En 2016, el Instituto Nacional Penitenciario y Carcelario de Colombia reformó el reglamento de establecimientos de reclusión con el propósito de integrar medidas de antidiscriminación para la población LGBT. Reconociendo la función disciplinaria que tiene el complejo carcelario, este artículo analizará el reglamento del INPEC a través de la aproximación queer del derecho propuesta por Dean Spade. A partir de esa herramienta analítica, se argumenta que estas medidas antidiscriminación establecen un efecto dinámico sobre el derecho al libre desarrollo de la (...) personalidad de las personas trans privadas de la libertad. Esto es consecuencia de que la estrategia penitenciaria, al mismo tiempo que es un triunfo para el activismo LGBT, perpetúa un discurso binario y esencialista de la sexualidad. El artículo pretende demostrar que la reforma antidiscriminación del INPEC es un derecho queer: una maquinaria que degrada y protege, al unísono y de forma contradictoria, la vida trans. (shrink)

Some psychologists aim to secure a role for psychological explanations in understanding contemporary social disparities, a concern that plays out in debates over the relevance of the Implicit Association Test. Meta-analysts disagree about the predictive validity of the IAT and about the importance of implicit attitudes in explaining racial disparities. Here, I use the IAT to articulate and explore one route to establishing the relevance of psychological attitudes with small effects: an appeal to a process of “accumulation” that aggregates small (...) effects into large harms. After characterizing mechanisms of accumulation and considering some candidate examples, I argue that such mechanisms suggest how a contemporary attitude with small effects could figure in the explanation of large disparities, but they do not vindicate the importance of such an attitude since such mechanisms are typically also determined by competing causes. I close by sketching several strategies for advancing a defense of the relevance of attitudes with small effects. (shrink)

