10 - The Priority of Justice

Summary

I sometimes wonder if there is any emptier word in the geographer's lexicon than justice. Those of us who style ourselves as critical or radical geographers, as I do, use the term all the time. We use it for a lot of reasons. It is a marker of our politics. It is a sign of our solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed. It is an orientation for our research (against the bad, in favour of the good; against the technocratic and the irrelevant, in favour of the social and the pertinent). It is a dog whistle, only to the left rather than the right. It is a noun that just sounds good when modified by geography's key concepts: spatial, environmental, landscape, climate …. It is just so bloody obvious: we all know what justice is and we want it now.

But of course, it is not at all obvious, no more obvious than those other famously intuitive and remarkably complex terms so central to the geographer's lexicon, like nature and culture (Williams, 1976). Yet unlike nature and culture, justice has not accreted the same volume of theoretical debate and attention these two have. There is a bit, of course: David Harvey's (1973; 1996) significant explorations of liberal and radical justice theory; David Smith's (1994) spatializations of the (primarily) liberal tradition; Laura Pulido's (1996) exploration of environmental justice movements in New Mexico and California; Clive Barnett's (2017) dismissal of justice as such as an organizing principle and his argument instead for prioritizing injustice in geographical theorizing; and to a much lesser extent Edward Soja's (2010) promotion of spatial justice. And there is significant work by fellow travellers, such as Susan Fainstein's arguments for a Just City (2007). But on the whole, justice theorizing – especially engaging deeply with the extensive literatures on justice in political philosophy and critical theory – is quite thin on the ground within academic geography. There is, I think, a good reason for this. But there is also good reason for why justice theorizing ought to become a priority among critical, radical geographers and other theorists interested in space and spatiality.