Rethinking Agency and Responsibility: Feminist (and) Anti-Racist Theories of Structural Transformation

Abstract

The contemporary political landscape is marked by renewed struggles over responsibility, agency, and the conditions of collective transformation. Across debates about racism, misogyny, transphobia, care, genocide, and democratic action, the vocabularies through which agency is recognized and responsibility assigned have become sites of political contestation. This panel brings together five scholars who develop feminist and anti-racist theoretical resources to rethink how domination endures, often through practices and languages that appear ethical, democratic, or commonsensical, and how transformative action might nonetheless emerge. Collectively, the papers revisit and revise major theoretical lineages: Stuart Hall’s materialist account of ideology; feminist ethics of care and Marxist social reproduction theory; the Frankfurt School’s critique of reason; Arendtian theories of action and responsibility; the legacies of Joan Tronto and Iris Marion Young; and contemporary structural analyses of racism and genocide. By placing these traditions in conversation with intersectional, anti-racist, and trans-inclusive critique, the panel presents a diverse set of views on the conceptual landscape for understanding how structures shape meaning, agency, and accountability, and the possibilities these might open for a renewed anti-racist feminist politics. Taken together, the papers show how feminist and anti-racist theory can make visible contemporary structural forces that shape agency and accountability, while also expanding our sense of what transformative political action might entail.

Title	Details
Stuart Hall, ideology critique, and the problematization of commonsense	View Paper Details
Caring Subjects: Towards a Marxist Feminist Caring Democracy	View Paper Details
From the Dialectic of Reason to the Dialectic of Ethics	View Paper Details
Transformative Action as Socially Structured and Plurally Public	View Paper Details
Political Responsibility for Genocide	View Paper Details