My aim in this dissertation is to analyze Black oppression and White domination. I attempt to show how social systems unjustly diminish Black Americans’ opportunities to form and pursue their conceptions of good lives and unjustly strengthen White Americans’ opportunities for the same. I believe that the accounts of Black oppression and White domination I offer are more adept at identifying the expansive and varied wrongs of Black oppression in America, analyzing the relationship between theorizing oppression and addressing oppression through (...) social and political change in America, and demonstrating the ways that Whites benefit from and are incentivized to maintain oppressive systems in America, than the accounts put forward by other theorists. In Chapter 1, I begin by discussing why I frame my project in terms of oppressive “wrongs” rather than “harms”. I worry the term ‘harm’ may be taken to imply that one has experienced subjective suffering or a measurable loss, whereas I am concerned with instantiations of oppressive systems even when they don’t cause the person subject to the oppressive system to experience a measurable loss or subjective suffering. In an effort to describe how I identify wrongs, I then argue that in virtue of the deep importance of freely pursuing one’s chosen life plan, any barriers one faces in pursuing his or her life plan must be justifiable. Barriers one experiences in virtue of his or her race are typically not justifiable. On this basis, I argue for my principle of racial injustice, which states that individuals are prima facie wronged by socially constructed barriers to their abilities to form and seek their conception of a good life if those barriers exist in virtue of their race. The “prima facie” nature of the wrongness is significant, I argue, because correcting the injustices of Black oppression will require that Whites face some barriers to pursuing our life plans that we do not currently face; it is not the case, then, that every race-based barrier is truly wrongful. I then discuss my understanding of race, arguing that race’s mutability across contexts and how one’s race is intimately tied to systems of subordination and domination support my view that race is socially constructed. I end with a brief history of White domination and Black subordination in the U.S. In Chapter 2, I outline general experiences of racism as espoused by Black writers and the statistical data that support these accounts. I then take a deep look at mass incarceration, including a history of the system, its disproportional impact on Black Americans, and the many resulting injustices inflicted largely on incarcerated Black Americans, their families, and their communities. I specifically highlight the recognition-wrongs inflicted on Black Americans through mass incarceration, where recognition-wrongs are acts that function primarily as a mode of dehumanizing individuals. Recognition-wrongs include verbal degradation through things like slurs, but also epistemic injustices, a concept developed by Miranda Fricker and others to identify injustices that wrong individuals in virtue of their status as knowers and communicators of knowledge. I then discuss kinship-wrongs, a concept I develop to identify wrongs that impact people’s ability to form and maintain relationships. I highlight and conceptualize these wrongs in an attempt to draw attention to their significance in racial subordination. In Chapter 3, I develop an account of oppression that is particularly responsive to race-based wrongs. I begin by showing why the influential accounts authored by Iris Marion Young and Ann Cudd are unsatisfactory for capturing Black oppression. I attempt to develop an account that is sensitive to the experiences of subordination detailed by Black Americans, equipped to address the material harms of oppression, and also able to make sense of the recognition- and kinship-wrongs raised in Chapter 2. I ultimately determine that a member of a c-group is subject to an oppressive wrong when, in virtue of his or her or their membership in that c-group, he or she or they suffer wrongs that are systematically perpetrated through social, political, or legal norms, conventions, or practices. A c-group is any collection of persons who share some set of constraints, incentives, penalties, and the like. I end the chapter by carefully describing my commitments to each clause of the definition of oppression, beginning by analyzing c-groups, describing systematically perpetrated wrongs, explaining what it means to be wronged in virtue of one’s c-group membership, and showing that my account of oppression is sensitive to both material and recognition-wrongs. In Chapter 4, I argue that we ought to understand oppression in the framework of a capabilities approach. I begin by explaining the concept of capabilities, which are real opportunities to function in particular ways. I then argue that securing capabilities is a better aim for justice than ensuring that people function in certain valuable ways because a focus on capabilities protects people’s opportunities to pursue the kinds of lives they want to live, respecting their interest in freely determining their life goals, while a focus on protecting valuable functionings inappropriately prescribes life goals to them. I show how capabilities can be utilized as part of a theory of justice, and argue that my utilization of capabilities, combined with the other moral commitments I defend throughout the dissertation, comprises a rectificatory theory of racial justice aimed at eliminating Black oppression. I argue that through the framework of capabilities, I can analyze both the material and recognition-wrongs of oppression, avoid the kinds of bad idealizations that often skew our understanding of oppressive systems and their impact, and make judgments about modern day society without developing an account of perfect justice. I next show that to avoid inflicting further recognition-wrongs, it is essential that oppressed peoples are the primary arbiters of which capabilities and oppressive systems should be prioritized in policy and advocacy. I conclude Chapter 4 with a brief sketch of how we can turn the priorities of the oppressed into public policy, moving from the prioritization process, to policy development, to implementing policies, and finally to monitoring and revising them. My final chapter, Chapter 5, shows how my account can also be used to analyze the norms of White domination that coincide with Black oppression. I begin by discussing “correlative capabilities,” which are those capabilities that are strengthened for Whites in virtue of the fact that Whites are not subject to oppression as Black Americans are. My discussion of correlative capabilities maps closely onto the advantages typically described as White privilege. I then turn to more insidious advantages Whites gain from Black oppression. I argue that oppressive norms advantage Whites by creating a social structure that empowers us with the capabilities to dominate racial narratives and ignore our racialized identities. The capability to dominate racial narratives consists in Whites’ abilities to pontificate on racialized events without justification for our views and still have our perspectives treated as mainstream, worthy of debate, and often as nearly definitive. I demonstrate this capability in action by examining Colin Kaepernick’s protest in the NFL, the coverage it received, and his resulting treatment. I then discuss Whites’ capability to ignore our racialized identities, showing how we establish Whiteness as a central, unconditioned perspective. Whites see ourselves as “simply people,” while seeing non-Whites as raced. This leads to Whites promoting color-blind conceptions of justice, which move us farther from true justice by ignoring social norms’ impact on policy development and implementation. I then show how Whites may go one step further and argue that we are victimized by “reverse racism” when efforts are made to eliminate oppressive systems. Finally, I end Chapter 5 with a discussion of how Whites are also disadvantaged by Black oppression, particularly in our capabilities to perform our jobs well, live morally, and establish and maintain relationships. I then conclude the dissertation by discussing how we might teach race-sensitive virtues in an effort to change White-favorable social norms. (shrink)

