Paper short abstract:

How does it feel to experience injustice? Are experiences of justice the opposite of injustice, or is a “just world” simply experienced as morally “normal,” predictable, or uncomplicated? This talk examines what it means to seek to change moral worlds in an effort to better align with expectations.

Paper long abstract:

How does it feel to experience injustice? Is the experience of justice the opposite of injustice, or is a “just world” simply experienced as morally “normal,” predictable, or uncomplicated? Can we understand the experience of injustice with the discrete set of concepts and objects of study that are already well established within the psy-ences, or does the consideration of the political demand a new way of thinking about the entwined nature of identity, experience, subjectivity, and power/political economy? This paper argues that, at the heart of the experience of political engagement is an embodied experience of in/justice that reveals both how people culturally assess the rightness and wrongness of the world, but also how people seek to challenge the link between moralities and the concrete systems that are in place to enforce — legally, politically, economically — that moral landscape. How does it feel, then, when one’s sense of morality does or does not align with the political economy? Drawing on examples from fieldwork conducted among downwardly mobile Romanian and among farmers and ranchers across the U.S. Southwest and Great Plains, I argue that a psychological anthropology of injustice should not simply be reduced to a study of misery and the conditions that create that misery. Rather, this paper argues for a radical rethinking of interiority and exteriority in an effort to build a unique understanding of political selves and subjectivities that complements, but stands apart from, existing types of selves and subjectivities (e.g., gendered, medicalized, etc.).