What is Structural Injustice?

Open Research objectives/practices

To make cutting-edge research on “structural injustice” freely available, challenging systemic inequalities in access to research and educational resources.

Introduction

Together with Prof Jude Browne (Cambridge), we edited a volume entitled What is Structural Injustice? published with Oxford University Press. The book is the first to bring together top researchers in this area of political theory to address this fundamental question. The edited volume was interdisciplinary including perspectives from philosophy, political science and law, as well as decolonial and feminist approaches.

Structural injustice is usually understood as the cumulative unintended outcome of normal everyday activities that results in certain groups being dominated or oppressed. Structural injustice is embedded in social, economic and political structures. In that sense, it is different to the deliberate repression of a state or harmful actions by identifiable agents. Examples include homelessness, sweatshop labour, and climate change.

Motivation

Some authors in the volume approached us to ask whether it would be Open Access. They felt it was necessary given that one type of structural injustice is unequal access to educational and academic resources. The book would have been published in hardback and would have been too expensive for many people, including university libraries in under-funded regions, to purchase. We asked all the contributors what they thought about publishing Open Access and they all agreed that this was important. Making the book Open Access means that anyone around the world who is interested in structural injustice can read the work of leading scholars in this field. Hopefully this book will reach further than it would have done as a traditional academic edited volume.

Lessons learned

The UG’s Open Book Fund was key to ensuring that the book could be published Open Access. For an edited volume, the Fund could cover the costs of the editor based at the UG, so in this case, they paid for 50% of the costs because there were two editors, one from another university.

The difficulty was raising the remaining 50%. While everyone involved agreed that it was important to do this, it was difficult to raise the remaining money. However, in our case, many of our contributors were Full Professors who had access to significant funds which ultimately made it feasible. Then we had the logistical difficulties of transferring the money to the publisher, which involved a lot of coordination between myself, our authors, their financial departments at their universities and the publisher. Overall, it was a lot of additional work.

The lesson, I believe, is that this process could be simplified. I don’t know how! But it would make publishing Open Access edited volumes easier. Also, the fees charged by publishers are very high. Given that academic publishers’ profit margins are unusually high, they could support Open Access publication by reducing the fees. The UG’s Open Book Fund was instrumental in making this happen and should be supported into the future.

URLs, references and further information

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/what-is-structural-injustice-9780198892878?cc=nl&lang=en&