1. Democratic experimentalism, sympathy, and feminist renewal

Democratic experimentalism has in recent years established itself as one of the most influential strands of contemporary political thought, especially in Europe and North America. Explicitly inspired by Dewey’s pragmatism, this approach seeks to design institutions grounded in co-governance through multilevel organization and iterative processes capable of responding more effectively to the complexity of contemporary societies (Morgan and Sabel Reference Morgan, Sabel and Symons2019, 77). Yet while institutional reform is an indispensable pillar for advancing more inclusive and participatory politics, it is not sufficient on its own. Also required are the personal dispositions that can sustain, motivate, and render such reforms meaningful.

Both Dewey and Addams understood democracy as a way of life rooted in cooperative relations. For both, affective ties play a central role in shaping democratic habits. However, Addams expanded and deepened the significance of sympathetic affects through her daily coexistence with marginalized groups at Hull House. As Hamington notes, “Addams’s leadership among pragmatist philosophers in understanding the poor and the oppressed resulted in a form of pragmatism more radical than that of Dewey and James, a social philosophy imbued with class and gender consciousness” (Reference Hamington, Edward and Nodelman2018, 1), where “radical” refers not to advocacy of abrupt systemic rupture but to the widening of the epistemic and moral scope of pragmatism through situated, feminist, and cooperative practices. Her notion of sympathetic knowledge, forged and enacted in the experience of Hull House, provides the personal, affective, imaginative, and cooperative dimension that enables democratic transformation.

Addams was more concerned with achieving social reform than with articulating a systematic theoretical framework. For this reason, her account of sympathetic knowledge—sometimes referred to as sympathetic understanding, interpretation, or imagination—must be traced across her works. Yet a consistent thread runs through them: affective relations are the basis of democratic life. In Democracy and Social Ethics (Reference Addams1902/2002, 7–9), Addams criticizes paternalistic charity, emphasizes cooperation and shared experience, and conceptualizes sympathy as an epistemological tool. In A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (Reference Addams1912/2002, 7), she insists that “sympathetic knowledge is the only real approach to any human problem.” In Newer Ideals of Peace (Reference Addams1907, 8), she describes the evolution of moral obligations through sympathetic affects and stresses the need for sympathetic imagination in international relations. In Twenty Years at Hull House (Reference Addams1910/2020, 63), she underscores the importance of sympathy for understanding social situations from within. Finally, in The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements (Reference Addams1892/2013, 86), she argues that sympathy is the most effective instrument for grasping social situations. Ultimately, as Addams writes in Democracy and Social Ethics, the “diversified human experience and resultant sympathy which are the foundation and guarantee of Democracy” (Reference Addams1902/2002, 7) shape democratic life through reciprocal, embodied relations.

The purpose of this article is therefore to expand the democratic transformation promoted by experimentalism by enriching its pragmatist framework through Jane Addams’s feminism. Democratic experimentalism provides institutional procedures for participatory institutional transformation in the context of contemporary Western societies, where its institutional analyses and the successful transformation of specific practices warrant close attention, while Addams reflects on the sympathetic and affective dispositions that motivate cooperation and sustain political change and which proved remarkably effective in enabling institutional reform in early-twentieth-century Chicago. The aim is to reinterpret democratic experimentalism through Addams’s insights in order to advance a feminist democratic experimentalism responsive to contemporary challenges. This article does not aim to offer a general reconstruction of feminist epistemology, but rather to show how Addams’s notion of sympathetic knowledge expands democratic experimentalism in feminist directions.

