This event was co-hosted with Boston Review.
What is structural injustice, and who ultimately bears responsibility for it?‎
In this event to coincide with the publication of her new book, With Power Comes ‎Responsibility: The Politics of Structural Injustice, political theorist Maeve McKeown will ‎explore how power and responsibility truly function in today’s world. Drawing on case ‎studies from sweatshops to climate change, McKeown will identify three types of structural ‎injustice: the pure and unintended accumulation of disparate activities; the avoidable ‎injustice that could be ameliorated by the powerful but nevertheless continues; the ‎deliberate perpetuation of structural processes that benefit powerful political and economic ‎agents. In each of these, the role of power is different which changes the allocation of ‎responsibility.‎
From this understanding, McKeown will help us shape a deeper, more sophisticated idea of ‎how structural injustice operates and what we as individuals can do about it. What is the ‎political responsibility of ordinary individuals? How can ordinary individuals with very little ‎power pressure morally responsible, powerful agents to address structural injustice? Do we ‎have the same responsibility for historical injustice as we do for that which we see in today’s ‎world? This event aims for nothing less than a fundamental reassessment of the relationship ‎between power, ordinary people, and responsibility for structural injustice.‎
Maeve McKeown is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the University of ‎Groningen and has previously worked at Cambridge, Oxford and Frankfurt. She is the author ‎of numerous journal articles and book chapters, the editor of Stephen Jeffreys’ Playwriting: ‎Structure, Character, How and What to Write (2019), shortlisted for the Theatre Book Prize ‎‎2020, and is formerly co-editor of New Left Project. Her new book, With Power Comes ‎Responsibility: The Politics of Structural Injustice, is published by Bloomsbury.
Website: www.maevemckeo...
Twitter: / maevemckeown
Book: www.bloomsbury...
Katrina Forrester is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the ‎Department of Government and Committee on Social Studies at Harvard University. She is a ‎political theorist and historian with research interests in twentieth-century and contemporary ‎social and political theory. She is particularly interested in the history of liberalism and the ‎left in the postwar US and Britain; Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis; theories of ‎work, capitalism, and the capitalist state; and climate politics.
Homepage: scholar.harvar... ‎