ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a group of lawyers and activists linked to Mobilization for Youth (MFY), an agency of the war on poverty. MFY was the first of a number of bodies set up in inner cities across the United States. Working with poor people required an acknowledgment of the complexity of the problems they faced. The open-hearted pause before the other person, the connection or the reflection on the experience of the encounter is elements in a theory of "social practice concerned with changing the world". Critical Race Theory scholars began to develop arguments around social recognition that drew on earlier poverty research that parted company with the explicit analysis of alienation. Critical Legal Study scholars worked in a similar direction, developing a phenomenological account of alienation. The Fem-Crits were laying down paths out of alienation. This is exactly why MacKinnon was critical of different-voice feminism.
