Part III - Justice as Challenge

Summary

The three chapters in this section, written by Corine Wood- Donnelly, the Vegan Geography Collective (VGC) and Don Mitchell, reflect on the impact, opportunities and issues of working with justice in their respective fields. Throughout it is clear that justice needs constant engagement, both theoretically and materially, in order to ‘refill’ it as a concept and prevent the dangers that could arise from leaving it as an empty signifier. There is therefore a need for justice to be materialized through marginal and exploited agents, spaces and relations with engaging with the more- than- human acting as one route to challenge hegemonic constructions of justice. For the VGC, just research needs to challenge anthropocentric ideals through foregrounding a fluid and embodied multispecies justice. Wood- Donnelly highlights the need for a space itself to have voice, reflecting on the necessary challenge that justice theories present to the common conceptual frameworks in International Relations, arguing that it poses critical questions of the who, why and what in a discipline where, ordinarily, the state is the unit of analysis.

Nonetheless, how justice is operationalized in these arenas is less explicit and, from their reflections, it is apparent that the practice of just research in different disciplines and epistemologies requires further consideration to continue responding to the challenge that justice does, and should, pose to us as reflexive researchers.