11 - Concluding Thoughts: What Does It Mean to Do ‘Just’ Research?

Summary

This book comes together at a moment of deep crisis. As we write the sky in State College, Pennsylvania is an eerie colour, and the sun has taken on an otherworldly hue driven by climate change induced wildfires thousands of miles away rendering the air quality dangerous. In many Western nations nationalism and white supremacy are resurgent and threaten fragile political coalitions and, in the case of the United States, democratic governance at various political scales. More broadly, anthropogenic climate change and increased global competition sharpens already uneven distributions of resource scarcity, and reliance on militarism and neocolonialist processes of structural abandonment make vulnerable lives more precarious. These challenges render hope in the context of the present political realities difficult and hard to sustain. The reality is, the world and its places and peoples are being made more vulnerable by the day, and as a result the struggle to imagine alternatives has never been more important.

Within this context it is necessary to engage in broad conversations around justice and, more specifically, how and in what ways we practice justice in our work and through our lives. This edited book is meant to challenge existing paradigms that render researchers and our practices somehow separate from the work we do and the communities we engage with. Through these interventions we have perspectives that are grounded in a range of paradigms, which push the discussion of practising justice in new directions and challenge all of us to render justice more visible in both our work and our everyday lives. The concept of justice itself is slippery, it is often much easier to name injustices and human wrongs than it is to define what justice is and how it looks in operation. On the one hand, we often define justice geographically and the idea is mediated through the kinds of societies in which the concept emerges. Lisa Lowe (2015), for example, in her book The Intimacies of Four Continents describes the ways Western notions of freedom, democracy and justice, among other examples, emerged through the subordination of Black and Brown labour through enslavement and colonization as well as Indigenous genocides.