The Path-Dependency of Knowledge and Value: Co-Designing Critical Social Interventions

An important feature of theoretical projects that aim to promote social justice is their commitment to empowering those in oppressive circumstances so that they can solve their own problems. One reason for this approach is that the oppressed have situated knowledge of the circumstances that others lack. But situated knowledge may not be enough to prompt critique. A second reason is that opportunities for collective self-governance is central to autonomy. Sally Haslanger argues that a collective engagement with historically and materially grounded practices can provide a new frame for agency that enables a creative and potentially emancipatory restructuring of social relations. To achieve social justice, our knowledge and values should not just reflect reality; instead, informed by critical knowledge and values, we need to make a new reality together.

This keynote lecture for Standpoint Theory: Formation, Contestation, Legacies has been co-organized with UBC's Department of Philosophy, and is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Sally Haslanger is Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women's and Gender Studies at MIT. She also teaches in D-Lab, a hands-on program using participatory design to create inclusive, accessible, and sustainable solutions to global poverty challenges. Broadly speaking, her work links issues of social justice concerning gender, race, class (and other social categories) with contemporary work in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language. A collection of her papers was published in Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (Oxford 2012). She received a Guggenheim fellowship to put together another collection Doing Justice to the Social, currently forthcoming from Oxford. To learn more about Dr. Haslanger, visit: her website.