Carrying out this task requires that the concept of sympathetic knowledge be analyzed and distinguished from other contemporary feminist approaches. Like contemporary care ethics, Addams stresses the centrality of affect in moral conduct in contrast with more deontological approaches (Pulcini Reference Pulcini2012, 1). As in Joan Tronto’s politics of care (Reference Tronto2013b, 2–4), her practice disrupts the liberal separation between public and private spheres by revealing the political dimension of relations of care. Life at Hull House challenged the traditional family model that confined care to the domestic sphere, extending interest, affection, and responsibility beyond kinship ties (Castelli Reference Castelli2023, 4). Unlike care ethics and, like Nancy Fraser (Reference Fraser2019, 3), Addams underscores the importance of reciprocity and participation to avoid the marginalization not only of gender but also of race and class. Fraser further argues that democratic legitimacy requires participatory parity—that is, conditions that allow all subjects to intervene as equals despite structural inequalities of gender, class, or race (Fraser Reference Fraser2015, 14). Addams enriches this framework by incorporating affective and cooperative dispositions as a condition of democratic life itself. Finally, the article shows how sympathetic knowledge is reflected in contemporary feminist practices and proposes it as a guiding principle for cooperative feminist action—one that can expand and enrich democratic experimentalism’s project of transforming institutions toward co-governance.

Methodologically, this article rests on a comparative analysis: on the one hand, it revisits the main tenets of democratic experimentalism; on the other, it recovers Addams’s writings and social practice in dialogue with pragmatism and contemporary feminist debates and practices. The aim is to show the fruitfulness of a cross-reading that highlights both the scope and the limits of each perspective.

The article is organized into four sections. The first presents the main features of democratic experimentalism, underscoring its achievements while simultaneously being critically assessed through pragmatism, and specifically through Jane Addams’s feminist pragmatism. The second reconstructs the feminist and social expansion of pragmatism carried out by Jane Addams, with particular attention to her notion of sympathetic knowledge. This concept is examined in dialogue with contemporary feminist accounts, allowing its contemporary relevance—and its distinctive features—to come into view. The third section brings sympathetic knowledge—and the practices it generated at Hull House—into dialogue with contemporary feminist practices, and concludes by arguing that sympathetic knowledge enables forms of relation and cooperative feminist practices that are vital for the democratic transformation of our shared environments.

2. The limits of democratic experimentalism: a pragmatist-feminist critique

Democratic experimentalism is today one of the most influential orientations in contemporary political thought. Initially defined by Dorf and Sabel (Reference Dorf and Sabel1998, 267) and further elaborated by Sabel and Simon (Reference Sabel, Simon, Desautels-Stein and Christopher2017, 1), it presents itself as an alternative to deliberative, agonistic, and communitarian models. Its distinctive feature is an institutional design grounded in co-governance and multilevel organization, supported by iterative processes of collective learning. These features have made it a reference point for public policy design in diverse contexts, such as social programs in Finland (Kivimaa and Rogge Reference Kivimaa and Rogge2022), the Well-Being of Future Generations Act in Wales (Morgan and Sabel Reference Morgan, Sabel and Symons2019), and research policies of the European Union (Kivimaa and Morgan Reference Kivimaa, Morgan, Serger, Soete and Stierna2023).

Democratic experimentalism draws on several principles of John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy. First, instrumentalism, according to which political legitimacy is measured by the practical consequences of norms rather than by their formal or a priori origins, in contrast with neo-Kantian conceptions of democracy. Second, contextualism, which stresses the need to adjust policies to the specific conditions of each situation, avoiding doctrinal fixation. Finally, experimentalism, which conceives norms as working hypotheses to be tested in experience, in line with a pragmatist epistemology that understands politics as an open and fallible process of resolving collective problems (Bernstein Reference Bernstein2010, 84; Dewey Reference Dewey1938/1963, 96).

Compared to the deliberative turn in democratic theory, associated with Habermas (Reference Habermas1996, 309, 324) and with Anglo-American versions of deliberative democracy, democratic experimentalism resists the tendency to treat public reasoning as oriented toward rational consensus grounded in ideal speech conditions. Experimentalism does not deny the importance of justification or the force of reasons, but insists that no communicative procedure can definitively settle disagreement once and for all. Democratic inquiry remains open to revision in light of future experience, unforeseen contexts, and the claims of those not yet included in deliberation. In this respect, experimentalism affirms the provisional character of democratic agreements and guards against the risks of rationalist closure.

