1 - Researching Justice: How Do You Make the Research Process ‘Just’?

Summary

Understanding justice for many academics, practitioners and policy makers begins with questions of injustice – the way particular social, economic, political or cultural structures come to undergird exploitative conditions (Dorling, 2010; Barnett, 2017). Yet, as Sandel (2010: 10) reminds us, ‘thinking about justice seems inescapably to engage us in thinking about the best way to live’, which in turn requires us to consider how we engage with our day- to- day lives. As academics, spaces and practices of (in)justice may be the focus of our research although questions of the ‘what’, ‘who’ and ‘how’ of justice (Fraser, 2008) also shape both our working practices and everyday lives more broadly. From activist- scholars to theoreticians, ideals of justice shape how we understand and engage with our research questions and stakeholders; reflect on and practice research methodologies; and share and disseminate findings even if we are not always explicit about the reflective processes behind these approaches. Additionally, the nature and demands placed on contemporary academic outputs means that they are often focused on advancing theoretical or empirical understandings of justice or, when they are methodologically centred, reflecting on the challenges, negotiations and contradictions of doing ethical, participatory and emancipatory research. Although there have long been calls to explore how the research process itself can be a socially just endeavour (DePalma, 2010), responses have often been more critical, how- to guides rather than reflections on the role justice does, and should, play in our research praxis.

Quite simply, if we are serious about engaging in justice work, how we centralize justice within this is of vital importance to living out the broader realities of why we do what we do and the kinds of worlds we envision through our research engagements. Gaining insights into how others conceptualize, and use, justice in their work is important in encouraging discussion around contemporary research practices, opening up the ‘black box’ of how academics understand their own work. Furthermore, it offers a reflexive lens to engage with the variety of perspectives, ideologies, articulations, materialities and communities that connect into, and ground, justice research.