The problems of racism and racially motivated violence in predominantly African American communities in the United States are complex, multifactorial, and historically rooted. While these problems are also deeply morally troubling, bioethicists have not contributed substantially to addressing them. Concern for justice has been one of the core commitments of bioethics. For this and other reasons, bioethicists should contribute to addressing these problems. We consider how bioethicists can offer meaningful contributions to the public discourse, research, teaching, training, policy development, and (...) academic scholarship in response to the alarming and persistent patterns of racism and implicit biases associated with it. To make any useful contribution, bioethicists will require preparation and should expect to play a significant role through collaborative action with others. (shrink)

An Artificial Intelligence algorithm trained on data that reflect racial biases may yield racially biased outputs, even if the algorithm on its own is unbiased. For example, algorithms used to schedule medical appointments in the USA predict that Black patients are at a higher risk of no-show than non-Black patients, though technically accurate given existing data that prediction results in Black patients being overwhelmingly scheduled in appointment slots that cause longer wait times than non-Black patients. This perpetuates racial inequity, in (...) this case lesser access to medical care. This gives rise to one type of Accuracy-Fairness trade-off: preserve the efficiency offered by using AI to schedule appointments or discard that efficiency in order to avoid perpetuating ethno-racial disparities. Similar trade-offs arise in a range of AI applications including others in medicine, as well as in education, judicial systems, and public security, among others. This article presents a framework for addressing such trade-offs where Machine Learning and Optimization components of the algorithm are decoupled. Applied to medical appointment scheduling, our framework articulates four approaches intervening in different ways on different components of the algorithm. Each yields specific results, in one case preserving accuracy comparable to the current state-of-the-art while eliminating the disparity. (shrink)

Ever since Freud introduced the idea of the death drive as a means of explaining the apparently inborn inclination towards aggression, psychoanalysis has been riven by the question of negativity. For social theorists who lean upon psychoanalysis, the question is even more acute: how should these theories interpret the persistence of misrecognition and violence within contemporary societies? Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition represents the most compelling attempt to address these questions within the so-called ‘third generation’ of critical theory, yet Honneth (...) sidesteps or sublimates the most troubling aspects of the psychoanalytic legacy, displaying a quasi-Hegelian ‘cunning of recognition’ that sees human destructiveness as a purposive, experimental force within the psyche and the social. By rooting his theory in the work of D.W. Winnicott, Honneth avoids the ambivalent account of psychic and social life offered by object relations theorists such as Melanie Klein and Wilfrid Bion. However, I argue that Klein’s concept of ‘integration’ offers a more compelling orientation for social theory, insofar as it countenances the fragility of recognition alongside a desire for misrecognition. The turn to Klein and those directly influenced by her, such as Bion and Hanna Segal, has both theoretical and practical implications for contemporary critical theory. Theoretically it makes the case for reconnecting mainline critical theory – with its overtures to liberalism and deliberative democracy – with agonistic approaches to social life. Practically speaking it directs attention to the social and political spaces by which destructive impulses can be effectively articulated, held, and to some extent worked through. In particular, it offers a psychological and political defense of recent experiments in local, grassroots-organized truth and reconciliation processes. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide an analysis of the emergence of “problematic of alien sexuality.” I first locate discourses about “alien sexuality,” and the so-called anchor baby in particular, within other national discourses surrounding maternity, the fetus, and citizenship. I analyze the ways that national political discourses surrounding “anchor babies” and “alien maternity” construct the “problematic of alien sexuality,” thus constituting the “alien” subject as always-already perverse. I suggest that this production of a sexually deviant and threatening “alien” subject functions (...) in the normative dichotomy that places the sexually pure citizen on the one hand, and the perverse anticitizen on the other, in what I call “backwards uncitizening.” My analysis of this process shows that the perverse “alien” subject, as constituted in significant part by nonjuridical normalizing mechanisms of biopower, resists the juridical discourse that is supposed to determine it. (shrink)

