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Paper short abstract

Developing justice-centred futures requires the inclusion of vulnerable minoritised voices. Grounded on three case studies on collaborative innovation in contexts of migration, violence, and socioeconomic deprivation, this paper explores the multi-level challenges for their meaningful inclusion.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines justice-centred approaches to re-make sociotechnical futures through the lens of Creary’s ‘bounded justice’ framework (2021): justice-oriented public health policies and interventions are “bounded” by socio-historical constraints compromising the meaningful inclusion of the minoritised populations they are aimed to benefit. We build on the concept of ‘technical democracy’ (Callon et al. 2009) and on the literature of democracy as a tool for equity to argue that the direct (rather than representative) involvement of underserved groups to co-design and co-lead sociotechnical futures is essential to the equitable care of their needs and to the pursuit of justice. We specifically focus on the inclusion of vulnerable minoritised voices for justice-oriented sociotechnical innovation and policies: we explore potential strategies to give them voice, and we analyse the multi-level barriers that compromise their meaningful inclusion. We discuss the post-traumatic, psychosocial and socio-historical barriers that prevents them to seek, or even accept invitations for, collaborative innovation; as well as the upstream barriers to even access and invite them in the first place, such as gatekeepers’ permission and collaboration and institutional ethical and insurance approval. In particular, we build on the barriers we have encountered to include vulnerable, minoritised voices across three research case studies aimed to promote justice-centred health futures: homeless people in Ireland, socioeconomically deprived migrant people in Italy, and conflict-related internally displaced women exposed to gender-based violence in Ethiopia. We conclude by discussing the limits of current approaches to achieve the challenging goal to protect vulnerable populations without silencing them.