Social Justice Theory

Modern Justice Approaches

Theories of justice in the last century were rooted in hegemonic tradition. This century looks beyond these traditional social, political, and cultural visualizations of justice by asking us to consider the question, Justice for whom? Social justice impels more than an equal distribution of goods or a balancing of rights and wrongs. Modern justice approaches must take into account the multidimensional and intersecting identities of individuals to end oppression. Therefore, justice may be different for different people, depending on their particular position in the public sphere and on their geographical sphere.

Multiple dimensions of identities intersect and create identity politics that require recognition of the many ways a person experiences the social, political, and cultural justice of the world. Social justice theory accounts for institutionalized oppression allowed and experienced for being other than a member of the dominant social group. Sexism, racism, classism, ableism, ageism, heterosexism, and anti-Semitism are only a few of the many institutionalized forms of oppression that social justice theory analyzes through identity politics. Moreover, lived experiences serve as a critique for hierarchies of oppression that promote one form of institutionalized prejudice over another. Oppression can be experienced as one or many identities.

Social justice theory includes the practice of social justice. This combination of theory and practice together is known as praxis. Praxis can manifest in many forms of resistance to injustice. Feminist pedagogy rooted in the academy, and social justice movements rooted in the community, are examples of this combination of theory and practice to promote and achieve social justice.

Feminist pedagogy recognizes lived experience as a valid source of knowledge. Dominant social groups have long controlled the ideas of truth and fairness that lead to justice, but by allowing everyone a voice, and listening to those voices, knowledge and alternate paradigms of truth and fairness leading to alternate theories of justice are created. The implication of alternate sources of knowledge is a rewritten history and future in which everyone can recognize themselves represented or missing in the social, political, and cultural arenas of justice.

Injustice Resistance Movements

Coalitions of resistance to injustice are found in modern social movements including but not limited to the women's, civil rights, human rights, women's health, reproductive justice, and environmental justice movements. These movements and the many activist groups and individuals associated with them share the methodological assumption of identity politics and work toward solutions to ending the many forms of oppression.

...