To understand how compliance develops both in everyday and corporate environments, it is crucial to understand how different mechanisms work together to shape individuals’ (non)compliant behavior. Existing compliance studies typically focus on a subset of theories (i.e., rational choice theories, social theories, legitimacy theories, capacity theories, and opportunity theories) to understand how key variables from one or several of these theories shape individual compliance. The present study provides a first integrated understanding of compliance, rooted in complexity science, in which key (...) elements from these theories are considered simultaneously, and their relations to compliance and each other are explored using network analysis. This approach is developed by analyzing online survey data (_N_ = 562) about compliance with COVID-19 mitigation measures. Traditional regression analysis shows that elements from nearly all major compliance theories (except for social theories) are associated with compliance. The network analysis revealed groupings and interconnections of variables that did not track the existing compliance theories and point to a complexity overlooked in existing compliance research. These findings demonstrate a fundamentally different perspective on compliance, which moves away from traditional narrow, non-network approaches. Instead, they showcase a complexity science understanding of compliance, in which compliance is understood as a network of interacting variables derived from different theories that interact with compliance. This points to a new research agenda that is oriented on mapping compliance networks, and testing and modelling how regulatory and management interventions interact with each other and compliance within such networks. (shrink)

Given the pervasiveness of AI systems and their potential negative effects on people’s lives (especially among already marginalised groups), it becomes imperative to comprehend what goes on when an AI system generates a result, and based on what reasons, it is achieved. There are consistent technical efforts for making systems more “explainable” by reducing their opaqueness and increasing their interpretability and explainability. In this paper, we explore an alternative non-technical approach towards explainability that complement existing ones. Leaving aside technical, statistical, (...) or data-related issues, we focus on the very conceptual underpinnings of the design decisions made by developers and other stakeholders during the lifecycle of a machine learning project. For instance, the design and development of an app to track snoring to detect possible health risks presuppose some picture or another of “health”, which is a key notion that conceptually underpins the project. We take it as a premise that these key concepts are necessarily present during design and development, albeit perhaps tacitly. We argue that by providing “justificatory explanations” about how the team understands the relevant key concepts behind its design decisions, interested parties could gain valuable insights and make better sense of the workings and outcomes of systems. Using the concept of “health”, we illustrate how a particular understanding of it might influence decisions during the design and development stages of a machine learning project, and how making this explicit by incorporating it into ex-post explanations might increase the explanatory and justificatory power of these explanations. We posit that a greater conceptual awareness of the key concepts that underpin design and development decisions may be beneficial to any attempt to develop explainability methods. We recommend that “justificatory explanations” are provided as technical documentation. These are declarative statements that contain at its simplest: (1) a high-level account of the understanding of the relevant key concepts a team possess related to a project’s main domain, (2) how these understandings drive decision-making during the life-cycle stages, and (3) it gives reasons (which could be implicit in the account) that the person or persons doing the explanation consider to have plausible justificatory power for the decisions that were made during the project. (shrink)

In this article two series are analyzed: Black Earth Rising and Queen Sono, shows that are about African realities from an African perspective. The findings in this article show that both series address social and political issues such as neocolonialism, neoextractivism, internal colonialism, racism, inequality, justice, self-determination, corruption, violence, peace, memory, necropolitics, mental health, and decoloniality. I also argue that the shows could be used as pedagogical tools to raise critical consciousness in a wide public regarding the social and political (...) issues addressed. The research in this article has been conducted with a qualitative methodology, using both shows as case studies and using content analysis and bibliographical research. The analysis of the series is based in the discussion of critical theory and decoloniality approaches and authors, especially from Latin America and Africa. Furthermore, the analysis of popular media is a relevant effort to decolonize knowledge, using alternative and non-academic sources to produce and socialize knowledge. (shrink)

Rates of crime for Blacks in the United States in the post-slavery era have always been high relative to Whites. But explaining, or minimizing, this fact faces a major problem: individual excuses for bad acts point to deficiencies, in the agent, which are perhaps forgivable, such as mental deficiency or a deprived childhood, but at the price of treating the agent as less than a full member of the moral community. Collectivizing excuses risks implying group inferiority. The history of attempts (...) to provide an explanation of crime that mitigates blame without undermining full participation to the moral community is long and convoluted, leading to the presently widespread claim that crime is itself a product of victimization through pervasive racism. Three basic strategies – rejection of comparison, attribution to racially invariant causes and explanation by reference to uniquely Black conditions, such as subculture or extreme stigmatization – are identified and their ethical implications distinguished. (shrink)