A similar contrast can be drawn with communitarian approaches (Taylor Reference Taylor1989, 27–28), in which a shared ethical horizon provides the normative ground for democratic life. From a pragmatist perspective, however, communities themselves are historically situated and must be reconstructed through practices of cooperation. Experimentalism values community not as a repository of fixed moral substance but as a contingent arena in which solidarities are tested and reshaped over time. In this respect, democratic experimentalism—like agonistic theories of democracy (Mouffe Reference Mouffe2005, 84)—regards dissent and conflict as indispensable to democratic life. Far from being pathologies to be eliminated through consensus, disagreements are valued as opportunities to test assumptions, revise perspectives, and generate more inclusive solutions.

These Deweyan principles allow democratic experimentalism to distance itself from liberal democracy—focused on individual autonomy—and from communitarianism—centered on shared ethos—by proposing instead a model in which citizen participation and institutional action are mutually indispensable conditions of a living democracy (Magalhães et al. Reference Magalhães, Andion and Manoel2022, 72; Lazarevic et al. Reference Lazarevic, Mokkila, Kivimaa, Lukkarinen and Toppinen2024, 1). One of its crucial objectives is to establish strategies that harmonize directionality with cooperation through multilevel politics, thereby avoiding both centralism and hyper-localism (Kivimaa and Morgan Reference Kivimaa, Morgan, Serger, Soete and Stierna2023, 106). Central actors initiate, support, and evaluate initiatives, while local actors tailor goals to their context, assess results, investigate unintended effects, and report alternative solutions, contributing to a process of continuous revision. While effective in specific areas, current research focuses on the mechanisms by which democratic experimentalism can be scaled and sustained over time (Sengers et al. Reference Sengers, Turnheim and Berkhout2020, 1148; Ghosh et al. Reference Ghosh, Kivimaa, Ramirez, Schot and Torrens2021, 740).

Democratic experimentalism draws on Dewey’s pragmatism as particularly suited to contemporary post-bureaucratic societies, characterized by rapid change, decentralization, and the need for new forms of participation. Classical notions of citizenship are challenged, for instance, by migration (Sabel and Simon Reference Sabel, Simon, Desautels-Stein and Christopher2017, 477). In recent years, civic associations—such as citizens’ assemblies—have demanded political reforms (Harvard Law Review 2025, 1912). In the United Kingdom, the Climate Assembly UK (2020–21) brought together 108 randomly selected citizens to formulate concrete climate policies (Perlaviciute Reference Perlaviciute2024, 1228). Democratic experimentalism builds on such initiatives to design strategies for institutional change.

Although democratic experimentalism is inspired by Dewey, it does not fully incorporate a crucial aspect of Dewey’s conception of democracy. As Dewey famously writes:

As Dewey makes clear in The Public and its Problems (Dewey Reference Dewey and Rogers1927/2012, 5, 119), the formation of a democratic public depends not only on rational deliberation but on the cultivation of shared affective dispositions that enable individuals to perceive their problems as interconnected and to act collectively.

Similarly, in Art as Experience (1934/Reference Dewey and Boydston1996, 337), Dewey argues that aesthetic experience plays a central role in democratic life because it expands perception, deepens imaginative identification, and fosters the habits of sensitivity and responsiveness upon which cooperative inquiry depends.

Like democratic experimentalism, Dewey understood democracy as rooted in participation. Yet cooperation, for Dewey, must permeate not only institutions but the entire spectrum of personal relations. Such cooperation arises from lived experience and is therefore shaped by affective ties (Dewey Reference Dewey and Boydston1888/1996, 240). It is at this juncture that Jane Addams’s contribution becomes crucial. Her daily coexistence with the residents of a marginalized Chicago neighborhood, together with the gendered constraints she faced as a woman of the Victorian era (Seigfried Reference Seigfried, Hamington and University Park2010, 57), enabled her to expand the democratic significance of sympathetic and imaginative relations, especially in contexts of social marginalization. As Seigfried has shown, a pragmatism attentive to situated experience and relational practices becomes inherently feminist, since it understands knowledge as emerging from concrete social encounters rather than abstract principles (Seigfried Reference Seigfried1996, 4–6). This is not to suggest that Dewey neglected affective or aesthetic dimensions of democracy, but rather that Addams renders their operation within gendered, racialized, and classed relations more explicit and socially situated. The contribution of Addams lies therefore not in introducing affect where Dewey lacked it, but in situating these affective and ethical habits within concrete relations of power. Her feminist pragmatism shows that sympathetic and imaginative dispositions emerge differently depending on one’s social location, and that democratic habits cannot be understood independently of the structural asymmetries that condition experience.

