We live in unjust times. Wealth and power continue to accumulate in the hands of an increasingly small elite, more and more people around the world are exposed to the whims of authoritarian rulers, hate movements are proliferating and becoming emboldened, all as we hurtle headlong into climate catastrophe in which the vulnerable are being sacrificed to secure the lives and livelihoods of the privileged. Language is woven through all of this, from the shibboleths used to identify victims and the rhetoric used to incite their attackers, to the discourses that promote inaction through denialism and indifference or justify, even celebrate, the most heinous of atrocities.
In this climate of injustice, the publication of Language and social justice is timely and welcome. It makes an important contribution to a growing effort to explore the intersections of language and social justice (e.g. Piller Reference Piller2016; Avineri & Baquedano-López Reference Avineri and Baquedano-López2024).
But what is social justice? In the volume's introduction, the editors sidestep the issue of defining this key term, noting that it is ‘a concept with many competing and contested definitions’ (4). Nonetheless, they do give us some clues as to their understanding of social justice, for example, when they note that the term is often used to ‘highlight the intersection of race-based sociopolitical-economic inequities’ brought about by ‘colonialism and neoliberal capitalism’ (5). We also catch hints of an editorial vision of social justice in the book's organization into four thematic sections: challenging linguistic ideologies and exclusions, confronting hate and violence, decoding globalized interactions, and negotiating resources in the Anthropocene. Beyond these hints, however, the editors resist imposing a specific definition of social justice, or its relation to language.
This makes sense as an editorial policy for a large and ambitious volume, containing twenty chapters (running to nearly 500 pages of text), written by thirty-four contributors, and focusing on a range of countries, including Aotearoa, Brazil, China, Denmark, Guatemala, Mexico, Nepal, South Africa, and the US. This global scope is also another reason that the editors avoid pinning down a single overarching vision of social justice: in line with the anthropological orientation of the volume, the editors adopt a strategically ambiguous definition of social justice in order to hold space for the possibility of multiple visions of social justice. This editorial approach places the burden of defining social justice on the authors. It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the extreme polyvalence that the term social justice carries, to better understand the daunting task that the authors faced.
Social justice first emerged in the 1840s as giustizia sociale in the writings of Luigi Taparelli d'Azeglio, a Jesuit scholar and advisor to the Vatican. His vision of social justice was conservative, relying on everyone knowing their place in an immutable social hierarchy (Lorenz Reference Lorenz2014). Over a century later, social justice obtained new form and increased popularity through the work of liberal philosopher John Rawls (Reference Rawls1971), who saw fairness as central to social justice, and advocated for a minimally interventionist state to protect individual freedoms, while also redistributing resources to improve the standing of the least fortunate. Later, in the 1990s, Nancy Fraser (Reference Fraser1996) developed a vision of social justice that incorporated insights from Marxist and feminist philosophy, breaking down social justice into three interdependent components: socioeconomic justice (redistribution), sociocultural justice (recognition), and political justice (representation).
These divergent visions of social justice have generated intense debate in academia, often seeming to test the limits of commentators’ credulity. Charles Mills (Reference Mills1998:4), for example, in his critique of the Rawlsian concept of social justice for its ‘race blindness’, was left wondering if the entire philosophical enterprise was actually ‘just white guys jerking off’. Nancy Fraser, meanwhile, in a debate around the concept of social justice with Iris Marion Young, was driven to ask whether she and Young ‘inhabit different worlds’ (Fraser Reference Fraser1997:126). The intensity of these debates emerges, perhaps, from the sweeping real-world stakes of their outcome, and the total incompatibility of different definitions. ‘Social justice’ is today put to completely contradictory ends. While Nancy Fraser's earlier work on social justice has propelled her into a stance of advocating socialism and anti-capitalism (Fraser Reference Fraser2023), we also see the Chilean radical right Partido Republicano (Republican Party) adopting ‘social justice’ as one of its guiding principles (van Dijk Reference van Dijk2024). Definitional ambiguity therefore opens up a yawning chasm of possibility.
The authors of individual chapters are thus faced with a heavy burden in being required to present their own definition of social justice. Each of them grapple with this issue, regardless of whether their chapter focuses on language and activism, Islamophobia, healthcare, seafaring, toponyms, testimony, sovereignty, or translation. The contributions that tackle this definitional conundrum most successfully, I think, are those that work through their definition of social justice explicitly, and with reference to the philosophical literature on the topic. To give some idea of what this looks like, I give two examples.
The chapter written by Laura Menna & Eva Codó, ‘Barcelona street vendors’ voice and the crossing of narrative (b)orders,’ draws on Nancy Fraser's model of social justice and its three components of redistribution, recognition, and representation. In particular, the authors concentrate on the third element, political representation, to examine how racialized, migrant street vendors in Barcelona are excluded from the mechanisms of political representation by the persistent smothering, channelling, and coopting of their voices. The use of Fraser's model of social justice to interpret the public and political life of vendors’ voice thus opens up new avenues for understanding how injustice is produced through and in relation to language. Furthermore, the author's use of Fraser's work also renders the language element of social justice struggles legible to a wider audience in ways that our disciplinary terms and theories would not. Menna & Codó's contribution therefore does the important work of rendering language visible within social justice, while also moving us closer to what we might call ‘linguistic justice’.
The approach taken by Bernard Perley (one of the book's editors), in his chapter ‘Inscribing social justice through Indigenous place names’, demonstrates another set of possibilities for exploring the interface of language and social justice. Rather than applying social justice theory to language, Perley uses his analysis of the political predicament of Indigenous languages within settler colonialism to reflect on theories of social justice. Examining the long history of colonial erasure of Indigenous languages in Canada, and the recent emergence of more just practices, such as bilingual signage, Perley reflects on the hypocrisy and inadequacy of much contemporary social justice theory. Finding social justice wanting, he promotes a vision of ‘transformative justice’ that ‘challenges systemic violence against targeted populations to support changes in cultural norms and contexts that support access and equity, thereby dismantling the perpetuation of discrimination against Indigenous peoples and other disadvantaged populations’ (414). Importantly, Perley argues that we can and should turn to Indigenous languages and worldviews to inform our vision of transformative justice.
These two contributions demonstrate the insights that sociolinguists, linguistic anthropologists, and others can generate when we combine our focus on language with the theoretical tools developed by generations of philosophers working on the topic of social justice: we can better understand the forms and faces of linguistic injustice, bring language into broader conversations about social justice, and even challenge and transform dominant notions of social justice. In the face of rising injustice around the world today, each of these tasks take on greater significance with every passing day.
