From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a “Postsocialist” Age

“Indeed, to equip public debate and demands to undertake ‘transformative solutions’, democracy must be informed by analyses of cause – that reveal underlying ‘generative frameworks’ (Fraser 2008, 28).”

“Building on Fraser (1995), we are concerned with distribution and recognition of dignity as”

“Injustices arise out of a combination of economic exploitation and cultural subordination, neither of which can be analytically subsumed under the other (Fraser, 1995; Fraser and Honneth, 2003).”

“Others, notably Fraser (1995, 1997) but also Phillips (2004), have taken issue with the emphasis given by Young to the politics of difference and the extent to which the overaccentuation of what Fraser defines as cultural injustice has diverted attention from socioeconomic redistribution.”

“To do this, we utilize Fraser’s framework founded on notions of status (rather than identity) as a means of contextualizing and explaining the implications of recovery-based individualization, deficit and inequality in relation to questions of social justice (see Fraser, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2007).”

“To take on idealtypes of interactions in urban environments, critical patterns include relationships of allocation/extraction, oppression/emancipation, and recognition/misrecognition (Fraser, 1995).”

“Adapting from Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth concepts that these theorists devised for other circumstances, we might say that populism typically includes a “struggle for recognition” arising from the perception of “social contempt” [Honneth 1995 (1992); see also Taylor 1992, Fraser 1995].”

“…to a Marxist general framework that inspires a considerable portion of political ecology work, political ecologists consider emotions not merely cultural or non-material (see Fraser, 1995; Butler, 1998), but as engaged with the daily experience of living in territories of environmental struggles5.”

“Contemporary political and social theories of recognition are associated principally with the work of Axel Honneth (1995), Charles Taylor (1994) and Nancy Fraser (1995). All start from ‘the Hegelian idea that identity is constructed dialogically, through a process of mutual recognition’ (Fraser, 2000: 109), and for al…”

“Grounded in critical theory, the work of recognition scholars (Bingham, 2001; Fitzgerald, Graham, Smith, & Taylor, 2010; Fraser, 1995, 2000; Honneth, 1995, 2001, 2004; Taylor, 1994; Thomas, 2012; Thompson, 2006) is largely interested in self-actualisation, social inequality, and social justice.”

“They would include the transformation of basic economic structures and reorganization of the division of labour (Fraser, 1995).”

“Institutionalized misrecognition goes hand in hand with two other forms of injustice: economic maldistribution and political misrepresentation (Fraser, 1995, 2005).”

“Recognition is concerned with the societal structures that lead to injustices (Young, 1990; Fraser, 1997); for example, value systems institutionalized in conservation that fail to recognize diverse forms of knowledge, including that held by Indigenous peoples and local communities (Martin, 2017).”

“Epistemic injustice is closely linked to other forms such as socioeconomic and cultural injustices emanating from “maldistribution” and “misrecognition” (Fraser, 1995).”

““Transformations” are described in terms of the extent to which education policies, individual and institutional agency, and development programs promote the social justice dimensions of redistribution, recognition, and representation, as defined by Nancy Fraser (2005), complimented by postconflict issues of reconcili…”

“The former is influenced by a Marxist rationale that aims to achieve equality through a redistribution of material wealth within social arrangements whereas the latter is the recognition of the personal dignity of all individuals (Fraser, 1995).”

“…differentiate between them and other students who need other forms of support; the third links between the material and cultural aspects of ‘difference’ and the need for transformative policies that address both aspects of redistribution and recognition from a structural perspective (Fraser 1995).”

“I will focus on the convergence of traditional union activism with other collective forms of mobilization in order to show how they are increasingly converging around a call for dignity, basically a claim to recognition and social worth (Fraser 1995, 2001).”

“As Fraser (1995) and Carroll (2006) point out, actions of resistance that simply affirm or improve one actor’s entitlements or position within a social order hold little potential to transform that order.”

“In dialogue with Axel Honneth (Fraser, 2003), and in Scales of Justice (2008), Fraser moved beyond the perspectival dualism of redistribution and recognition that was a defining feature of her earlier work (Fraser, 1995).”

