Jane Addams and Settlement Sociology

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter examines Jane Addams’s writings on the role of settlements in contributing to a new science of social reform. It places her work in the context of a transnational settlement sociology movement that evolved an original epistemology and methodology for connected and participatory social research. The work of American settlements is compared with research carried out by British women researchers in the early twentieth century. The settlement sociology movement is neglected in most histories of sociology which construct a narrative privileging university-based, theoretical, and teaching work. Accounts of settlement sociological work have been mainly focused on the United States, with little attention paid to developments in other countries and to transnational linkages and networks.