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.