I am working on two book-length projects.
Structural Agency and Structural Obligations
My current book project examines recent discussions of structural injustice and argues that in spite of theorizing injustice as structural, this literature tends to fall back on an individualist social ontology when raising normative questions about the actions that could be taken to dismantle structures of injustice. These theorists proceed as if agents embedded in unjust structures could act entirely unencumbered by the social structures whose injustice they resist. When they turn to prescribing actions that could dismantle the forms of injustice they theorize as structural, too often these theorists prioritize individual, deliberate action, losing sight of their own insights about the limits of individual, voluntary action. I argue that this dominant tendency, that can be found in everyday practice as well as in scholarly discussions, relies on a picture of action that is both historically inaccurate and politically limiting. This picture of action limits our political imagination by making invisible precisely those features of political action that enable agents to bring about social change. The book focuses on two of these features – action’s “plural publicity” and its “socially structured” character – and argues that the transformative potential of action, its potential to change the social structure depends on these two features, which should be central to theorizing action and the normative demands on agents.
Race as a social structure. A conception of race as the basis for solidarity for anti-racist collective action
My next book project is centered on the question of how to understand solidarity for anti-racist action, given that divisions along class, gender and sexuality challenge notions of shared black interests. I reject three prominent answers to this question – the shared identity of persons of color, the shared condition of being victims of racial oppression (Shelby) and shared political goals (Kolers) – for their inability to explain what brings together people of color across divisions of class, sexuality or gender. These answers run into the problem of “secondary marginalization” of the poor, the gender-non-conforming, and women in anti-racist social movements. Given that different people of color experience racism in different ways, solidarity cannot be based on something they share, whether an identity, an interest to end racism or shared political goals.
I argue that we should begin our conception of solidarity with the observation that the actions of agents in anti-racist social movements are aimed at transforming the same social reality of race, even though their agents experience different forms of racism and share no political goals. To understand the social and political facts behind this observation I argue that we should distinguish between, on the one hand, a conception of what constitutes race, and how it is structured by class, gender, sexuality and other axes of oppression and, on the other hand, a conception of action as a response to this social reality of race. I have two aims in this book project. The first is to argue that we should understand race as located in social practices, not in individuals or groups, and to offer a notion of race as a social structure that integrates race with other axes of oppression. The second aim is to argue that we should understand solidarity as forged in action in response to a shared social reality, and to offer a notion of anti-racist solidary actions as responses, from different structural positions, to the same social structure of race.
I argue that we should begin our conception of solidarity with the observation that the actions of agents in anti-racist social movements are aimed at transforming the same social reality of race, even though their agents experience different forms of racism and share no political goals. To understand the social and political facts behind this observation I argue that we should distinguish between, on the one hand, a conception of what constitutes race, and how it is structured by class, gender, sexuality and other axes of oppression and, on the other hand, a conception of action as a response to this social reality of race. I have two aims in this book project. The first is to argue that we should understand race as located in social practices, not in individuals or groups, and to offer a notion of race as a social structure that integrates race with other axes of oppression. The second aim is to argue that we should understand solidarity as forged in action in response to a shared social reality, and to offer a notion of anti-racist solidary actions as responses, from different structural positions, to the same social structure of race.