Mara Marin



Postdoctoral Fellow

Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:
September 2012‒März 2013

Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:
»Oppression and Obligations of Commitment«

Project outline:
My book project elaborates a notion of commitment as an alternative to contract for understanding oppression and the obligations individuals owe to each other under conditions of oppression. Commitment has the advantage of combining two features of action typically thought to be mutually exclusive: commitments are voluntary yet not fully under the control of the agent. In a commitment, the agent incurs obligations in virtue of his or her voluntary actions but without knowing in advance the precise content these obligations will have in the future. This feature makes commitment useful in understanding oppression, the actions that support it, and our obligations to dismantle it. For oppressive structures are the effects of our actions, yet the actions that implicate us in oppressive structures cannot be understood through the model of consent or contract because we need not, as these models assume, intend the oppressive effects of our actions. (Mara Marin)

Funding of the stay:
»Justitia Amplificata. Rethinking Justice − Applied and Global«

Scholarly profile of Mara Marin


Mara Marin received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. Before coming to Frankfurt, she was Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago, where she taught Classics of Social and Political Thought and worked on her book-in-progress entitled »Oppression and Obligations of Commitment«. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Melon Foundation, Open Society Institute, and the University of Chicago. She was awarded the Wayne C. Booth Prize for Excellence in Teaching in recognition of the quality of her teaching at Chicago.
Visit Mara Marin's Homepage

Main areas of research:
Feminist political theories, liberalism, theories of justice, oppression, domination, authority, political obligation, social contract tradition.

Selected publications:
  1. Connected by Commitment. Rethinking Relations of Oppression and Our Responsibility to Undermine Them, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (forthcoming 2017)
  2. »Care, Oppression and Marriage« in: Hypatia, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2014.
  3. »Marriage as Commitment: A Revisionary Argument« in: American Multicultural Studies, edited by Sherrow O. Pinder, Sage Publications 2012.
  4. »Reflective Equilibrium: A Misconceived Requirement?« in: Polis, Journal of Political Science, vol. 6, no.1/1999.
  5. »The Role of Textbooks in the Process of Gender Socialization« in: Djurdja Knezevic (ed.): Women and Politics - Seminar Documentation, Zagreb: Zenska Infoteka Press, 1998.
  6. »Women in Politics and Politics for Women«, in: Djurdja Knezevic, Koraljia Dilic (editors): Vlast bez zena ili dugi mars/Governments Without Women or the Long March, Zagreb: Zenska Infoteka, 1997.
  7. »John Rawls: A Theory of Justice« in: Laurentiu Stefan (ed.), , Dictionar de scrieri politice fundamentale, (A Dictionary of Fundamental Political Writings), Bucharest: Humanitas, 2000.
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