Historically, power has been conceived as a dyadic relation between individuals: A has power over B. In recent decades, however, power has been reconceived as part of the social field for all social agents. This talk develops this alternative account of power and considers how it might be employed in understanding unjust systems such as White supremacy, capitalism, and male domination, and how agents, together, can resist injustice.

Sally Haslanger is Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT. Haslanger’s work links issues of social justice—especially concerning gender, race, and the family—with contemporary work in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. A collection of her papers that represent this effort over twenty years was collected in Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (Oxford 2012); it received the Joseph B. Gittler award for outstanding work in philosophy of the social sciences.