Structural Injustice: Reflections on Social Groups, Identity and Intersectionality

The volume investigates the ways in which oppression, marginalization, and misrecognition are determined and/or fostered by practices, social standards, and attitudes concerning intersectional identities and how we should conceptualize social groups against these circumstances. The various contributions, from different perspectives, tackle how forms of oppression can be directed toward individuals qua members of a specific group and can involve systemic forms of misrecognition often coupled with unwarranted biases regarding the epistemic credibility of these individuals. Different contributions reason upon how social discrimination against members of racialized, sexualized, or otherwise stigmatized and oppressed groups must be understood as institutional, structural, or systemic phenomena deeply embedded in the social system of our political societies. From this normative framework it follows that addressing injustices related to identity groups requires clarifying the self-reinforcing dynamics between structural disadvantages and identity-based prejudices. These forms of injustice take stock of the constrained position in which members of disadvantaged groups find themselves given the “unintended consequences of the combination of the actions of many people” (Young 2011, p. 53).