CSAS Annual Ambedkar Lecture 'The Enigmatic Pursuit of Social Justice'
Venue
Violet Laidlaw Room (6th floor), Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15a George Square, EdinburghDescription
At the start of India's journey as an independent republic, Dr B.R. Ambedkar warned that if 'we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life' we will put our 'political democracy in peril'. Seventy-three years later our pursuit of social justice remains enigmatic. Inequities abound - stubbornly persisting, magnified, intractable. A closer examination suggests the antithetical pull of the two parts of 'social justice': the social is partial and unruly, justice is impartial and orderly. Is this where the problem lies? Is the core of the social - of intimate norms governing relations between self and other - out of reach of impartial justice? Is every programme of social justice bound to fail due to overreach or underreach? Yet, from another perspective, the social is coded too by heteronormativity, androcentrism, white supremacy and caste patriarchy. But all these hierarchies rely on enforcement, on the use of violent means, including, state sanctioned permissions and prohibitions on transgressions. How then can the very instruments of justice that hold the conservative social together, become constructive tools in favour of the oppressed to fructify social justice? These enigmas of social justice will be examined using recent examples from India, of superexploitation of sanitation labour, the bulldozing of homes of the poor and the incarceration without trial of campaigners for social justice. A final question will be to ask: is the resurgence of Ambedkar's slogan: 'one man, one value', in the form of the recent demand for disclosure of the caste census, the beginning of an answer towards a feasible programme of social justice?
Speaker bio:
Meena Dhanda is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Politics. She arrived in the UK from the Indian Punjab in 1987 with an award of a Commonwealth Scholarship for doctoral work in Philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford University. She has taught and researched in philosophy at Wolverhampton from 1992. She is currently engaged in doing empirically informed social, moral and political philosophy, with a focus on casteism as a kind of racism. She is internationally recognised as a leading academic in the development of diaspora Dalit studies. To understand injustices, prejudices and misrepresentations suffered by powerless groups, she pursues transdisciplinary studies, specifically connecting caste, class, gender and race. She brings Ambedkar into conversation with a diverse range of philosophers such as Fanon, Sartre and Wittgenstein. Meena has led research projects funded by The Leverhulme Trust, Equality and Human Rights Commission UK, and the European Commission. She has authored The Negotiations of Personal Identity, and edited Reservations for Women. She has co-edited special issues of journals on anti-caste thought, Dalits and Religion, Race and Racism in Scotland. She is currently co-editing the Routledge Handbook of Punjab Studies and writing Caste: A Very short Introduction for Oxford University Press.
Key speakers
- Prof Meena Dhanda, Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Politics, University of Wolverhampton