Addams’s contribution is particularly relevant for contemporary democratic experimentalism. Her praxis at Hull House took up pragmatist principles of experimentation and cooperation but expanded them by centering the inclusion of women, immigrants, and racial minorities. This emphasis links her work with current debates on intersectional politics and with critiques of putatively neutral deliberation (Young Reference Young1990, 97). Her notion of sympathetic knowledge and her social reforms show how a feminist pragmatism can extend aspects of classical pragmatism (Hamington Reference Hamington2010, 13), offering normative resources for rethinking democratic experimentalism today.

In this respect, returning to Jane Addams is essential. Her proposal should not be understood merely as a historical predecessor but as a feminist expansion of pragmatism that addresses a central limitation of democratic experimentalism: its insufficient attention to the personal and affective dispositions that sustain cooperative practices. The experiences of Hull House thus help articulate the institutional and personal dimensions of democratic life, showing how they mutually shape one another.

3. Sympathetic knowledge in Jane Addams

Jane Addams developed one of the most distinctive contributions of classical pragmatism to democratic theory: the concept of sympathetic knowledge. Although her intellectual friendship with John Dewey is well documented—Dewey served on the board of Hull House (Addams Reference Addams and Seigfried1929/2001, 25) and frequently acknowledged her philosophical insight (Dewey Reference Dewey1902, 4)—Addams’s thought emerged above all from the lived experience of coexisting with those positioned at the social margins (Hamington Reference Hamington2010, 8). Hull House, the settlement she co-founded with Ellen Gates Starr in 1889, became a space where she lived alongside recent immigrants, working-class women, and young people vulnerable to exploitation and violence. These situated encounters allowed her to challenge classed, gendered, and racialized assumptions that shaped academic discourse of her time and were decisive in the formulation of sympathetic knowledge as a methodological, ethical, and political principle for democratic life.

It is crucial to emphasize that Addams did not conceive sympathetic knowledge as a merely affective supplement to institutional reform. Her work integrates affective dispositions with structural and legal transformation, offering a comprehensive democratic framework rather than a partial corrective to procedural models. For Addams, reforms in labor law, public health, child protection, and municipal governance were inseparable from the everyday cultivation of cooperative habits. She played a crucial role in institutional reforms such as the first Illinois factory sanitation law, the establishment of a 14-year minimum working age, limits on women’s labor hours (Addams Reference Addams1910/2020, 97), and legislation prohibiting the sale of cocaine to children (Addams Reference Addams1910/2020, 140).

Addams did not present sympathetic knowledge in a systematic form. In line with her pragmatist commitment to revisability, she understood concepts as evolving responses to social problems rather than as closed theoretical constructs. In The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements (1892), she argued that settlement workers must be willing to “change their methods as the environment demands” (Addams Reference Addams1892/2013, 86). This orientation toward experimentation explains why sympathetic knowledge appears across her writings not as a fixed doctrine but as a habit of attention, a cultivated disposition that integrates affect, imagination, and reflection. Her most explicit formulation comes in A new conscience and an ancient evil, where she insists that “sympathetic knowledge is the only real approach to any human problem” (Addams Reference Addams1912/2002, 7). For Addams, social problems can be grasped adequately only through an affective and imaginative engagement with the lived experience of those most directly affected.

It is important to note that Addams never offered a single, fixed definition of sympathetic knowledge. Instead, she developed a flexible and evolving vocabulary—alternately speaking of sympathetic understanding, sympathetic interpretation, moral imagination, or “scientific patience”—because she conceived concepts as tools emerging from lived encounters rather than as abstract theoretical constructs. Her varied terminology reflects the plural contexts in which sympathetic knowledge was forged: the daily co-presence with neighbors at Hull House, the interpretive work required in social investigations, and the imaginative extension of sympathy to those beyond one’s immediate circle. Rather than signaling conceptual inconsistency, this multiplicity reveals the pragmatist method underpinning Addams’s thought: concepts must remain open, revisable, and responsive to the concrete situations from which they arise.

