Structural Injustice: Reflections on Social Groups, Identity and Intersectionality

The Special Issue "Structural Injustice: Reflections on Social Groups, Identity and Intersectionality", co-authored by Ingrid Salvatore and me, was published in the journal Phenomenology and Mind at the end of 2024. 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 (Dotson 2011; Fricker 2007). Many 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).

Not just bad luck;
disadvantaged groups often face the consequences
 of actions within unjust social structures.

The special issue illustrates the social dynamics impacting agents in making fundamental life decisions within the constraints of unjust social structures that restrict their options and capacity for critical reflection. The attempt by some of the contributions, then, is to outline a paradigm of social justice that aims to provide normative guidance for actual people, situated within their complex lives and interacting with societal structures and imperfect political institutions. From the perspective of disadvantaged social groups, multiple belonging invites intersectional philosophical and sociological investigation into how individuals can be victims of multiple injustices (Crenshaw 1989). But it also requires deeper philosophical research on personal identity and group belonging (Appiah 2006).

Specifically on the topic of epistemic injustice in healthcare, I think that the last section of the volume, Power, Social Oppression and Recognition, is of most interest. The section has a double goal: on the one hand, it is interested in laying out concrete instances of group discrimination related to specific ascriptive characteristics possessed by groups’ members and in proposing some justice-oriented remedies; on the other hand, this section delves into the notion of recognition, illustrating how helpful the recognition framework (Honneth 1996) is in identify instances of social injustice in contemporary societies.

In the context of mental illness and disabilities that impact the collective perception of agents’ epistemic capacities, it is essential to promote epistemic justice that improves relationships between speakers with mental disorders and people who care for them in society. On this specific topic, the volume presents two relevant contributions. 

First, the article by Christian Tewes, “Reconsidering the Double Empathy Problem”, addresses the exclusionary mechanisms directed towards autistic individuals, showing the deeply discriminating side-effects of neurotypical individuals and institutions projecting their implicit normative rules of behavior and assumptions onto autistic individuals. In so doing, Tewes argues that neurotypical individuals and institutions inaccurately ascribe a lack of empathetic understanding to autistic individuals, resulting in their exclusion, stigmatisation, and even traumatisation (Milton 2012). This analysis, employing a range of embodied-phenomenological perspectives, is illuminating in showing the often-overlooked exclusionary mechanisms activated, sometimes even involuntarily, by social norms and social conventions that are established mirroring the preferences, costumes, and ascriptive characteristics of members of the cultural majority (Galeotti 2017). 

On similar lines, a second contribution, by Donata Chiricò and Maria Tagarelli De Monte, “Hearing perspectives on deafness: a century-long form of power” illustrates the kind of structural exclusion and discrimination historically suffered by deaf and hear-impaired individuals. Through the powerful example of Charles-Michel L’Épée (1776), who founded a school where deaf individuals were treated equally to hearing individuals, the authors problematize the exclusionary dimension of spoken language for subjects precluded from it and the enduring implicit stigmatization that characterizes the historically established notion of “physical and cognitive normality”.

Federica Liveriero is associate professor of political philosophy at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Pavia. Liveriero's main areas of interest are normative theories of justice and legitimacy; democratic theory; social epistemology and oppression studies. She is interested in understanding what we owe to each other as fellow citizens in democratic settings, both practically and epistemically. You can see more about her publications and published monographs here.