Critical Concepts

When we are born into a particular society, we quickly learn its norms and practices. As we internalize these patterns, we also begin to reproduce them in our everyday actions. Through this repetition, it becomes tempting to see these social arrangements as natural or inevitable. Today’s guest, MIT-professor Sally Haslanger, challenges this assumption. In her work, she examines the many ways in which social subjects participate in reproducing the very structures that shape them, and why these patterns can be so difficult to break. At the same time, she argues that understanding how social structures are reproduced can also reveal how they might be transformed.

Prisons are a central institution of modern society, yet their legitimacy is rarely questioned. Many people assume they prevent crime and justly punish wrongdoing. But what if these assumptions are mistaken? Today’s guest, Tommie Shelby, is the Lee Simpkins Family Professor of Arts and Sciences and the Caldwell Titcomb Professor in the ⁠Department of African and African American Studies ⁠and the ⁠Department of Philosophy⁠ at Harvard University. He argues that prisons fail to deliver what we expect from them and challenges the very idea that they are justified.