Can a culture make us unfree? How do we retain the power to change our world in liberating ways? My work brings insights from the tradition of Hegel, Marx, and Critical Theory to shed light on these and other questions in contemporary feminist and social and political philosophy.
I am particularly interested in how social reality must be conceptualized if we are to understand freedom, oppression, and social change. To this end, I have written about the nature of oppressive social practices, and the way they can co-opt our desires for esteem and the expression of our values. In Toward an Expressivist View of Women’s Autonomy (Ergo 2024) I explore cases of ‘thwarted autonomy,’ in which women pursue autonomy but in ways that reinforce their subordination. Intersubjective Meanings and Oppressive Social Practices (under review) shows why the recent turn in social philosophy towards social practices requires a robustly intersubjective account of social meanings. I am currently working on an article about the role of publicity in emancipatory social change.
My work in contemporary social theory grows out of an interest in 19th- and 20th century European thought, especially Hegel, Marx, the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, and De Beauvoir. I have written on Hegel’s early reflections on social critique and alienation in “Love and Justice in Hegel’s Spirit of Christianity,” in The Unique, the Singular, and the Individual (Mohr Siebeck, 2022). My other interests include the history of social and political thought, the concept of the public sphere, the relation between material and symbolic elements of the social world, socialist and radical feminist thought, philosophy of technology, and philosophy of race.
Laura Ariadne Martin 