AGNES TAM

According to the standard liberal story, "we" are...bad. We create "them", then exclude or even dominate them. This tribalistic nature of us is at the root of exclusionary and xenophobic practices. We tend to be tyrannical over individual members "I" too, suppressing dissent and commanding conformity. So, at both inter and intra-group levels, we are in tension with liberal values such as “mutual respect for equal autonomy”, “fairness” and “toleration”.

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I believe the liberal story about us operates with implicit and mistaken assumptions about what and who we are. My new work explicates and corrects these assumptions. Specifically, I believe that we are partly constituted by the stories we tell ourselves. If so, we can be better, to our members and outsiders, if we retell our not-so-good stories. The huge, but worthy, task is to come up with an ethic of joint narration about who we can be. Below is a list of works-in-progress:

• Social Movements as Agents of Change? (2026), Philosophia. Online First. An increasing number of philosophers have argued that social movements as a form of contentious politics are apt agents of change. Given their contentious mode of communication, social movements are said to be more inclusive of the oppressed and effective in disrupting pernicious ideologies. This paper challenges the current overly optimistic and simplistic assessment of aptness. The core argument is that social movements are not just a form of practical contention but also a form of practical narration. As such, whether a movement fosters progress or regression depends crucially on the quality and content of the narration in which it is embedded.

• Local Legends: Multiversional, Place-Centered Narratives of Belonging in Diverse Societies (With Martin Wagner; Under Review) This paper bridges insights from political philosophy and literary studies to advance a new genre of narratives of belonging that promises to bind diverse populations to their homeland. We begin by identifying two influential models of belonging in political theory and show why both are wanting. According to the Belonging as Formal Inclusion model found in the liberal tradition, belonging is a formal citizenship status, constitutive of inclusion in egalitarian institutions or democratic processes as free and equal. By contrast, in the Belonging as Narrative Nationhood model, proposed by nationalists and communitarians, belonging is an affective bond among co-nationals, emergent from their shared historical narratives of the nation. Drawing on recent psychological and ethnographic research on belonging, we argue that while the Formal Inclusion Model is insufficient to generate affective belonging, the Narrative Nationhood Model generates affective belonging at the cost of inclusion. To address the tension between inclusion and belonging, we develop a new narrative model of belonging, called Local Legends Model. Drawing critically on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s largely neglected German Legends (Deutsche Sagen), we reappropriate a genre of multiversional, place-centred narratives that promises to bind people to shared spaces through everyday marvels and a sense of wonder, without presupposing common ancestry or a single authoritative history.

• Trust, Belonging, and Right-Wing Populism (Status: under review) While there is no lack of diagnoses of right-wing populism, I argue that one of its core appeals is overlooked: its perceived trustworthiness in fostering people’s sense of belonging. Drawing on psychology, sociology, and the political philosophy of belonging, I reconstruct belonging not as equal inclusion, but as an affective sense of “at-homeness” arising from mutual recognition of specialness and irreplaceability, conferred by historical narratives of the quest genre. If this is right, the challenge is not low trust in democracy itself, but in its willingness and ability to foster belonging—one that calls for moving beyond the inclusion paradigm of liberal-egalitarian and neo-republican thought.
   

• The Social Normativity of Social Norms: A Relational and Historical View (Status: early stages) Social norms regulate our social interactions—how we greet, grieve, apologize, date, tip, and show up for one another. But are they genuinely binding? In this paper, I argue that the influential “normative attitude” theories both overstate the authority of social norms and under-justify them. I develop an alternative relational and historical view, on which the normative force of many social norms—especially those regulating social interactions in social relations—emerges not simply from patterns of mutual responsiveness to underlying affective attitudes, such as trust, gratitude, forgiveness, and love, but also from the intelligibility of those patterns, conferred by the narratives relevant participants tell about them. On this view, social norms are not always binding: they often begin as invitations and become genuine obligations only when patterns of responsiveness acquire meaning through narration over time.
   

• Two Conceptions of Belonging (Status: at early stages. A key goal of democracy is to construct communities of belonging, at least in the civic republican tradition. But I think the tradition operates with the flawed conception of belonging as "ownership". I identify and defend a contrasting conception, i.e., belonging as "bond". If correct, deliberative democracy—the latest generation of civic republicanism and the liberal orthodoxy—may build a place of control, but not necessarily a home where we belong.)

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