Enabling Structures and Socially Structured Action – Mara Marin (22 Jun)

We’ll be joined by Mara Marin (University of Victoria) for a talk on ‘Enabling Structures and Socially Structured Action’. This will take place in Chrystal Macmillan Building room 3.15 between 3pm and 4:30pm on Monday 22nd June 2026.

Abstract:

Discussions of structural injustice have proliferated in political theory. I argue that discussions of responsibility for structural injustice fail to consider how structures are produced and reproduced in action and, consequently, how they can be transformed by action. I trace this failure to a problematic view of structures and their functioning, a view that reduces the relation between structures and actions to one of constraint: structures mainly inhibit transformative action; transformative action can only come from outside structures (Cudd 2006, Young 2011). I offer an alternative view of structures and their functioning that shows that actions have the capacity to transform the structures within which they are taken. Drawing on and extending Sewell’s (1992) and Haslanger’s (2016; 2022; 2024) conceptions of structures and Arendt’s (1958) view of action, I argue that actions are “socially structured” and “plurally public,” features that explain the capacity of action to transform the structures within which they are taken. Action, unlike behavior, has public meaning. Action is “socially structured” in the sense that its meaning is constituted by the available cultural meanings, practices and material things that jointly constitute a society’s social structure. Actions are “plurally public” in the sense that the public of one’s actions plays a crucial role in conferring meaning to actions; actions acquire social meaning in a process of public interpretation of the structures within which they are taken.