Climate, refugees, global health

What does it mean to be displaced at this juncture of history, in an era marked by increasing climate breakdown? How should the harms and injustices of displacement be rectified? In this project, Dr James Souter aims to build upon existing social scientific work that challenges the standard framing of displacement as necessarily involving forced migration or movement, contending that displacement is a condition that can be experienced in situ, in the absence of such movement. Aiming to draw on lived experiences of this kind of ‘displacement without altered movement’, he will theorise what forms reparation for such displacement should take in different contexts worldwide.

In recent years, Iris Marion Young’s notion of structural injustice has become an influential way of framing a variety of global injustices, such as sweatshop labour, climate change and global poverty. So too has her vision of ‘political responsibility’, in which ordinary citizens act to address such injustices despite not being liable for blame for their part in perpetuating them. While the literature on structural injustice is developed and complex, however, it remains not fully clear what political responsibility requires in practice. In this project, Dr James Souter and Dr Joshua Hobbs will aim to advance theorising on political responsibility for structural injustice by engaging ordinary citizens in discussion and debate in order to develop a feasible account of the practical requirements of political responsibility.