Call for submissions to Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies for a special issue on The Problem of Social Justice: Global Perspectives and Personal Narratives. Deadline: 15 March 2025.
This special issue of LLIDS seeks to initiate a global dialogue on Social Justice (SJ). While considerations of economy undergird SJ theory, its discourse reaches beyond economics to address inequalities of access, privilege, and rights. As an academic discipline, SJ theory embraces a range of critical theories and methods: colonialist criticism, critical race theory, gender criticism, and queer theory among other methods fall under its purview. For SJ theory offers to critique the institutions—social, political, economic—that sustain inequalities of access, privilege, opportunity, and rights generally. As a social praxis, SJ theory aims to deinstitutionalize systematic inequality by means of progressive public policy. Indeed, treating equal access and opportunity as matters of social “justice” necessarily entails law and policy. SJ theory seeks to protect and expand rights of individuals and communities. In concert with posthumanism and ecocriticism, SJ theory extends this same protection to the planet and to our many “companion species” whose survival is threatened by climate change and environmental degradation.
Such is the starting point for a special issue on Social Justice, which invites submissions that reflect on, analyze, expand on, and complicate SJ theory and its implications. As an international interdisciplinary journal, LLIDS seeks to involve authors and audiences globally in exploring this timely issue. A series of questions and propositions follow apropos to this topic.
- How does SJ theory understand itself as an ideology or ideological behavior?
- How is SJ theory taught? What is its curriculum? What are its paths of resistance?
- In the classroom, in scholarship, and in public/political discourse, what does SJ theory enable or make visible? What does it leave unseen or unspoken? What are its “blind spots”?
- How can SJ theory address the political-economic crisis of the 1% against the 99%?
- Can Social Justice have the same meaning and application/implication for all communities, charting both the Global North and the Global South?
- As per the U.N. declaration, Social Justice seeks a “fair and compassionate distribution” of wealth. This remains a noble aim and aspiration. And given the deep entrenchment of global capitalism, is it viable?
- How can SJ advocates claim to speak “on behalf” of a community unless/until its members have spoken and been heard? Is advocacy earned through listening? (Is SJ theory a mode of “listening rhetoric”? Can/should it become one?)
- What can SJ advocates learn from the social methods of Engaged Theory, Grounded Theory, and the Bourdieusian Theory of Practice?
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