Justice, Geography of

Scholars in many different fields have dealt with the topic of justice. For some disciplines, such as philosophy, political theory, and law, justice is one of the central concerns. Some of the most widely read contemporary authors from those [Page 1644]fields are theorists of justice, such as Iris Young, John Rawls, Charles Taylor, and Will Kymlicka. Goals in work on justice in the social sciences and humanities have included the following: defining justice, attaining justice, and denouncing and correcting injustices. More than a field in and of itself, justice has been an ethic applied in many disciplines, approaches, and methodologies.

How to think about justice has been, in and of itself, a focus of much work. Whether justice should be conceived individually or collectively, whether it is something to be decided through institutional legal means or beyond, and who decides when a situation is just or unjust are some of the questions addressed by those who engage the theme of justice. Quite often, perceptions of new injustices or new formulations of what would constitute a more just society arise not within the so-called ivory tower of academia but outside it, although the academic world is increasingly engaged with its surrounding social context. In fact, the social sciences have often become more attuned to the diverse questions surrounding justice due to the actions of social groups in the public sphere (e.g., the civil rights movement pushed many researchers to deeper engagement on the question of racial justice).

The geography of justice focuses on the spatialities of the question of justice—how phenomena such as international development, peace and war, racism, sexism, class inequality, environmental destruction, and more have specific spatialities to them. Particular spaces or spatial configurations can produce or maintain a situation of injustice. Additionally, a spatial approach can help correct an unjust situation. Thus, identifying these spatialities is one of the primary focuses of geographers working on questions of justice.

There is no clear starting point at which geographers began to work on this theme, and justice has been a concern of different geographers in many different specialties. Nonetheless, much of the recent work that focuses on questions of space and justice inherits from those subfields of geography that developed as a response to the different sociopolitical upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, in particular (a) geographies of development, (b) feminist geographies, (c) geographies of race, (d) radical geography, and (e) Marxist geography. For many of these subfields, the highlighting and analysis of an injustice and its spatialities is the central theme.

Through this work, geographers have been able to contribute new thinking to how questions of justice are approached. For example, even given formal legal equality and the legal end of segregation, geographic work has demonstrated how race continues to be a significant issue in countries such as the United States, through demonstrating inequalities in housing markets that create pools of poverty and electoral gerrymandering that hinders voters from choosing elected representatives responsive to their needs. Even what appears as the “straightforward” work of mapping socioeconomic data from the census or other sources has helped show how poverty and social exclusion do not work in the same ways across the board but are spatially concentrated in certain regions or types of spaces. Geographic work by feminists has demonstrated how spaces of social reproduction and care work (domestic work, child rearing, etc.) have been rendered invisible socially as well as legally and how these have historically been highly feminized spaces. Urban geography has demonstrated how the architecture and urban planning of a city, in and of itself, contributes to the inequalities between groups therein. Work in these fields concerning the geographies of justice focuses on many different scales, from the body to the neighborhood, to the nation and the globe, to producing or redefining scales as such.

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