At its core, sympathetic knowledge arises from co-presence: the patient, everyday practice of living “side by side” with others until relations of mutual regard and shared concern are formed (Addams Reference Addams1892/2013, 86). Co-presence is not an idealized intimacy but the condition for developing what Addams called a “scientific patience”—a mode of inquiry grounded in long-term observation, careful listening, and experiential understanding. Yet sympathetic knowledge also requires moral imagination. In Democracy and Social Ethics, Addams warns that much social hardness stems from “the failure of the imagination” that prevents individuals from recognizing the experiences of others (Addams Reference Addams1902/2002, 8). Imagination extends sympathy beyond immediate contacts, enabling engagement with the lives of those who are socially or culturally distant. Still, Addams emphasizes that imagination and affection are insufficient unless disciplined by reflection, for “social feelings are as blind as selfish ones and must be illuminated by fuller knowledge” (Addams Reference Addams1907, 10). Sympathetic knowledge thus avoids both sentimentalism and paternalism by integrating affective sensitivity with critical judgment.

Yet the significance of sympathetic knowledge is not merely epistemic. It is also an ethical and political disposition indispensable to democratic life. Addams argued that democracy is not simply a set of institutions but “a way of life” rooted in interdependence, cooperation, and mutual regard (Hamington Reference Hamington, Edward and Nodelman2018, 7). Emotional states, she wrote, are “an organic preparation for action” (Addams Reference Addams1912/2002, 7), and without them no deep ethical transformation is possible. Sympathetic knowledge channels these affective energies toward cooperative practices that replace relations of domination with reciprocal forms of interaction.

This framework brings Addams into conversation with—but also beyond—contemporary feminist ethics of care. As Joan Tronto argues, democratic theory often rests on an exclusionary model of autonomous citizenship that renders dependence and care politically invisible (Tronto Reference Tronto2013a, 2). Addams clearly anticipated this critique: she regarded activities historically confined to the private sphere—feeding children, nursing the sick, helping neighbors—as politically meaningful practices that sustain democratic life. Yet she also departed from many formulations of care that primarily focus on attending to the needs of others. For Addams, the guiding ethical criterion is reciprocity. This reciprocity rests on the interdependence of all members of society. Because we are not self-sufficient but interdependent, no individual, class, or group can advance unless social progress is shared by all. Addams referred to this genuine form of social improvement—which requires enhancing the living conditions of every class and social group—as lateral progress (Addams Reference Addams1902/2002, 69). Although Addams uses the expression “lateral progress” only once, I employ the term here in a strictly heuristic sense, as a way of naming a recurrent intuition in her work rather than as a systematically developed concept. While it does not function as a systematically developed concept, it nevertheless articulates a central pragmatist intuition in Addams’s work, namely that no improvement can be sustained unless it incorporates the perspectives and needs of all those affected. Sympathetic knowledge is inseparable from reciprocity—understood as the creation of relationships in which all participants’ perspectives carry transformative weight (Seigfried Reference Seigfried2002, xxi). This ethical emphasis was not abstract: it structured her feminist and labor reform work. Addams presided over the National American Woman Suffrage Association, chaired the International Congress of Women at The Hague in 1915 (Verde Reference Verde2021, 10), founded The Woman’s International League for peace and Freedom, for which she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 (Binetti Reference Binetti2016, 15), she contributed to the founding of the Women’s Trade Union League—the first national organization of women workers (Knight Reference Knight2005, 391)—and supported the formation of women-led unions at Hull House, including the shirtmakers’ and cloakmakers’ unions (Addams Reference Addams1892/2013, 71).

