What Are the Aesthetics of Justice?

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Intensities and intractabilities within the current political landscape have challenged activists and scholars alike to think beyond familiar strategies for political transformation. The papers on this panel explore and seek to expand current repertoires for political action seeking structural justice, with an emphasis on aesthetic dimensions of political struggles from below. They examine, in turn, the relationship and role of pain, pleasure, receptivity, and movement in urgent calls for democratic action. In doing so, they experiment together with the range and nuance of forms of political action that can bring about structural change, whether public spectacle or secret haven, interpersonal encounter or architectural intervention, slow poetics or urgent pragmatics.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 3: Normative Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Sensible Redistributions: Racial Justice and Aesthetic Activism in Chicago - Kam Shapiro, Illinois State University

• The Poetic as Pragmatic: Experiments in Compassionate Activism - Emily Beausoleil, Victoria University of Wellington

• Justice as Pleasure: Fighting for a Beautiful World - Cristina Beltran, New York University

• Locomotion as Political Aesthetic: Reflections on Caravans and Walls of Welcome - Romand Coles, Australian Catholic University

Chair

• Deva Woodly New School for Social Research

Discussant

• Deva Woodly New School for Social Research