As economic inequality, climate change, and the rise of anti-democratic authoritarian ideologies intensify worldwide, scholars and activists alike are searching for ways to understand—and transform—the deeply entrenched systems that reproduce oppression. OPR Interviews Editor Samu/elle Striewski sat down with Sally Haslanger, Ford Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to discuss her approach to analysing the complexity of social change and the potential for social practices by individual and collective agents to help overcome injustice.
Professor Haslanger is a unique voice in the international sphere of social critique and philosophy. In her work, she combines the methodological clarity of analytical philosophy with feminist and anti-racist political and socio-theoretical ambitions to explain the efficacy of ideologies, expose the mechanics of sexism and racism, and develop a critical account of contemporary structural injustices. A selection of her numerous published essays on social critique, epistemology, and the metaphysics of race and gender, have been gathered in Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. Furthermore, Haslanger has argued for conceptualising race as a socio-political reality in her contribution to What Is Race? Four Philosophical Views. Currently, she is preparing a book entitled Doing Justice to the Social (under contract with OUP) that tries to correct mainstream Anglo-American philosophy’s failure to attend to transformative value of social practices and the importance of cultural critique for resistance.
The interview is based on a conversation between Haslanger and Striewski after she delivered the Benjamin Lectures 2023 on Agents of Possibility in Berlin. Haslanger explains why she rejects theories that treat capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy as analytically distinct systems, arguing instead that their logics are inseparably woven through all of society’s subsystems. She elaborates on how practices—and the feedback loops between material conditions and cultural norms—both entrench and open possibilities for change. From vegetarianism in the 1970s to the mutual-aid infrastructures of queer and feminist care, Haslanger emphasises the importance of coalition-building as as a way of sustaining resistance. Finally, she reflects on co-design as a method of grassroots empowerment, defending it as a tool for building durable, collective capacities for justice.
Samu/elle Striewski (OPR): You describe societies as complex dynamic systems and argue against an approach like that of Nancy Fraser who frames capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, and the forms of labour they rely on, as ‘analytically distinct but mutually imbricated’. Instead, you favour a single complex system approach. What does that mean?
Sally Haslanger (SH): When you say that something is a ‘system,’ rather than just ‘organised in some way,’ you are making a claim about the causal relations between its parts and the relationship between those causal relations and other causal relations. Big complex systems have smaller functional systems as their parts, e.g., a society has an educational system, a transportation system, a healthcare system, a legal system, and many more. These subsystems are interdependent, or ‘co-integrated.’ The interacting subsystems are shaped by capitalist, patriarchal, and white supremacist dynamics or logics. But since these dynamics are all imbricated with one another in every material subsystem, I dislike tearing them apart – putting capitalism over here with one logic dealing with the economy, patriarchy over there with a different logic dealing with social reproduction, and then white supremacy somewhere else with yet another logic dealing with structures of colonialism or expropriation. The logics of capital, gender, and race are relevant to all of the subsystems.
OPR: The potential for change is allocated by you to social practices, that is, to the meso- rather than the micro- (individual habits, subjectivities, etc.) or the macro-level (global material structures, abstract societal norms, etc.). Why can socially transformative power be best described via that meso-level?
SH: Power is a very slippery and difficult concept. In one way, it means forcing people to do things. In that sense, the military, or the police, or the state have power, because they have coercive control over some aspects of life. In another way, as Foucault would say, we are disciplined subjects. In the processes of subjectivation, we are situated in a structure of relations that distributes power and naturalises it. For example, gender naturalises subordination and domination such that you cannot see the ‘power’ involved if you accept your subject position as simply how it ought to be. If you become a disabled subject in the way that society expects it, you cannot complain about it since the way how society disables you is naturalised to the degree that you are simply deemed ‘naturally deficient’ or ‘impaired.’ Focusing on the meso-level is important because the described subjectivation happens through our engagement in social practices and that makes us take the unequal distribution of power for granted (e.g., by deeming it natural or not noticing it at all). To become agents of social change, we must begin to uncover the power dynamics latent in these practices, disclose how they are interconnected and maybe realise that many of the relationships you are in are relationships of subordination and domination. Individuals can sometimes make a difference, but to change a structure – a network of practices, on my view – our best bet is collective action.