For Addams, none of these initiatives were philanthropic; they were matters of justice. Working-class neighbors could not participate in public life due to material deprivation, while college-educated women residents were excluded because of gendered restrictions. Hull House sought to create the conditions under which both groups could participate meaningfully in democratic life. As Addams stated, the settlement aimed to provide the means by which the working people’s aspirations toward better living conditions could be recognized and supported, and to acknowledge in turn the residents’ desire for social participation (Addams Reference Addams1910/2020, 73–74). Sympathetic knowledge thus supports the cooperative empowerment required for democratic participation, illustrating how changes in dispositions, social practices, and institutions must evolve together (Knight Reference Knight, Fischer, Nackenoff and Chmielewski2009, 69). It is important to emphasize that the investigations carried out at Hull House combined early forms of community participation with the work of residents who possessed advanced training in the social sciences, such as Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, Edith Abbott, or Sophonisba Breckinridge. Far from opposing “experts” and “neighbors,” Addams articulated a hybrid model in which situated experience and professional methods mutually reinforced one another in the effort to understand and transform the social environment. Addams herself referred to these “Public Activities and Investigations” and described several of them in detail. One example is the systematic study of the city’s garbage collection system undertaken by the Hull House Women’s Club. While the residents designed the inquiry, systematized the investigation, and established correlations—particularly between waste accumulation and local mortality rates—neighborhood women contributed by gathering empirical data in their own streets. Through this collaborative division of labor, situated experience and methodological expertise were combined, producing technical reports aimed at prompting concrete institutional reforms (Addams Reference Addams1910/2020, 133). It is therefore essential to emphasize that Addams did not conceive sympathetic knowledge as an alternative to institutional or structural reform, but as its necessary condition: affective and imaginative dispositions were, for her, inseparable from the legal, procedural, and policy transformations required to sustain democratic life.

This dimension of Addams’s work anticipates contemporary feminist debates on epistemic justice and intersectionality such as those of bell hooks (1997, 1) and Gloria Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa2016, 13). Her insistence that immigrants from diverse ethnic backgrounds, working-class women, possessed indispensable knowledge directly challenges models that privilege the expert, the academic, or the politically enfranchised. Hull House residents learned to see neighbors as epistemic agents capable of interpreting their own situations and proposing solutions—an insight that anticipates Miranda Fricker’s account of testimonial injustice, where marginalized groups are systematically discounted as knowers (Fricker Reference Fricker2007, 13–29). It also resonates with intersectional analyses showing how class, gender, race, and migration status co-constitute lived experience. As Fischer (Reference Fischer2019, 120) argues, Addams’s sympathetic knowledge actively redistributed epistemic authority toward marginalized groups, treating their interpretations not as anecdotes but as essential resources for democratic inquiry.

Seen together, these elements show how sympathetic knowledge enlarges democratic experimentalism. While contemporary models emphasize institutional design, iterative feedback, and experimental problem-solving, Addams reveals that such mechanisms remain incomplete without sustained attention to the affective, imaginative, relational, and epistemic conditions that make cooperation possible. Democratic experimentation requires not only procedures but also cultivated habits of listening, responsiveness, and reciprocal engagement—precisely what sympathetic knowledge nurtures.

From this perspective, sympathetic knowledge provides a conceptual bridge between pragmatist democratic theory and contemporary feminist critiques. It retains the pragmatist emphasis on inquiry, revision, and learning, while foregrounding interdependence, reciprocity, and the authority of situated knowledge. In doing so, it suggests that democratic institutions alone cannot secure inclusion or justice; these require practices that transform how people perceive, relate to, and cooperate with one another in everyday life.

This theoretical synthesis sets the stage for the next section. While Addams formulated sympathetic knowledge through the daily life of Hull House, contemporary feminist movements, community organizations, and participatory initiatives continue to enact cooperative practices that embody and expand this insight. These practices offer concrete illustrations of how sympathetic knowledge can guide democratic experimentation today, especially in contexts marked by inequality, fragmentation, and political exclusion.

The following section examines these contemporary feminist practices, showing how they operationalize sympathetic knowledge and thereby amplify democratic experimentalism into a cooperative feminist experimentalism capable of addressing the ethical and political challenges of our time.

