This entry was prompted by the recent publication of McMahon’s (2024) chapter entitled: “Using Poststructural Policy Analysis for Social Justice”. McMahon identifies as an objective “achieving progressive social change” and targets “critical policy analysis as a research method for social justice”. I imagine that many of us share these objectives. McMahon (p. 83) points to an occasion where I refer to “justice goals” and how “we can produce a just society” (Bacchi 2016, p. 8). 

Here I mention a few WPR applications that invoke the concept “justice”. There are many others included in the Master List of WPR applications, distributed through the WPR list (“WPR Network” WPRNETWORK@jiscmail.ac.uk).

            Olsson, D. 2022. From Technocracy to Democracy: Ways to Promote Democratic Engagement for Just Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Building. Sustainability, 14, 1433.

            Rask, N. 2022. An intersectional reading of circular economy policies: towards just and sufficiency-driven sustainabilities. Local Environment, DOI: 10.1080/13549839.2022.2040467

            McGarry, K. and FitzGerald, S. A. 2019. The politics of injustice: Sex- working women, feminism and criminalizing sex purchase in Ireland. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 19(1): 62-79.

            Mulinari, P. et al. 2023. Exploring Swedish “Family Planning”: Reproductive Racism and Reproductive Justice. In A. Kochaniewicz (Ed.) Struggles for Reproductive Justice in the Era of Anti-Genderism and Religious Fundamentalism. 

            Zemandl, E. J. 2018. The Roma experience of political (in)justice: The case of school (de)segregation in Hungary. ETHOS – Towards a European Theory of Justice and Fairness, European Commission Horizon 2020 research project.
Available at: https://ethos-europe.eu/sites/default/files/ethosd5.2hungary.pdf 

So, “justice” is very much part of the vocabulary adopted in WPR analyses. However, all these invocations of “justice” face a challenge. Sotiropoulos (2021: 851-852) points out that “social justice” is one of the “cherished notions of the western philosophical and political tradition”, problematised in poststructural accounts. We have seen on many occasions that, as a poststructural intervention, WPR questions taken-for-granted categories of analysis. The task in these instances is to see how these categories represent the “problem” they purport to address. For example, the term “equality” is often analysed using WPR – showing how the term can have different meanings with contrasting implications. A large number of WPR applications examine how “women’s equality” is conceptualised in different approaches (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 64-66). 

So, what about “justice”? How can we invoke “justice” without querying different invocations of the term? How, in short, can we describe WPR as a social justice analytic strategy? 

Poststructuralism and “doubling practices”

To pursue these questions, it is useful to adopt what is commonly described as poststructuralism’s “double move”. Lather (2001) introduces the notion of a “doubled research practice” to deal with what she calls “stuck places”: “a way of thinking through of some of the complexities, ambiguities and contradictions involved in the process of doing qualitative research that is concerned with recognizing difference and with pursuing social justice” (Gunaratnam 2003: 3). We have just encountered one such “ambiguity”: how to pursue social justice while subjecting “social justice” to critical analysis. 

A “doubled research strategy” involves working with and against analytic categories at the same time. Gunaratnam (2003) illustrates the usefulness of this strategy in relation to racial categories. While recognising “race” as a constructed category, she points out that dissolving the category of “race” makes it difficult to claim the experience of racism. At the same time, poststructuralist critiques of essentialist notions of “race” can “be used in empirical research to generate more complex insights into the production of social location and experience”. It is therefore possible, and politically useful, to work with and against racial categories. 

 In Mainstreaming Politics (2010), Joan Eveline and I describe this double move as embracing the simultaneous fixing and unfixing of meanings. In that book, for example, at times we adopt the convention of putting “women” and “men” in quotation marks to trouble the categories; at other times we use women and men, without quotation marks, as having an assumed meaning. This shifting of position reflects the complex political circumstances within which we navigate. 

For political reasons it is sometimes necessary to question the category “women” but at other times it is necessary to adopt the category. There is no confusion here. Rather, there is a determination to shape one’s strategy to particular political objectives, with the decisions about when to fix and when to unfix meanings dependent upon reflexive judgment about the political exigencies of the particular situation. The fixed meanings we necessarily impart on some occasions must be regarded as temporary and subject to continuous critical scrutiny in order to elaborate new, more inclusive meanings. The question is not whether to fix meaning – since for a range of reasons fixing must occur – but when to fix meaning and who to involve in the “fixing” exercise.  

To capture this double move in relation to “justice” or “social justice” I suggest approaching the topic through two perspectives: first, reflecting on WPR through a social justice lens; second, questioning “social justice” through a WPR lens. The reference to social justice in the first position has no quotation marks, signalling a desire to fix meaning. The use of quotation marks in the second position signals a willingness to unfix meaning. As a strategic intervention, these two proposals work together to elaborate new, more inclusive meanings. 

WPR through a social justice lens

I locate the first perspective in relation to McMahon’s (2024) chapter. Her goal is to consider how PPA (Poststructural Policy Analysis), and hence WPR, serve social justice objectives. The starting point for analysis is a social justice orientation. This “social justice orientation” comprises policy work and policy practice as “key skills for social justice advocacy” (p. 79). Policy advocacy is linked to a commitment to “give voice to disadvantaged and marginalised groups”. 

McMahon (2024: 82) highlights the usefulness, for social justice concerns, of exploring research policy as a governing technology. As part of this project, she emphasises the role of “policy as discourse” and of problematisations. She includes a variety of WPR applications that “address social justice issues” (2024: 86). Importantly, she notes that 

“All discourses, all reforms and proposals for change (including those of the researcher themselves), whether conservative or progressive, seek to govern conduct in particular ways, and from a poststructural perspective all must be opened up to problematisation in order that there is governing ‘with a minimum of domination’ (Foucault, 1987: 129, cited in Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016: 24)”.

