%0 Journal Article
%A Benjamin Selznick
%A Seán McCarthy
%D 2022
%C Berlin, Germany
%I Peter Lang Verlag
%J PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY IN HIGHER EDUCATION
%@ 2578-5761
%N 3
%V 2
%T 3. Toward a Theory of Social Innovation in Higher Education
%R 10.3726/PTIHE032020.0004
%U https://www.peterlang.com/document/1169753
%X A necessary response to addressing complex global problems rests in the theoretic and practice of social innovation: approaches to solving intractable social issues on a local and global scale. The logic, language, and practices of social innovation can, in turn, motivate energies toward conceptualizing college students as social innovators: individuals capable of meaningfully and cooperatively responding to persistent and transdisciplinary problems including social inequities, environmental change, and public health crises. To provide a philosophical anchor needed to ultimately sustain these propositions, we unite social innovation with Honneth’s concept of social freedom. We then introduce an expanded definition of the prototype as a mechanism that can be utilized to embed social innovation and social freedom throughout the contemporary collegiate academic curriculum. The subsequent section considers students in two interdependent forms of relation—student-student and student-faculty—within the dynamic context of postsecondary learning. We conclude by incorporating our ideas around an imagined possibility for securing social freedom amidst present ecological fragility and provide long-range considerations of our theory for the higher education enterprise.
%K social innovation, social freedom, prototype, social relations, unlearning, Honneth