Workshop on Injustice, Resistance and Complicity

Injustice is often difficult to pin down. It manifests not only in one group using their power to inflict physical or psychological harm on another, or to limit another group’s options, choices or possibilities through overt policies or political means. Recent developments in philosophy have highlighted that injustice can take more insidious forms. It can manifest at an epistemic level: depriving agents of the ability to conceptualise the harms done to them, or blocking their ability to articulate the ways in which they have been wronged. Injustice often functions structurally, in the absence of any identifiable oppressing agent. Frequently, unjust social structures have a deceptive nature, making systemic issues appear to be individual failings; thus, effectively identifying and resisting these diverse sites of injustice requires careful attention to the interplay between structural and interpersonal forces, and questions of individual, collective and vicarious responsibility and agency. These matters are further complicated by issues of complicity: the way in which agents can play a role in upholding or reinforcing their own subordination and the subordination of others. Complicity manifests itself in the ‘grey zone’ of agency, responsibility and choice in situations of injustice, where strategic negotiations with oppressive social structures need to be disentangled from adaptive preferences and internalised oppression, or affective mechanisms that inure agents against acknowledging, resisting and combating injustice. Epistemic and structural injustice, and our complicity in both, raise difficult questions for the possibility of resistance.

This workshop invites papers that seek to explore issues of injustice, resistance and complicity from a range of philosophical perspectives. We invite work that builds on traditions including, but not limited to, feminist philosophy, critical race theory, global justice and disability studies, as well as work on responsibility, autonomy, agency and epistemic and structural injustice. Papers may address one or more themes from the workshop, and conceptual and applied approaches from both the analytic and continental traditions are welcome. We particularly encourage submissions from early career researchers and members of groups currently underrepresented in academic philosophy.

Keynote lecture by Professor Alison Jaggar

The keynote lecture will be given by Professor Alison Jaggar who has published pioneering work in social, moral and political philosophy, most recently in the areas of feminist philosophy and transnational justice. Some of this work includes: “Vulnerable women and neo-liberal globalization,” (Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 20020), “’Saving Amina?’: Global Justice for Women and Intercultural Dialogue,” (Ethics and International Affairs 2005), “Agency, Complicity, and the Responsibility to Resist Structural Injustice” (Aragon and Jaggar, Journal of Social Philosophy, 2018), “Decolonizing Anglo-American Political Philosophy,” (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 2020) and the edited collection Gender and Global Justice (Polity, 2013).

For any questions regarding the workshop please contact Charlotte Knowles