Taken together, these feminist practices demonstrate that sympathetic knowledge is not merely an historical insight or a localized ethic of interpersonal relations, but a structural condition for democratic experimentalism itself. By foregrounding interdependence, reciprocal accountability, and the epistemic authority of those most affected by injustice, sympathetic knowledge supplies the affective and relational capacities that procedural models alone cannot generate. What emerges is a cooperative feminist experimentalism in which democratic inquiry is sustained not only by institutional flexibility and iterative problem-solving, but also by the cultivated dispositions that enable people to appear to one another as partners in shared action. In this sense, contemporary feminist practices do not stand apart from democratic experimentalism; they reveal its missing conditions of possibility. At the same time, democratic experimentalism offers the institutional framework through which insights grounded in sympathetic knowledge can be renewed within contemporary contexts. By bringing Addams’s sympathetic knowledge into conversation with these practices, we can see more clearly how democracy depends on forms of embodied cooperation that extend beyond institutional design and make co-governance a lived reality rather than a formal aspiration.

4. Feminist practices and the expansion of democratic experimentalism

If sympathetic knowledge offers the conceptual heart of a cooperative feminist experimentalism, contemporary feminist practices provide its living articulation today. What distinguishes these practices is not only their attention to interdependence, vulnerability, and everyday forms of cooperation, but also their capacity to transform local contexts through embodied participation. In this respect, they resonate powerfully with the experimental ethos of Hull House. Addams understood democracy as a mode of life that emerges from shared inquiry, mutual recognition, and the imaginative expansion of sympathy through collective action. Many feminist movements today—particularly those grounded in community organizing, collective artistic creation, and participatory governance—carry forward these commitments while responding to contemporary configurations of inequality.

Latin American community feminism offers one of the clearest examples of this continuity. Thinkers and activists such as Julieta Paredes and Lorena Cabnal have developed a feminist politics rooted in territorial practices of cooperation, insisting that democratic agency begins in the neighborhood, the community, and the shared space of everyday life. Their concept of cuerpo-territorio highlights the inseparability of personal and communal well-being, echoing Addams’s insight (Reference Addams1902/2002, 69)—formulated in Democracy and Social Ethics—that “individual progress depends upon the progress of all,” a notion she once described as “lateral progress.” Like the residents of Hull House, community feminists treat education, collective childcare, neighborhood assemblies, and economies of solidarity as political practices through which women become co-authors of their conditions of life. These forms of grassroots deliberation and mutual aid challenge hierarchical models of expertise by foregrounding situated knowledge and by creating political subjectivities through participation itself. In doing so, they exemplify how sympathetic knowledge—understood as a cooperative, affective, and reflective mode of engagement—can inform democratic action beyond formal institutional arenas.

For Addams, artistic practices were not peripheral adornments to social life but central epistemic and moral resources. She understood the arts as expanding perceptual awareness, enabling individuals to apprehend social realities that remain inaccessible through abstract reasoning alone (Addams Reference Addams1930, 410). Addams’s pragmatist view of art illuminates why she regarded aesthetic practices as indispensable to democratic life. For her, artistic experience links individuals to a common human heritage and counters the isolating tendencies of modern industrial society by awakening creativity, imagination, and playfulness—capacities she considered essential for social vitality (Addams Reference Addams1910/2020, 172). She also warned that, when these impulses are suppressed, social and personal pathologies may emerge (Addams Reference Addams1909/1972, 101). More broadly, Addams held that art enables individuals to reinterpret and “transfigure” the events of their lives, a theme she develops in The Long Road of Woman’s Memory (Reference Addams1916), in stories such as the “devil baby.” Her writings consistently frame aesthetic experience as a way of widening perception, cultivating the imaginative extension of sympathy, and generating the interpretive flexibility required for cooperative democratic inquiry. Artistic expression also cultivated what Addams called the “imaginative extension of sympathy,” a capacity to enter into the experiences of others and to revise one’s own moral standpoint accordingly. In this sense, the arts were integral to democracy as a way of life: they generated the habits of attentiveness, interpretive flexibility, and shared meaning-making that sustain cooperative action across lines of difference. It was for this reason that Addams sought to make artistic creation accessible to immigrants, workers, and women at Hull House, where collective workshops, concerts, and theatrical productions became sites of empowerment and shared democratic agency. The Labor Museum brought together women of Irish, Russian, Syrian, and other origins to demonstrate textile traditions (Hull-House Year Book 1906–7, 10); Eleanor Smith’s Music School cultivated shared repertoires by incorporating songs from migrants’ homelands, Hull House songs replaced sentimental themes with pieces addressing social injustice (Addams Reference Addams1910/2020, 175; Cassano et al. Reference Cassano, Schultz and Payette2019, 64); and theatrical productions—whether directed by Laura Dainty Pelham, Neva Boyd, or Viola Spolin—combined experimental techniques with social critique and collective creativity (Catalano and Ramírez Reference Catalano and Ramírez2020, 4). These practices democratized artistic production, challenged gendered exclusions, and created spaces where imagination became a resource for civic transformation. Collective feminist art practices constitute a second lineage that extends Addams’s legacy.

