Citational Justice and the Capabilities Approach

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Sam Popowich, MLIS PhD

Acting Associate Dean, University of Winnipeg Library

Outline

• Introduction
• Justice and Citational Justice
• Distributive Justice
• End State Patterns
• Iris Marion Young and Citational Justice
• Young’s life and work
• Young’s non-distributive social justice
• “The Five Faces of Citational Justice” (KULA, 2026)
• Young’s conception of injustice
• Rejecting the distributive paradigm
• Oppression
• Domination
• Oppression and Domination in citation practices
• The “Five Faces of Oppression”
• Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach

Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 153-156.

1990/2011

2005

2011

Iris Marion Young (1949 – 2006)

Rejecting the “Distributive Paradigm”

“Social justice concerns the degree to which a society contains and supports the institutional conditions necessary for the realization of [the values the constitute the good life]. The values comprised in the good life can be reduced to two very general ones: (1) developing and exercising one’s capacities and expressing one’s experience… and (2) participating in determining one’s action and the conditions of one’s actions. […] To these two general values correspond two social conditions that define injustice: oppression, the institutional constraint on self-development, and domination, the institutional constraint on self-determination.” (Young, J&PD, p. 37).

Citational Justice becomes less about the distribution of citations, or even the distribution of privileges that go along with citation, but about the structural (e.g. academic) conditions of oppression and domination which uses citation and citation metrics to maintain and reproduce themselves.

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In Canada, we typically see this in things like tenure and promotion committees (i.e. “publish or perish”), but also in the distribution of privileges like Canada Research Chairs and Tri-Agency research funding.

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In the UK REF system, how is impact measured? How does citation fit into measurement of impact, how does REF influence what researchers and scholars write and publish? How does the distribution of citations affect REF evaluation and research funding?

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“The Research Excellence Framework is lumbering and expensive. For a fraction of the cost, a digital census of academic research would create unrivalled and genuine information about UK universities’ research performance.” (LSE Blog, June 10, 2011)

The Five Faces of Oppression

• Exploitation: “The central insight expressed in the concept of exploitation, then, is that this oppression occurs through a steady process of the transfer of the results of the labor of one social group to benefit another” (p. 49)

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• Marginalization: “Marginals are people the system of labor cannot or will not use… Marginalization is perhaps the most dangerous form of oppression. A whole category of people is expelled from useful participation in social life…” (p. 53)

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• Powerlessness: “The powerless status is best described negatively. The powerless lack the authority, status, and sense of self that professionals tend to have” (p. 57)

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• Cultural Imperialism: “To experience cultural imperialism means to experience how the dominant meanings of a society render the particular perspective of one’s own group invisible at the same time as they stereotype one’s group and mark it out as the Other” (p. 59-60)

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• Violence: “What makes violence a face of oppression is less the particular acts themselves, though these are often utterly horrible, than the social context surrounding them, which makes them possible and even acceptable” (p. 61)

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1999

2011

“Capability Deprivation”

Sen, DaF, p. 87.

“Central Capabilities”

Nussbaum, CC, p. 18.

• Life
• Bodily Health
• Bodily Integrity
• Sense, Imagination, and Thought
• Emotions
• Practical Reason
• Affiliation
• Other Species
• Play
• Control Over One’s Environment

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Senses, Imagination, and Thought

Nussbaum, CC, p. 33.

Young and the Capabilities Approach

Making and Doing and Being (poeisis, praxis, and ousia)

Young, J&PD, p. 39.

Thank You. Questions?