At the same time, the starting point for the analysis is a conception of social justice. As McMahon (2024: 93-94) explains: “There are no ‘rules’ for representing a WPR analysis, and the researcher will need to shape the write-up in a way that best conveys the research story based on the social justice orientation of the analytical work undertaken”. Referring to her research on “value for money”, McMahon (2024: 89) argues that “the dominant economic thinking and assumptions pervading the policy discourse failed to take account of very important social justice perspectives”. Poststructural policy analysis, in this account, “enables the social justice researcher to engage in a deeper critical analysis of the role of policy in constructing social problems in particular ways and potentially undermining social justice principles and values” (McMahon 2024: 94). 

“Social justice” through a WPR lens

While McMahon offers an insightful analysis of the critical perspective associated with PPA, the category of “social justice” continues to function as unproblematised. That is, the notions of “social justice principles” and “social justice perspectives” operate as taken-for-granted concepts with some form of assumed meaning. 

One of the chief tasks undertaken by WPR scholars is the questioning of taken-for-granted categories of meaning – to see what they effect (and affect) and what they fail to effect (and affect). Many applications have made good use of this approach (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 44, 63, 71, 94).

This way of using WPR finds its inspiration in Tanesini’s (1994) argument that concepts have no definite meaning but are proposals about how we ought to proceed from here. As proposals, then, different uses of a term contain implicit representations of the “problem” they purport to address. A way forward, therefore, is to consider different uses of the concept “justice”, probing their underlying assumptions, the genesis of different meanings, their effects and their silences. The analytic strategy adopted here involves applying the WPR questions to “justice”.

Dillon (1999), a well-known postructuralist researcher in the field of international relations, provides links to the kind of thinking and analysis required here. His article invokes Deleuze’s call for “another justice”, “a justice that is different from the justice of the state” (Sotiropoulos 2021: 862). Dillon uses a capital letter for this “other Justice” to distinguish it from “normal justice”. He is concerned that what he calls “normal justice”, characterized as distributive justice, is embedded in conventional state-based politics. Sotiropoulos (2021: 861) also highlights the “statist conception of justice that has dominated political philosophy since antiquity”. That is, “normal justice” presumes nation-states, which become the grounds for determining those called “citizens” and “non-citizens”. 

Digging deeper, Dillon argues that a particular understanding of individual “human beings” underpins this distinction, an understanding of a subject as sovereign and “a fungible unit of account”. From this stance it is a short step, says Dillon (1999: 171), to 

“systems of calculability, commensurability, and expendability which characterise the arithmetic politics and political arithmetics of much of the international relations and strategic studies – military and managerial – as well as the inter and intra genocidal politics of modern times”. 

Hence, to offer “another Justice” it becomes necessary to disrupt these assumptions/presuppositions. For Dillon (1999: 171), “The self that is the place of the taking place of Justice is not a what. For it does not possess an unchangeable essence”. Rather: “The self is a divided self from a beginning that is itself incomplete. It is only by virtue of that very division, that very incompleteness, that the question of justice arises at all” (Dillon 1999: 157). 

Dillon (1999: 157) elaborates how the analytic strategy he deploys assists in developing “another Justice”: “Thought of another Justice is therefore a continuous displacement of normal justice, a radical discomfort to it. But I have first to note how normal justice understands its place before considering the taking place of Justice differently”. He provides more detail: “The other way of thinking has continuously to be contrasted with the thought that underlies distributive justice, so that the characteristic features of another Justice may be differentiated from those of the normal model” (Dillon 1999: 158).

In effect, Dillon’s analysis indicates precisely the sorts of issues that arise when applying Question 2 in WPR to the question of “justice” – “What deep-seated presuppositions or assumptions underlie this representation of the ‘problem’ (problem representation)?” (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 20). We begin by asking how “normal justice” is conceptualised, opening up the space to think of “justice” differently. This way of thinking is captured in the second part of the title for this entry: “‘social justice’ through a WPR lens”. Importantly, Dillon describes this “making way for other ways of being” as a political act, with politics referring to “an irruptive and inventive practice called up by specific historical circumstances”. We pursue these issues in the next entry. 

REFERENCES

Bacchi, C. 2016. Problematizations in health policy: Questioning how “problems” are constituted in policies’, Sage Open, 6(2): 1–16.

Bacchi, C. and Eveline, J. 2010. Mainstreaming Politics: Gendering practices and feminist theory. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press. 

Bacchi, C. and Goodwin, S. 2016. Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice. Palgrave Macmillan: New York. 

Dillon, M. 1999. Another Justice. 27(2): 155-175.

Foucault, M. 1987. The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom: An interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984, with R. Fornet- Betancourt, H. Becker, A. Gomez-Müller, J.C. Gauthier, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 12, 112–131.

Gunaratnam, Y. 2003. Researching Race and Ethnicity: Methods, Knowledge and Power. London: Sage.

Lather, P. 2001. Postbook: Working the Ruins of Feminist Ethnography. Signs, 27(1): 199-227.

McMahon, S. 2024. Using Poststructural Policy Analysis for Social Justice. In K. McGarry, C. Bradley, and G. Kirwan (Eds), Rights and Justice in Research Advancing Methodologies for Social Change. Bristol Policy Press. pp. 79-98. 

Sotiropoulos, G. 2021. Between order and insurgency: Post-structurlism and the problem of justice. Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 47(7) 850–872. Tanesini, A. 1994. Whose language? In K. Lennon & M. Whitford (eds) Knowing the difference: Feminist perspectives in epistemology. NY: Routledge