Reflections on Justice

Semester and Year Offered: Semester 3

Course Coordinator and Team: Dr Ishita Dey

Email of course coordinator: ishitadey@aud.ac.in

Pre-requisites:

Course Objectives/Description:

The aim of this course is to critically engage with the concept of justice. The course will expose students to processes that create, reinforce, challenge, and/or subvert injustice while reflecting on key debates and theories that bring into question ‘justice’. Students will engage with these debates and thoughts to understand and analyze the imbrications of justice with the state, development, media, difference, and bodies. The question, ‘what is justice’, will play a central role in the structuring of the course, where students will undergo a critical examination of the matrices within which conventional and unconventional meanings of justice are located. Further, the students explore possibilities of action-ing questions of justice through a close reading of forgiveness, its apparatuses in situations of historical injustice.

Course Outcomes:

On successful completion of this course students will be able to:

1. Transform communities in directions that are in tune with social justice and well-being considerations
2. Reflect critically on the transformative social praxis instituted

Brief description of modules/ Main modules:

Module 1 Concept of Justice: The first module critically engages with the concept of justice to explore processes and practices that create, reinforce, challenge, and/or subvert injustice while reflecting on key debates and theories that bring into question ‘justice’.

Module 2: State, Law and Justice: The second module introduce students to debates on imbrications of justice with the state, development, media, difference, and bodies as well as offer a critical examination of the matrices within which conventional and unconventional meanings of justice are located.

Module 3 Forgiveness as Justice In this course we will explore possibilities of action-ing questions of justice and well-being through a close reading of forgiveness. We will try and understand apparatuses of forgiveness that has been explored in situations of historical injustice. How do such remedial measures account for rebuilding ethics of co-habitation? Do we need to reimagine social suffering into our discussions on well-being? In the classes to remain we will explore readings under three cross cutting themes : acknowledgement, forgiveness and social suffering. We will try and explore if these themes could provide us with methodological groundings as it appears in writings of jurisprudence, literary theoretical works and anthropological writings to action-research questions of justice and well-being.

Assessment Details with weights:

• Assignment
• Annotated bibliography around Justice (30%)

Critical Paper: Idea of Justice and its practice (30%)

Reflective Paper: Forgiveness as Justice (40%)

Reading List:

1. Minow, Martha. 2012. ‘Historical Justice’ in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy. Edited by Robert E Goodin, Philip Pettit, and Thomas Pogge,621-637. West Sussex:Wiley-Blackwell.
2. Minow, Martha.2015. ‘Forgiveness, Law, and Justice’ California Law Review 103(6) :1615-1644
3. Minow, Martha. 2002. Breaking the cycles of hatred. Memory, Law and Repair. Princeton and Oxford : Princeton University Press.
4. Cornell, Drucilla.1998. ‘Feminism, Justice and Sexual Freedom’ in At the heart of freedom. Feminism, sex and equality. Pp 3-32. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
5. Minow, Martha.2000. ‘About women, about culture: about them, about us’. Daedalus 129(4): 125-145.
6. Hickson, Letitia.1986. ‘The Social Contexts of Apology in Dispute Settlement: A Cross-Cultural Study’.Ethnology 25 (4) :283-294.
7. Conley, Katharine. 2010. ‘Is Reconciliation Possible? Non-Western Objects at the Menil Collection and the QuaiBranly Museum’. South Central Review 27(3): 34-53.
8. Allais, Lucy.2008. ‘Wiping the Slate Clean: The Heart of Forgiveness’. Philosophy & Public Affairs 36 (1): 33-68.
9. Kristeva, Julia and Alison Rice. 2002. ‘Forgiveness: An Interview’. PMLA 117(2): 278-295.
10. Derrida, Jacques.2001. ‘On forgiveness’. In On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Translated by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. Pp 27-60.
11. 11. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy.1998. ‘Undoing: Social Suffering and the Politics of Remorse in the New South Africa’.Social Justice, 25, 4 (74) : 114-142.

ADDITIONAL REFERENCE: