Discursive Structures of (In)Justice: The Simon Prideaux Legacy Series I – Justice as Myth: Unveiling the Global Discursive Illusion

(Please note: This call for papers may be subject to adjustments in the coming months)

The publishing project "The Discursive Structures of (In)Justice: The Simon Prideaux Legacy Series" proposes to explore, in a cognitive and research-based perspective, the most fundamental questions underpinning global injustice. Following the longstanding idea that language shapes the boundaries of our world—revived so convincingly by Fricker’s notion of epistemic injustice—we start with language, with discourse, with narratives. To understand injustice, we must first critically interrogate the very language through which global injustices are framed, justified, or obscured. In doing so, we align ourselves with a path that was already quite well established by thinkers such as Spivak, de Sousa Santos, Monzó, Ahmed. At the same time, we seek to uncover the symbolic violence embedded within discourse itself—a violence structured by ideology and power, as so incisively analysed even further ago by Žižek, Mouffe, van Dijk, or Bourdieu. Though the mechanisms they describe are now widely recognised, their grip on the social imagination continues to grow. Paradoxically, the more we know, the more overwhelming their effects seem to become. In the emerging age of generative AI—with its power to (re-)produce symbolic and narrative violence on an unprecedented scale—previously dystopian scenarios begin to look increasingly plausible.

The fusion of intelligent discourse-generation tools with advanced techniques of emotional and attentional manipulation draws us closer to a version of 1984 that perhaps even Orwell could not have foreseen. What once thrived in agnotological capitalism now persists through a reconfigured, skewed, subversive awareness—as if the knowledge of our own condition had ceased to be a remedy and instead gave rise to new, more complex injustices.

The first volume of our series is "Justice as Myth: Unveiling the Global Discursive Illusion." At the outset of this journey, we seek to understand how the very promise of justice—a promise conjured in every ideological grammar available on the political marketplace—reveals itself in the early decades of the 21st century. The more intuitive and self-evident the notion of justice appears, the more hollow it becomes as a floating signifier, emptied by overuse. And the more urgently we demand justice in practice, the more vulnerable we become to its instrumentalisation through technocratic and symbolic forms of social engineering. We inhabit a world saturated with the bitterness of injustice, a reality in which resentment and grievance accumulate across successive layers of violence. This ideological palimpsest is written and rewritten through the cynical deployment of justice, a concept increasingly framed from the vantage point of the powerful. In a kind of cognitive potlatch, the strong offer the victims of structural violence a narrative and a promise—a myth of justice—that, rather than healing, burns from within.

Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal's instructions for authors and submit their abstracts (maximum of 250 words, with a tentative title) through the abstracts system (here). When submitting their abstracts, authors are also asked to confirm that they are aware that Social Inclusion is an open access journal with a publishing fee if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review (corresponding authors affiliated with our institutional members do not incur this fee).

Readers across the globe will be able to access, share, and download this issue entirely for free. Corresponding authors affiliated with any of our institutional members (over 90 institutions worldwide) publish free of charge. Otherwise, an article processing fee will be charged to the authors to cover editorial costs. We defend that authors should not have to personally pay this fee and encourage them to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication costs. Further information about the journal's open access charges can be found here.