Description
Theoretical and philosophical scholarship related to justice and human rights mostly fails to pay near adequate theoretical, philosophical and conceptual attention to specific struggles for justice in most of the world. When they do appear in the scholarship, they are more often than not subjected to a technical application of normative theory, rather than being seen as a generative site for theorising in themselves. At the same time, political theorists are increasingly attending to what people communicate in specific deliberative contexts and political struggles, taking this as a starting point for theorising (e.g. Ackerley et al. 2021; Getachew and Mantena 2021).This workshop brings together a group of scholars lo oking at grounded concepts of justice, opening space to think together about which sites are most generative, how to articulate concepts emerging from this kind of enquiry, and what uses they might be put to.
Opening: Sharing existing work on grounded concepts of justice
The workshop will open with a roundtable discussion of the concepts attendees are working with – including bedel (debt), haq (right), adda (gossip), ubuntu (humanity), ujamaa (familyhood), time, hope, and freedom – and the sites and practices these concepts have emerged from. Discussants will include Paul Apostolidis, Kieran Dunn, Laura Forster, Emrah Karakuş, Ruth Kelly, Sumi Madhok, Ẹniọlá Ànúolúwapọ́ Ṣóyẹmí, Stephanie Wanga, and others.
The roundtable will open with short interventions from discussants on how attending to what people communicate in site specific, historical, political and ideational contexts might enable a different theoretical perspective on key political concepts. Each discussant is invited to identify a few specific insights emerging from the grounded concepts they focus on that could inform debates about comparable abstract concepts in political theory.
Reflecting together on these contributions, we will consider how these particular concepts come into being, the practices and traditions they emerge from, the political cultures they put into place, the kinds of people they make up, and also the accounts we produce of these. This may include reflection on how the intellectual articulation of these concepts overlaps with or diverges from their articulation in everyday life or political struggles; as well as how these concepts bring into view particular historical and moral worlds, political imaginaries, and gendered and political subjects.
Discussion: Key questions in articulating grounded concepts of justice
We will then go on to identify key questions and considerations for articulating grounded concepts of justice, taking the following questions - and for each question, a short pre-circulated contribution - as a springboard for discussion:
How do we decide which sites and aspects of communication to pay attention to, and which to leave aside?
How are concepts articulated and specified (or not) in different sites?
What is the generalisable/echoable potential (or not) of concepts articulated in and for specific local contexts?
What is the potential and limits of this kind of work as a kind of reflective practice for theorists?
| Period | 9 Sept 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Workshop |