Building on these foundations, contemporary feminist artistic movements continue this work by using embodied, collaborative creation to generate forms of sympathetic knowledge. Murals by Mujeres Creando in Bolivia, textile and embroidery collectives in Chile and Mexico, and community theater grounded in improvisation reflect the same principles Addams emphasized: art as a vehicle for expanding sympathy, as a site for reconfiguring dominant emotions, and as a practice of co-presence that enables participants to see one another as partners rather than objects of intervention. Moreover, these works often address state violence, gendered precarity, and economic inequality, demonstrating how artistic practices can function as tools of political inquiry and community empowerment. Like the Theater Workshop at Hull House, many feminist performances today fuse disciplines, foreground collective authorship, and critique hegemonic narratives that obscure the realities of marginalized groups.

A third domain in which sympathetic knowledge becomes politically generative is the field of participatory governance. Experiments such as neighborhood councils with gender parity, municipal care policies designed through co-governance mechanisms, and participatory budgeting initiatives that incorporate women’s movements demonstrate how feminist practices can reshape democratic institutions. In cities such as Barcelona, neighborhood councils (Consells de Barri) were reoriented under a feminist municipalist agenda after 2015 to actively promote gender-balanced participation and to foreground everyday experiences related to care, safety, and daily mobility (Blanco et al. Reference Blanco, Salazar and Bianchi2019, 4–7). A comparable dynamic can be observed internationally in participatory budgeting processes, most notably in Porto Alegre, where women and grassroots feminist activists played a central role in deliberation and agenda-setting (Baiocchi Reference Baiocchi2005, 120–46), and later in Paris, where feminist collectives influenced participatory budgeting priorities toward care infrastructures and social reproduction (Sintomer et al. Reference Sintomer, Herzberg and Röcke2016, 190–98).

These processes echo Hull House’s approach to public reform: residents and neighbors engaged in joint investigations, produced data collectively, and pressured authorities to enact legislative changes on housing, labor, public health, and juvenile justice (Mattarollo and Santarelli Reference Mattarollo and Santarelli2024, 173). Contemporary feminist initiatives adopt a similar logic by grounding governance in the embodied knowledge of those most affected by policy decisions. They show that democratic experimentation must not only revise institutions but also build the relational and affective capacities necessary for cooperation. In this sense, community feminists and neighborhood assemblies enact the very dispositions—listening, reciprocity, and mutual support—that Addams regarded as indispensable to democratic life.

Taken together, these contemporary practices illustrate how sympathetic knowledge can expand democratic experimentalism. They show that democratic inquiry is not merely procedural but relational; it requires spaces in which people can build trust, cultivate imagination, and learn from one another’s situated experiences. They also reveal that knowledge for democratic action emerges not only from formal deliberation but from collective labor, artistic creation, and community defense. By foregrounding reciprocity, interdependence, and the authority of marginalized voices, feminist cooperative practices actualize what Addams envisioned: a democracy sustained by everyday habits of sympathy, embodied participation, and shared responsibility for the common world.

These resonances do not mean that contemporary feminisms simply reproduce Addams’s insights. Rather, they radicalize and update them by confronting the structural power relations of neoliberal economies, racial hierarchies, settler colonialism, and gendered violence—conditions more acute and globally interwoven than in Addams’s time. Yet the conceptual bridge remains: sympathetic knowledge provides the affective and epistemic ground for democratic cooperation, while feminist practices demonstrate how such cooperation can be enacted under contemporary conditions of inequality.

It is this convergence—between a pragmatist ethics of relational inquiry and feminist practices of community transformation—that informs the shift toward a cooperative feminist experimentalism.