Fundamental Questions on Affective Injustice

Room – Roscoe 2.5

4-5 September, Manchester

Affective injustice – suffered by individuals “in their capacity as affective beings,” i.e., capable of experiencing, interpreting, regulating, and expressing affective states and emotions (Srinivasan 2018) – has been attracting growing interest among normative political theorists and philosophers in the last decade.

The nascent yet burgeoning affective injustice literature has thus far primarily centred on identifying relevant cases. For instance, some have focused on invidious forms of “affective dilemmas,” whereby oppressed groups’ members are forced to either suppress their warranted emotions – e.g., anger, resentment – or risk exacerbating their disadvantage (Archer & Mills 2019; Srinivasan 2018). Others have analysed troubling cases of “emotional imperialism” and “violations of affective rights,” such as when members of social groups who have suffered injustices in the past are pressured to participate in the emotional rituals of historically dominating cultural majorities – e.g., socially mandated public displays and expressions of grief and mourning for fallen soldiers (Archer & Matheson 2020; Archer 2024). Others still, have highlighted unequal – e.g., gendered or racialised – distributions of distinctively emotional burdens in social interactions – e.g., emotion work to regulate one’s (or others’) emotions so that others are spared efforts or embarrassment (Liebow & Glazer 2019; Villa 2024).

With a few exceptions (Gallegos 2021; Whitney 2018), several theoretical questions concerning, e.g., the nature of affective injustice, its precise conceptualisation, and – more generally – its place within broader (egalitarian) social justice theories remain severely underexplored. This is problematic since the field of normative affective injustice theory is ripe for theoretical development, as the rich, long-standing research program on the affective and emotional dimensions of social, cultural, and political life in several cognate social science disciplines suggests (e.g., Ahmed 2004; Hochschild 1983, 2016).

Against this backdrop, the panel investigates issues related, but not limited, to the following points: definitions of affective harms, disadvantages and injustice (and relationships between them); how affective injustice relates to other types of injustice – e.g., epistemic injustice, structural oppression; accounts of “affective rights,” their normative grounds, possible correlative duties or responsibilities; normative and prescriptive analyses of emotion-related social practices and norms – e.g., external emotional regulation, emotion-centred stereotyping; role of emotions and beliefs in constituting affective injustice; affective injustice and political movements, practices of citizenship, institutions (e.g., state, workplace, education); collective dimensions of affective injustice.

Convenors: Rossella De Bernardi (University of Genoa) and Quân Nguyen (University College Dublin)