Part 3 Summary of Findings, Conclusions and
4.1 The Person-Structure Interface
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to manipulation in the interest of unjust institutional regimes. These risks have been discussed in the context of recent critiques of virtue ethics (for example, Clifford 2014), and I provide a brief review of this discussion in Section 4.3. Possible responses have been developed, among others, by affective turn theorists. I reflect on some of these contributions in Section 4.4, focusing on the notions of critical emotional reflexivity and affective dissonance. In my discussion, I draw, among others, on Clare Hemmings (2012), Michalinos Zembylas (2014), and Richard Hugman’s (2005) consideration of emotion in the ethics of caring professions. It is in conjunction that these debates support the production of a situated, critical and emotionally reflective account of how structural processes of injustice entangled cross-border migrants, their social workers, other practitioners of care, and members of the receiving community in this study, and assist in discerning those openings for just practice that emerged in its course.
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Such universals … conceptualise the stuff of which the experienced world consists … with a view of its possibilities, in the light of their limitations, suppression and denial ... [These]
philosophical concepts are formed and developed in the consciousness of a general condition in a historical continuum … [and] elaborated from an individual position within a specific society (Marcuse, cited in Young 1990:6).
Young (1990) treats the notions of social injustice and oppression as inseparable. Individual actors are regarded as implicated in rendering oppression a structural feature of society and hence, as having a responsibility and possibilities for action in relation to it. She elaborates on this dialectic in Global Challenges (Young 2007). Drawing among others on Anthony Giddens and Jean-Paul Sartre, she notes that, ‘social structures exist … not as states, but as processes’
in that ‘people act on the basis of their knowledge of pre-existing structures and in so acting reproduce those structures’ (Young 2007:169). In other words, structures not only shape, they are also the aggregate outcome of, individual choices and actions. The dialectic relationship between social structures and the social positioning of myriads of individuals on the one hand and these individuals’ consciousness, choices and actions on the other renders social injustice open to change. Young (1990:48) notes that ‘in complex, highly differentiated societies … individual persons … themselves are heterogeneous and not necessarily coherent’. It is this complexity that ultimately enables people to explore different points of view, critically reflect on their expectations, priorities, values, habits, as well as the consequences of their actions, and as a result, choose to change. Consequently, Young (2007) asserts that to the extent that individuals are woven into structural processes of injustice, as agents, they are morally responsible for helping to change them, and for addressing the harms they have caused. This responsibility remains even if individuals cannot be held liable for the structural consequences of their actions.
Young returns to the options available to people in the face of structural injustice in Responsibility for Justice (Young 2011). Drawing on Hannah Arendt, she identifies four possibilities. Firstly, people may commit or directly contribute to actions, practices or institutionalised forms of injustice and therefore are liable for the harms that they cause.
Secondly, they may support other individuals, practices, institutions or regimes that commit or directly contribute to structural injustice and therefore are morally responsible for the harms that they cause. Thirdly they may attempt to prevent harm through moral, often brave but generally private and therefore apolitical, actions and thus avoid guilt. Finally people may take political responsibility for justice in the form of collective and public responses to actions,
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practices, or institutional forms of injustice. This means that if changes in individual consciousness happen at a large scale and as a result, collective political action is taken, then the targeted social structures can be rendered potentially more just (Young 2011).
Importantly, Young does not place the onus for taking action against injustice on the privileged only, or on remunerated providers of care. Instead, she points out that responsibility for justice falls on all who are woven into processes of structural injustice, noting, however, that the greater scope for action and impact lies with the relatively privileged (Young 2007, 2011) – who in the context of my arguments include social workers, other practitioners of care and members of the receiving community (see Chapter 1.4.4).
Clifford and Burke (2009:17-20) sum up their ethical responsibility as follows:
The personal interactions which are the subject of ethics are an integral part of social situations in which oppressions are systematically reproduced … Individuals … have varying degrees of … ability and awareness … to actively engage with powerful social systems … [For this reason,] the social context of the professional working with vulnerable individuals and groups demands recognition of the need to act in a way that minimises or overcomes some of the complex effects of discrimination and oppression, rather than adding to them through collusion, neglect or lack of self-awareness.
All in all, Young’s work inspired what my co-authors and I referred to in several publications as just practice (see Part 2 of this thesis). At the time of writing the articles concerned, we intended for this term to signify any concrete response to a ‘call to be just’ (Young 1990:5) made by cross-border migrants upon social workers, other practitioners of care and members of the receiving community. In the course of this study, such calls appeared in all manner of forms: as formal requests for welfare services, as a spontaneous showing-up, as impositions that disrupted the routines of people who might not have expected to be called upon, or in the form of polite, respectful, submissive, startling, unpleasant or even offensive exchanges in existing relationships between people so unequally positioned. Sometimes, the call was almost inaudible. As such, the term was meant to signify a practical recognition of such a call (compare Leonard 1997), however ambiguous and difficult it might be to discern at the time (compare Bauman 1993), and irrespective of how the response may be interpreted with hindsight (Young 2011). However, in further considering socially just practice in this study, I would like to propose two additional meanings. Firstly, the notion of just practice should also reference any search among any of the study participants for the implications of these calls, responses, and the specific situations in which they appeared, for their broader
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understanding of social justice and the responsibility they might hold in relation to it.
Secondly, it is significant that Young (1990) uses the expression ‘being just’ rather than ‘acting justly’, for it implies that being, relating and interacting are interlinked indeed, and that just practice must also entail critically reflexive considerations of the social positions people hold in relation to one another, and the impact thereof upon their relationships and possibilities for action.