Big Data evangelists often argue that algorithms make decision-making more informed and objective—a promise hotly contested by critics of these technologies. Yet, to date, most of the debate has focused on the instruments themselves, rather than on how they are used. This article addresses this lack by examining the actual practices surrounding algorithmic technologies. Specifically, drawing on multi-sited ethnographic data, I compare how algorithms are used and interpreted in two institutional contexts with markedly different characteristics: web journalism and criminal justice. (...) I find that there are surprising similarities in how web journalists and legal professionals use algorithms in their work. In both cases, I document a gap between the intended and actual effects of algorithms—a process I analyze as “decoupling.” Second, I identify a gamut of buffering strategies used by both web journalists and legal professionals to minimize the impact of algorithms in their daily work. Those include foot-dragging, gaming, and open critique. Of course, these similarities do not exhaust the differences between the two cases, which are explored in the discussion section. I conclude with a call for further ethnographic work on algorithms in practice as an important empirical check against the dominant rhetoric of algorithmic power. (shrink)

This article examines the critical work of Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction novel Dawn, which follows Lilith Ayapo, a black American woman who is rescued by an alien species after a nuclear war destroys nearly all life on Earth. Lilith awakens 250 years later and learns that the aliens have tasked her with reviving other humans and repopulating the planet. In reframing Reagan-era debates about security and survival, Butler captured the spirit of ‘pessimistic futurism’, a unique way of thinking and writing (...) black female sexuality, reproduction and survival. Suturing concepts central to both Afro-pessimism and Afrofuturism, pessimistic futurism carefully considers how black female subjectivity and labour create the coming world. By linking human survival to Lilith’s own ability to adapt to the new and dangerous world, Butler offers scholars of black studies a vital interpretive framework for thinking about the points of contact between pessimism and futurism. Specifically, Butler presents a form of futurism brought back to Earth, grounded in the sensibility of the black female experience. (shrink)

This article carves out a new path between the two dominant wings of contemporary egalitarianism. The luck egalitarian emphasis on choice and personal responsibility is misplaced because individuals differ so deeply, and arbitrarily, in their choice-making capacities. Allowing inequalities to result from ‘choice’ is akin to allowing inequalities to stem from the possession of any other morally arbitrary factor – such as skin colour or gender. The move towards relational egalitarianism has been a case of two-steps forward, one-step back. While (...) the shift away from the focus on choice is salutary, the concurrent rejection of luck is problematic, given the prevalence and importance of luck-based discrepancies in opportunities to lead a good life. A new conceptual framework is presented: good life egalitarianism. The guiding idea is that given the unavoidable arbitrariness of human capacities, the foundation for a good life should be assured for people regardless of the actual choices that they make. The essential goods necessary for leading a good life – such as the opportunities to self-determine and to enjoy non-dominating social relationships – should be guaranteed to all. (shrink)

In my dissertation, I engage in a political history of waste; in particular I look at modern philosophers from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and the way that waste functions alongside narratives of civilization, progress, and perfection. I analyze the political, pedagogical, and other theories of John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. I use Julia Kristevaâs concept of abjection to trace the legacies of these philosophers to the continued and continuing practices of wasting life their work (...) supports and maintains. Social contract theory must have its others, those wasted and abjected to limn the boundary of the âclean and properâ civilized order. Locke abjects waste in his theory of property and I link the use of his term âwastelandâ to the wastelanding of Native Americans. As Kristeva says the forgetting, repressing, or disavowal of abjection leads to the return of its repressed in the form of our âapocalypses.â I discuss Rousseauâs treatment of waste and the way it is ambivalently embraced, which I think is a more appropriate treatment of waste. I also compare Emile and Sophieâs education and argue that his education of women makes waste of their lives. Last, I discuss Kantâs theory of waste and race together, arguing that he redeems all waste and that he makes waste of all races except the white race. He assents to the use of people of color as means for the white raceâs ends, rather than treating them as ends in themselves. Thus, I conclude that social contract theories are wasteful of life and lives and that contract theory should be garbaged for a new political principle: to not make waste of life or lives. (shrink)

Recent political events suggest that there is more political, religious, and moral division than many had previously realized. Since people on all sides think they’re in the right, mitigating division is in everyone’s interest. But overcoming division requires changing minds, and changing minds requires advocacy. These considerations raise important questions in the epistemology of advocacy. In particular, who are the best advocates? After making some general remarks about the epistemology of advocacy, I explore the thought, found in Berkeley’s dialogue Alciphron, (...) that an important variable to consider when assessing advocates is whether they are converts. I argue that this is indeed an important variable to consider, as certain kinds of converts can avoid some attempts to dismiss advocates. However, non-converts score better than converts in other respects. I conclude by suggesting that empirical work must be done to assess the role conversion plays in assessing advocates. (shrink)

This article explores the philosophical underpinnings and implications of the idea of the public in the US state processes of knowledge production and control. In it we take up questions of public and counterpublic political philosophical knowledge production and mediation in relation to an expanding state. Specifically, we examine the political philosophies of racialized counterpublics since the 1960s, considering the particular knowledge production genre of the political prison letter. We suggest that the philosophical principles of the dominant public in the (...) US have a proclivity to merge with state mechanisms of domination and to thwart counterpublics and their modes of political knowledge production. (shrink)

The new edition of Manning Marable’sBeyond Black and Whiteseeks to explain the course of black politics in the United States over the last thirty years. Marable argues that this history shows the failure of liberal and nationalist politics to address the problems facing black Americans. Though Marable attempts to chart a course beyond these ideologies, his alternative of ‘transformative politics’, shorn of the revolutionary Marxism that defined his earlier writings, is no more capable of confronting racial inequality than the strategies (...) it seeks to replace. (shrink)

Plea bargaining is a response to capacity overload in the criminal justice system. It both preserves and belies the right to trial, making possible its glorious display but only by denying it in most cases. While plea bargaining has been documented and analysed copiously in historical, sociological and legal terms, its ethical status as an institutional practice are hazy. Richard Lippke offers an account of plea bargaining that draws on the normative debates over responsibility, culpability and desert, in aid of (...) a holistic proposal for a morally defensible system of pre-trial adjudication. In proposing an ethical system of plea bargaining, and working through the normative challenges to this, two bigger questions become visible. These are: what are the implications of developing, in essence, an ethics of efficiency, and, how should the criminal justice system be held to account for the inequalities (and iniquities) that exist before and outside it? In this review essay, I show how these questions are constructed in the book and make some attempt at analysing them, thus engaging with the more urgent and general issue of the complicated relationship of the ideal to the real when it comes to penal practice. (shrink)

We examine the ethical, social, and regulatory barriers that may hinder research on therapeutic potential of certain controversial controlled substances like marijuana, heroin, or ketamine. Hazards for individuals and society and potential adverse effects on communities may be good reasons for limiting access and justify careful monitoring of these substances. Overly strict regulations, fear of legal consequences, stigma associated with abuse and populations using illicit drugs, and lack of funding may, however, limit research on their considerable therapeutic potential. We review (...) the surprisingly sparse literature and address the particular ethical concerns pertinent to research with illicit and addictive substances, such as undue inducement, informed consent, therapeutic misconception, and risk to participants, researchers, and institutions. We consider the perspectives of key research stakeholders and explore whether they may be infected with bias. We conclude by proposing an empirical research agenda to provide an evidentiary basis for ethical reasoning. (shrink)

Moral and legal philosophy are too entangled: moral philosophy is prone to model interpersonal moral relationships on a juridical image, and legal philosophy often proceeds as if the criminal law is an institutional reflection of juridically imagined interpersonal moral relationships. This article challenges this alignment and in so doing argues that the function of the criminal law lies not fundamentally in moral blame, but in regulation of harmful conduct. The upshot is that, in contrast to interpersonal relationships, the criminal law (...) cannot lose its standing to blame through institutional analogues of hypocrisy, complicity, and meddling. Rather, certain forms of structural and severe historical and contemporary injustice point to the question of the overall legitimacy of state authority. (shrink)

Black mothers often are responsible for teaching their children how to respond to police violence. Through 30 in-depth interviews with black mothers from diverse social class backgrounds, I investigate how they address the gendered racial vulnerability of their children in the “police talk,” a socialization practice designed to prepare children for police encounters. I identify mothers’ primary discourse as “the making it home” framework, which encapsulates in parent–child socialization their use of double consciousness around the police. This framework marginalizes girls’ (...) experiences in three ways: it conceptualizes boys as the primary targets of police, while constructing girls as collateral targets of police violence; it emphasizes masculine forms of violence; and it is directed almost exclusively at boys. An intersectional analysis is applied to redress the limitations of the police talk and to highlight the need for structural reforms to recognize and combat police violence against black women and girls. (shrink)

This review essay critically engages three socio-legal books directed to the changing bases of criminalization; namely, Lacey ; Farmer ; and Norrie, Justice and the slaughter bench: essays on law’s broken dialectic, Routledge, New York, 2016). The texts explore how modern institutions of criminal law proscribe, assign responsibility and appear through contradictory socio-political ‘constellations’. They variously reference criminal law’s expanding punitiveness as it: embraces revived character-based ways of attributing responsibility via ideas of risk; drifts away from a social function of (...) creating civil order; and, works through a ‘broken dialectic’ that fails to recognize its ethico-political auspices. The ensuing ‘overcriminalization’ is referenced variously, but this review questions a tendency to work off legal lexicons, with consequent limitations placed on the scope of social analysis. Referring to Roman and Cape colonial forms of criminalization, this review highlights processes of accusation that call subjects to account as criminals, thereby signalling an initiating socio-political layer upon which unequal forms of overcriminalization rest. (shrink)

"Analyzes the value of using case-based methodologies to address contemporary social justice issues in philosophy"--.

To a packed audience in Clark Hall, Sheila Jasanoff, a distinguished scholar and former president of the Society for Social Studies of Science, gave the plenary address for “Where has STS Traveled,” a commemorative gathering of the fortieth anniversary of the inaugural meeting of the 4S. Not only was this meeting located in the very same room as the first gathering, but also many of the original members had traveled from far and wide to Cornell University to reminisce and reflect (...) on the academic field they had established, as well as imagine the possibilities of the next forty years. In response to a question about the direction of STS, Professor Jasanoff suggested that the 4S had not turned its reflective gaze inward to examine the politics of its own society, nor had it spent much effort interrogating the society’s contribution to social policy or enduring social problems. As I heard Jasanoff speak about our collective need for reflection and reflexivity, I had to wonder whether, and to what extent, we were ready to reflect on the subject matter of race and racism in this mostly color-blind field of inquiry. (shrink)

Several writers have argued that the state lacks the moral standing to hold socially deprived offenders responsible for their crimes because the state would be hypocritical in doing so. Yet the state is not disposed to make an unfair exception of itself for committing the same sorts of crimes as socially deprived offenders, so it is unclear that the state is truly hypocritical. Nevertheless, the state is disposed to inconsistently hold its citizens responsible, blaming or punishing socially deprived offenders more (...) often or more harshly than other offenders, even when the crimes are the same. The state’s stable disposition to inconsistently hold offenders responsible undermines its standing to hold offenders responsible for the same reasons that hypocrisy undermines standing; instead of making an unfair exception of itself, the state makes an unfair exception of others. Strikingly, this means that the state lacks the standing to hold anyone responsible for a crime for which it is unfairly disposed to hold citizens responsible inconsistently, not just socially deprived offenders. Thus, it is even more urgent that the state regain its moral standing by working toward a justice system that holds offenders responsible consistently. (shrink)

In December 2010, the governor of Mississippi suspended the dual life sentences of two African American sisters who had been imprisoned for sixteen years on an extraordinary condition: that Gladys Scott donate a kidney to her ailing sister Jamie Scott. The Scott Sisters’ case is a highly unusual one, yet it is a revealing site for inquiry into US biopolitics more broadly. Close attention to the conditional release and its context demands a broader frame than traditional bioethics and helps to (...) push science and technology studies analysis of race past its conventional focus on genetics. This article draws on the Scott Sisters’ case as a site for interrogating the US context of racialized mass incarceration and kin-oriented and consumerist valorization of organ donation. Tensions between racialized exclusions, the promise of consumerist freedom, and the lack of expectations of the state are foundational to a distinctly American biological citizenship. By putting the Scott Sisters’ case into conversation with broader arguments about incarceration as a site of racialization and STS literatures of organ transplantation and of biological citizenship in diverse geographical sites, this article seeks to articulate some of the racialized contours of biopolitics in the United States. (shrink)

