The Atlantic, Inside Higher Education, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, New York Daily News, Times Higher Education,Princeton Alumni Weekly, Public Books, Forbes, and Vox.

She has received the American Philosophical Association’s Scheffler Prize for her work in the philosophy of education, her paper Reasoning Under Scarcity was award the Australasian Association of Philosophy‘s 2017 Best AJP Paper Award, and her paper Grit, cowritten with Sarah Paul, was selected by the Philosopher’s Annual as one of the ten best philosophy papers published in 2019.

Previously, Jennifer has held positions at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the City College of New York, the Graduate Center-CUNY, and Swarthmore College. She received my Ph.D. from Stanford University and an A.B. from Princeton University. She has been a Laurance S. Rockefeller Faculty Fellow at the Princeton Center for Human Values. She is also an elected member-at-large of the American Philosophical Association’s Board.