Sally Haslanger, Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT and one of the leading voices in feminist philosophy, gave an interview to Ípsilon, the cultural supplement of the Portuguese daily Público, while in Braga as an invited keynote speaker at the latest edition of the Braga Meetings on Ethics and Political Philosophy. Speaking to Isabel Lucas on the University of Minho’s Gualtar campus, where the Meetings gathered around 200 researchers from 30 countries, Haslanger discussed the social construction of gender and race, the invisible care work done by women, and the way political elites have turned the word “woke” into a weapon against feminism, anti-racism and inclusion policies.

As president of MIT’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, she also warned about growing threats to academic freedom in the United States, from dismissals of academics to research funding conditioned on avoiding certain words. Though pessimistic about climate change and the rise of fascism, Haslanger argues, drawing on Gramsci and Rebecca Solnit, that hope is a matter of will rather than optimism, and rejects the idea that humans are naturally selfish or hostile to others: marking someone as “other,” she says, is a learned social process.

Interview (in portuguese) here.