Trends in the history of social science dedicated to the study of crime and punishment are presented as a case study supporting F.A. Hayek's theory of social change. Designing effective social institutions and public policies first requires an accurate vision of how society operates. An accurate model of society further requires scientific methods uniquely suited for the study of human beings as purposeful agents and the study of human institutions as complex social phenomena. If guided by faulty methods, theories are (...) inaccurate and policy outcomes veer from their intentions. Hayek termed such outcomes "abuses of reason". Aiming to replicate the objectivity of physical sciences via formal modeling and statistical measurement, economists throughout the 20th century imposed an excessively technical vision of human decision-making. Policy failures and social problems resulted. This paper argues that the historical trends of applied social science dedicated to crime and punishment can be understood similarly. Formal modeling and statistical measurement continuously displaced methods more attuned to human intentionality and social complexity. In result, amidst a long-run history of intellectual and political change, US law enforcement and criminal punishment policies became technocratic, and outcomes became disjointed from their stated intentions to promote social order and welfare. (shrink)

This paper is premised on the understanding that racism is deeply and widely entrenched in our culture and the ethical claim that we operate within complex networks of habituated practices. Within this framework, we ask how do we disrupt these calcified, complex, and racist ways of being? Specifically, we explore how teachers are habituated into particular ways of seeing and acting. We argue generally that conscious cultivation can promote greater equity and specifically that changing teacher talk is a necessary part (...) of this cultivation if racist norms are to be disrupted and replaced with more equitable ways of seeing in schools. In making this argument, we draw on a practice, Descriptive Inquiry, to cultivate more equitable talk and describe how it led to changes in four urban public schools. (shrink)

Martin Luther King’s primary emphasis was upon ‘beloved community,’ a phrase he borrowed from Royce, but an idea that he shared with St. Augustine. Theories of the state tend to focus upon division, in which one stratum dominates another or others. King’s context is the US in the segregated South—a region whose internal divisions sharply instantiate the idea of the state as an unequal hierarchy of dominance. King’s appeal was less to end black subjugation than to end subjugation as such. (...) Hence King was called by some a ‘dreamer,’ given his background commitment to equality and community, ideals taking marginal precedence over his foreground commitment to liberty and autonomy. This article explores the notion of ‘beloved community’ broadly and then specifically in Martin Luther King along with related notions in Howard Thurman and in Josiah Royce. (shrink)

This paper traces the unspoken, implicit white racial logic of the brain disease model of addiction, which is based on seemingly universal, disembodied brains devoid of social or environmental influences. In the United States, this implicit white logic led to “context-free” neuroscience that made the social hierarchies of addiction and its consequences invisible to, and thus exacerbated by, national policies on opioids. The brain disease model of addiction was selectively deployed among the white middle-class population that had long accessed narcotics (...) and pharmaceutical treatments for narcotics disorders from biomedical clinics, as opposed to from illegal sources subject to law enforcement. In turn, new treatments for opioid addiction were racially marketed to the same white clientele to which newly patented opioid analgesics were marketed, tapping into a circumscribed but highly lucrative consumer base that has long benefited from a legally protected, racially segregated safe space for white narcotics consumption. The connecting thread for the contemporary white opioid “crisis,” therefore, is white race as a ghost variable in addiction neuroscience and in its pharmaceutical and biotechnological translation. (shrink)

Often created by colonial societies characterized by violence and oppression, historical artefacts such as monuments are increasingly under criticism for perpetuating violent attitudes. While the links between artefacts and society are well understood, there has been little work that finds the opportunity for resistance to violence in these artefacts themselves. Developing a ‘spectrum of violence’ for artefacts, I argue that ambiguous artefacts move us towards non-violence by provoking critique, while absolute artefacts move us away from it by stilling critique. Applying (...) this spectrum to a discussion of a graffitied New York monument in 2020, I propose that the act of ‘refacement’ can turn absolute artefacts into ambiguous ones. In so doing, the artefacts that once upheld colonial values might be transformed to resist them. This paper offers a timely exploration of monuments and violence, and seeks to better understand how cultural artefacts can lay the foundations for a non-violent future. (shrink)