Authors Meet Authors: Solidarities and Injustices

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Session Description

When should we be solidary against injustices? How and with whom? Against which injustices? And what to do when some solidarities seem to perpetuate other injustices? Global politics is now driven by these questions. Today, indigenous-rights movements battle over whether to integrate or separate; progressive movements splinter over prioritizing diversity or equity; #BlackLivesMatter competes with #AllLivesMatter; right-wing populist insurgencies claim solidarity with the common people and against migrants and globalist elites; the Africa Liberal Network competes with Pan-Africanist forces for the hearts and minds of Africans; transnational pro-democracy protests inspire each other in Chile, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Bolivia; Hindu nationalists offer seemingly genuine solidarity with disadvantaged Dalits in exchange for solidarity against Indian Muslims; #MeToo activists compete with due-process libertarian feminists for political clout; socialists berate the New York Times for obsessing over anti-Black racism while studiously ignoring the One Percent's grab of global wealth; separatist movements break up the United Kingdom in the name of national solidarities and of opposition to domination by the EU or by Westminster, and on and on...These clashing demands for solidarity, and the clashing diagnoses of injustice that they invoke, now bewilder many citizens and political observers.

Fortunately, political theory has risen to the occasion! In the last three years, political theorists have published a number of books examining the questions driving these demands and diagnoses. This recent wave of books took inspiration from a number of important works on these questions published in the 1990s and 2000s. On the solidarity front, these included books by Jodi Dean, Sandra Bartky, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Tommie Shelby, Dale Turner, Sally Scholz, and Juliet Hooker. Where diagnosing and conceptualizing systematic injustices was concerned, path-breaking works were offered by Charles W. Mills, Nancy Fraser, Thomas Pogge, Carole Pateman, Ann Cudd, Janna Thompson, Tom McCarthy, Daniel Butt, and Iris Young. Political theory then took time to steep itself in these ideas, as well as in the new ideas brought by the movement for comparative political theory. Together, these tendencies required displacing justice and (democratic) authority as the field's core objects of study, and drawing ideas and problems from a more diverse and global range of sources. Early signs that the tea was brewed were heady books and articles on these new themes, authored by Liz Anderson, Jeff Spinner-Halev, Jack Turner, Chris Lebron, James Ingram, Glen Coulthard, Neil Roberts, Avery Kolers, Amy Allen, Antonio Vazquez-Arroyo, and Catherine Lu. And then, in 2017, the wave arose: between then and now, each of the participants in this Workshop, as well as other scholars, published books that addressed these themes. For this Workshop, we have gathered the following authors of books published in that wave:

Panel chairs:
-Edwina Barvosa, author of Deliberative Democracy Now: LGBT Equality...
-Sina Kramer, author of Excluded Within

Presenters:
-Kouslaa Kessler-Mata, author of American Indians and the Trouble with Sovereignty
-Inés Valdez, author of Transnational Cosmopolitanism
-Inder Marwah, author of Liberalism, Diversity & Domination
-Alasia Nuti, author of Injustice and the Reproduction of History
-Andrew Valls, author of Rethinking Racial Justice
-Ben McKean, author of Disorienting Neoliberalism: Global Justice and the Outer Limit of Freedom (to be published by Oxford by APSA)
-Mara Marin, author of Connected by Commitment
-Tom Donahue-Ochoa, author of Unfreedom for All

This Workshop would gather these authors to discuss three questions: How? What else? What next? How can we get from each book's proposals and solutions to clear answers to the hot-button questions described above? What other problems and dilemmas does each book's theory illuminate? What else can the theory offer to theorists and practitioners of politics? Given these global political controversies, and the ideas offered in these and other books in the recent wave, what problems would it be fruitful to address next?

The Workshop therefore proposes to create a research network among its participants and attendees, as well as those now writing books on these problems, and the immediate predecessors mentioned above. So it aims to treat each book not as a stand-alone and final contribution, to be defended by its author against all criticism, but rather as a work in progress. Each book will thus be presented as part of a joint intellectual effort to understand global politics and to propose ways forward, both theoretically and practically. Hence we will treat each book's contributions as provisional offerings to the network's overarching research program. Conversely, the Workshop will propose that the entire network jointly take forward each of these contributions.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Edwina Barvosa University of California, Santa Barbara

Presenters

• Sina Jo Kramer Loyola Marymount University

• Kouslaa Kessler-Mata University of San Francisco

• Inés Valdez Ohio State University

• Inder Singh Marwah McMaster University

• Alasia Nuti University of York

• Andrew Valls Oregon State University

• Benjamin McKean Ohio State University

• Mara Marin University of Victoria

• Thomas J. Donahue-Ochoa Haverford College