“…has become more complex as a source of solidarity as questions of social justice do not only include struggles over redistribution, but also struggles for the recognition of ethnic and cultural minorities and for the political representation of different groups in society (Fraser 1995, 2010).”

“Fraser argues that recognition offers explanations as to why such maldistributions come to be sustained [54,59,60,62].”

““Recognition” is the theme of Nancy Fraser’s post-distributive framing of justice (Fraser 1995).”

“For example, Fraser (1995) contends that political standards, which are often unfairly biased against certain groups or people, are mainly established through state institutions and the economy.”

“(Fraser, 1995, p. 74) Race and gender stand in contrast to class and sexuality in that they are subject to both misrecognition and maldistribution and elicit both recognition and redistribution claims as routes to remedy injustice.”

“Fraser views socioeconomic injustice as rooted in political-economic structures of society and expressed as economic marginalization, exploitation and deprivation (Fraser 1995, p. 70-71).”

“Instead, she draws on Fraser (1995, 2000) to assert that the economic and the cultural are intersecting rather than oppositional domains.”

“The division of labour between paid/productive and unpaid/reproductive and domestic labour, with women primarily assigned responsibility for the latter produces gender-specific distributive injustice (Fraser, 1995).”

“…means of abstracting the different elements and workings of the politics of Indigenous water rights in Australia as part of a schema of injustice where the cultural, political, and socioeconomic forms “systematically disadvantages some groups of people vis-a-vis others” (Fraser, 1995, p. 72; 2005).”

“She stresses that "only by articulating recognition and redistribution can we arrive at a critical-theoretical framework that is adequate to the demands of our age" (Fraser 1995, italics added).”

“When first writing in 1995, Fraser argued that the political left in the United States had prioritised the politics of recognition over redistribution and challenged the uptake of both to enable transformative social justice (Fraser, 1995).”

“For this research, the following definition of social justice was developed from the work of Keddie (2012), Fraser (1995), and Young (1997) as: A process and also a goal to achieve a fairer society which involves actions guided by the principles of redistributive justice, recognitive justice or…”

“Misrecognition is ‘‘to be denied the status of full partner in social interaction and prevented from participating as a peer in social life’’ (Fraser, 1995, p. 280 cited in Skeggs (2001, p. 295)).”

“The term was coined by Axel Honneth [18] and Nancy Fraser [19] to express the specific concept of social justice based on the notion that a society is just if it provides both material and symbolic possibilities for any of its members to participate in social interactions.”

“…in which we live, and therefore unless we produce some kind of systemic changes which are transformative, that is, ‘remedies aimed at correcting inequitable outcomes precisely by restructuring the underlying generative framework’ (Fraser 2008, 28), then we are only scratching at the surface.”

“Third, it has generated an effort to establish immaterial and discursive aspects as critical determinants of social reality (Lefebvre, 1974; Sen, 1981; Watts and Bohle, 1993; Fraser, 1995; Latham and McCormack, 2004; Pain and Bailey, 2007).”

“The lack of recognition can have consequences for dignity-of-self, impeding self-expression and the formation of positive identities (Fisher, 2008; Fraser, 1995; Fraser & Honneth, 2003).”

“In general, Fraser (2000, 107) claims that in recent decades we have seen an increase in struggles based around the politics of recognition, and a relative decline in claims for egalitarian redistribution. These struggles, she goes on to argue (2000, 108), ‘are serving less to supplement, complicate and enrich redistr…”

“The combination of those two forms of spatial justice can promote access to land for poor people and others who are deprived of access to land resources through land redistribution strategies [67] and other processes of spatial organisation, such as the relocation of squatters or slum dwellers to serviced sites.”

“…how non-, mis-, or malrecognition of people, communities, and conditions are the core reason for injustice, oppression, and domination, and Fraser (1995) accentuated the importance of recognition as a prerequisite for procedural/participatory parity and, as a consequence, distributional…”

“However the erosion of this core assumption, and the shifting of the politics of solidarity from distributive justice toward recognition and identity (Fraser, 1995; Joppke, 2007) have brought them closer together.”