OPR: In the mediation between the material conditions experienced by the individual and the ‘cultural techne’ (including the moral beliefs), you are interested in a phenomenon you call ‘feedback loops.’ What role to they play in identifying possibilities for intervention?
SH: Culture creates subjects that interact with the material world and thereby change it. This is called ‘niche construction’ in the biological literature. Fitness is not simply the result of a species adapting to their stable and static surrounding. They modify the environment such that they can fit with it better, i.e., they create a niche. This is an example of a feedback loop in the practices of non-human animals. Regarding humans, agriculture is a perfect example: you figure out what can be grown, and you develop a taste for it. Then you discover a different way of growing it, you might hybridise crops, create new ones, and so you develop new tastes. This is a loop between what the world provides and how your taste develops.
But over time it becomes an expectation that you ought to have this or that to eat, because that is what the world provides, or this is what ‘we’ eat. If under conditions of climate change, one needs to disrupt these norms again (because growing some edible might use too much water or energy), this can pose a difficulty: after all, you have formed that niche where the world and your tastes converge and fit. It can also be difficult to acknowledge that one’s tastes were malleable to begin with, that they developed in reaction to a changing and changeable external world. In a feedback loop, there are typically two sites of intervention: the material and the sociocultural. On the material side, you could change what food is available, which will nudge tastes to adjust. Or you can intervene in the cultural side by encouraging the development of different tastes. Then, there is no longer a demand that we grow the problematic food.
OPR: How does this translate, though, to what you were talking of before with the social practices and other feedback loops?
SH: In every social practice there is a cultural and a material dimension. Considering food again, there are many things that are, strictly speaking, edible, but they may not count as food, e.g., grasshoppers or snails are food in some cultures but not in others. Our culture directs us to see certain things as (not) edible which affects the material production and conditions of what is (not) available to eat.
Regional cuisines, religious constraints, specific diets, health conditions, they all shape what is materially produced and available. It isn’t just a matter of what we eat, but also how we collectively organise eating. Our particular practice of eating, for instance, three meals a day, at particular times, some hot, some cold, has a huge impact on the workplace. Workers or pupils get their break at midday when they eat lunch. Their day is organised around these mealtimes. If you prefer to eat lunch in the late afternoon, you may have a problem finding a place to get a meal because the world has been shaped for the people who eat their lunch earlier. Categories like class, race or gender reveal themselves here, too. Who does the cooking? Will they be paid for it? Salaried workers can have lunch whenever they want, wage workers cannot. And who is allowed to eat in what places?
OPR: Given that our social practices are immersed in the current system, we can become complicit in it through our practices. How can community organising and a strategic approach to the creation of different social networks pose a solution to this problem?
SH: We are all partially complicit, simply because we need to be legible to the world in some form or other. We need to communicate with people. We need to eat. We need to work. That brings with it a certain complicity. But we also each have the option to resist, or play with, or disrupt the practices in our own everyday lives. I was a vegetarian starting in 1970. There were not a lot of vegetarians then, you know? It was difficult and if you were invited to someone’s house for a meal and said ‘I’m a vegetarian’ they wouldn’t know what to do. It’s very difficult to be an outlier all by yourself and trying to resist a set of practices. It usually is safer, more effective, and affectively more rewarding if you can build coalitions of groups of people who resist together. But the question is then, how to scale it up?
If I resist policies or practices in my university, that is just one drop in a bucket. However, if you build strategic connections with other people who are trying to do similar things in other sites, that provides, in the best case, support and fruitful criticism. Eventually, if that network gets big enough, you can try to raise money, hire lawyers, etc., because you may need them as your mere desire to exist is battered down by violence or formal, coercive power structures. Networking is extremely powerful for surviving because resources of many kinds get shared, not just economic but also situated knowledge, social and cultural capital. The most marginalised often lack the connection to anyone in a powerful network. Hooking up people in powerless positions with those in powerful ones can result in them finding a job, or health care, or being politically empowered. These in-group/out-group structures thus becomes porous, and power is redistributed differently across society.
OPR: Maybe we could think of queer and feminist ethics of care as an example for a practice that shows how the creation of networks yields affective, epistemic, political, legal, and medical power?
SH: Yes! My son worked at a youth homeless shelter for some time and many of the young people who came there were LGBTQ because they had been thrown out of their homes, and they had nowhere to go. They were provided not only with food and a physical shelter but also with a legal and medical network, with connections to lawyers, doctors, and medical centres, and to other LGBTQ organizations in the city or in other places. Being grounded in that new network can be transformative, especially once you have lost the ties to your original networks, your family. Of course, there is an economic dimension, too, when that network helps you find a job. The shelter is hence not only about survival but about breaking down the power of dominant networks and implementing social change starting, as it were, on the meso-level.
OPR: The approach of ‘co-designing,’ central to your second lecture, could be criticised for relying too much on social engineering methods and failing to be normatively grounded, durable or revolutionary enough. How would you defend it as an effective way of racial social transformation?
SH: The co-design process, as it is developed at MIT D-Lab, is intended to provide very concrete support for people who are trying to identify the challenges they are facing in terms that are meaningful to them, while at the same time giving them tools for being self-critical about the meanings embedded in their practices.
Very briefly, the co-design team engages with a local partner organization and offers creative capacity building workshops. In these workshops, participants begin by identifying their challenges and struggles using their own language. This is a scaffolded process that is supported by a process called ‘public narrative’ developed by Marshall Ganz.
Individuals begin by recounting a ‘story of self’ in a group, explaining their own encounter with the challenge in question. Having heard the stories, the group identifies key choice-points and values that guided decisions in the stories. This enables them to identify some shared values and to further articulate them and build on them together. This collective articulation process provides an opportunity for understanding and self-criticism and enables the group to realise both that there are structural and collective elements of their problems and also that they can work together to address them. They aren’t alone. This, in turn, prompts a process of analysis: When and where does the challenge arise? Why were they faced with this challenge? What was missing in the context? Answers to these questions emerge through sharing and organizing their situated knowledge of the circumstances. The final stage involves developing a plan for solving the problem: What can we do here and now to address the challenge? Co-design offers a specific design process – ideate, critique, prototype, critique, and then choose an option to pursue. It is a continuing cycle, for once the option is developed, there is again a process of identifying new challenges, seeking further knowledge, and improving the design.
Throughout, participants share their knowledge and ideas, their connections with others, and different forms of capital available to them. As co-designers, we support them in the process and teach them the design process that they can use repeatedly to address other challenges. If they are lacking the money or the tools or the connections and they ask us to provide them, we try to help with that. This is the difference between top-down solution engineering and supporting self-empowerment by connecting people to one another and providing them with the tools they need to collectively solve the challenges they face.
OPR: In your lectures, you connected these ideas with the question of social reproduction and, in that context, stressed the importance of having a fallback position. How does the above approach improve the latter?
SH: In a way, it is like building a society within a society. You try to build a liveable, sustainable subsystem with a society that is not. In pushing forward, we often fail. But as we have been building this inner sustainable society that provides mutual aid, connections, and networks, we can rally forward trying to make more dramatic changes to the societal infrastructure.
If or when we fail—which will happen sometimes—the most vulnerable are not punished and marginalised further, rendered invisible. In the best case, they have network, a society within the society, to catch them, support and see them, to provide them with the aid they need to go back into the struggle, the resistance, maybe even the revolution. Thus, in using the analysis of the meso-level of societal change, we can contribute to radical transformation. The ruptural moments in a revolution are important to envision a better future, but so is the real work of organising, of empowering agents whose interests are often neglected, and of providing care throughout. You cannot force the eventual rupture to happen, there is some spontaneity to it that escapes us, but you can prepare for it, build up to it, and be agents in shaping the change that unfolds.