The Ramifications of Telling Charles Murray to Shut Up

In our academic institutions, we are encouraged to debate one another and create productive discourse as a means for solving our problems. But is this an effective tool settling differences if the argument is whether or not you should be considered an equal human being? In cases like these, Iris Marion Young recommends activism as a way to bring attention to ideas that can actually prevent productive discourse. However, is it possible for activism to go “too far” thus shutting down discourse altogether? Applying Young’s theory, this paper will explore the roles of both activism and deliberation in the context of a protest at Middlebury College.

Ketika Demokrasi Membutuhkan Inklusi

Democracy is a political tool that aims to reach agreement and produce fair decisions for everyone. However, it seems that not all democratic processes and decision-making involve individuals or groups who are socially in a weak, powerless, and marginalized position. These groups, such as women, the elderly, minority groups, and the poor, find themselves in a disadvantageous situation, while political decisions made through a democratic process also impact and affect them directly. Based on this thought, Iris Marion Young, a modern feminist political thinker, seeks to dismantle the various democratic symptoms that obstruct the achievement of justice for all. One of the main problems Young identified is the attempt by those in power to ignore or override the role of communities that are not in power, thereby preventing them from taking full part in democratic processes and decision-making. Therefore, Young proposes the need to intrude on inclusion in the democratic process, through communication models which she calls communicative democracy.

Responsibility for structural injustice: A third thought

Some of the most invidious injustices are seemingly the results of impersonal workings of rigged social structures. Who bears responsibility for the injustices perpetrated through them? Iris Marion Young – the pre-eminent theorist of responsibility for structural injustice – argues that we should be responsible mostly in forward-looking ways for remedying structural injustice, rather than liable in a backward-looking way for creating it. In so doing she distinguishes between individualized responsibility for past structural injustice and collective responsibility for preventing future structural injustice. We reject both those arguments but embrace and extend Young’s third line of analysis, which was much less fully developed in her work. We agree that people should take a stand against structural injustice, even if it is likely to prove futile. That is in fact a position that is widely endorsed in social practice.

Migrant worker policies and national privilege: A UK case study

After a long period of decline in the Global North, migrant worker policies are making a comeback on the agenda of the European Union and several of its member states. Inspired by Iris Marion Young and Nancy Fraser’s accounts of structural injustice, this article argues that such policies cannot be reconciled with the principle of equality between migrant and national workers enshrined in international legal instruments such as the Convention on Migrant Workers and the EU Seasonal Workers Directive. To make this point it draws on a selection of UK based empirical literature as well as primary data from a recent study on domestic workers admitted to the UK under temporary visas since 1998. Results suggest that such visas tend to push migrants’ working conditions downwards (exploitation); prevent them from changing employer, enforcing rights in court or mobilising in unions (domination); and ultimately exacerbate racial conflict and stereotyping (stigmatisation). Received: 10 February 2021Accepted: 14 May 2021

Feminism in Radical Democracy and Japanese Political Theory: Mouffe, Pateman, Young, and “Essentialism”

This paper examines feminist arguments in radical democracy and Japanese responses to them. Although feminist insights are significant intellectual sources of radical democracy, recent political theorists have tended to exclusively consider radical democracy as agonistic pluralism. The radical democratic thinker Chantal Mouffe, who is very popular among Japanese political theorists and philosophers, criticizes the “essentialist” tendency of two feminist political theorists, namely Carole Pateman and Iris Marion Young. First this paper examines Mouffe’s critique of the two theorists. Second, it evaluates the relevance of Mouffe’s criticism of Pateman and Young by reconsidering their ideas on democracy and citizenship. Third, it engages the works of a few Japanese political theorists who respond to the issue of essentialism and points out the problems involved in the introduction of radical democracy in Japan and in Japanese feminist political theory. Finally, this paper concludes that we are still in the early stages of introducing and absorbing foreign feminist political theories into Japan as opposed to developing original Japanese feminist political theory to share with the world.

The New Responsible Tourism Paradigm: The UNWTO’s Discourse Following the Spread of COVID-19

The UNWTO’s discourse has focused on managing the effects of COVID-19 on tourism mobility since the outbreak was taken over by the WHO, as tourism is prominent amongst the hardest hit sectors. Emanating from the UNWTO as one of the dominant stakeholders in tourism discourse construction, an interesting component is the new meaning attributed to ‘responsible tourism’, which coincides with severe sanitary measures in this moment. Through critical discourse analysis and the theoretical framework offered by Iris Marion Young on responsibility for justice, this article will first demonstrate how the reappropriation of the term is in line with the UNWTO’s neoliberal perspective on tourism. The result is the promotion of sanitary measures for the protection of tourism as a consumer industry, rather than for the protection of the individuals involved. It is also cementing the pedestal on which the UN agency places the tourist-consumer, namely through the International Code for the Protection of Tourists project. This paper closes with thoughts on how the emerging dominant discourse on responsible tourism is internalized by tourism stakeholders as the new normal, which would gain in being explored through the lens of Foucault’s work on the concept of biopolitics and the neoliberal subject.

Rethinking the Public Sphere in an Age of Radical-Right Populism: A Case for Building an Empathetic Public Sphere

With right-wing populist movements gaining ever more traction worldwide, great attention is paid to addressing their exclusionary rhetoric. In this article, I focus on the question how to deal with these radical-right sentiments in our public debates. Believing that both exclusion and inclusion of right-wing populist voices wield counter-productive effects, I juxtapose Habermas’s public sphere theory to Mouffe’s model of agonistic pluralism and posit that both are ultimately insufficient to tackle the populist danger, albeit for different reasons. However, by synthesizing Mouffe’s model with the ideas of Zygmunt Bauman and Iris Marion Young, I introduce the concept of an empathetic public sphere as a model for creating minimal common grounds between right-wing populist “selves” and the “others” they oppose. Finally, I then move this normative model into the realm of media and communication studies and assess how empathetic storytelling might be given shape in today’s fragmented media ecology.

FeminisT Phenomenology

This chapter charts the field-defining contributions to feminist phenomenology made by Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Marion Young, Sandra Lee Bartky, and Judith Butler and discusses how their work has been influenced by, critically intervened in, and transformed traditional phenomenology. Drawing on their work as well as the recent work of contemporary feminist phenomenologists such as Lisa Guenther, Sara Ahmed, Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega, and Gayle Salamon, the chapter emphasizes that feminist phenomenology is a critical phenomenology. Not only does it directly engage specific social and political issues, eschewing the alleged universality and value-neutrality of traditional phenomenological accounts, but it is also in dialogue with, and immeasurably enriched by the multi- and interdisciplinary fields of critical race theory, prison studies, trans studies, queer theory, and disability studies.

Young’s Social Connection Model and Corporate Responsibility

Recent structural innovations in global commerce present difficult challenges for legacy understandings of responsibility. The rise of outsourcing, sub-contracting, and mobile app-based platforms have dramatically restructured relationships between and among economic actors. Though not entirely new, the remarkable rise in the prevalence of these “not-quite-arm’s-length” relationships present difficulties for conceptions of responsibility based on interrogating the past for specifiable actions by blameworthy actors. Iris Marion Young invites investigation of a “social connection model of responsibility” (SCMR) that is, in many ways, better suited to this new commercial reality. Scholars working to understand corporate responsibility have invoked Young’s model to some good effect, though often superficially and uncritically. In this paper, we look closely at Young’s social connection model and its potential for helping us understand corporate responsibility in a radically networked world.