Situated knowledge of violence

Situated knowledge of violence

Coordination : Anna Krykun, Emmanuelle Käes, Roxana Ilasca et Liudmyla Harmash (chercheuse invitée LE STUDIUM 2025-26 au sein de l’UR ICD)
 

• Marianna Esposito (University of Salerno, Political Philosophy and Gender Studies): “20th century female philosophers theorising violence”

This talk focuses on some of the great female thinkers of the twentieth century who were motivated by a demand for justice in relation to their lived experiences: the factory for Simone Weil, the margins for Audre Lorde, the borderlands for Gloria Anzaldúa. These are places that mark bodies as signs of violence and historical subordination and, at the same time, offer a lever for a theoretical practice capable of creating new spaces for action and possibilities.
Suggested reading: Marianna Esposito, "Borderlands. Colonial violence and transition spaces in Gloria Anzaldúas" (2025) - p.85-106.

Marianna Esposito is Associate Professor of political philosophy and global gender studies at the University of Salerno. She is the author of monographs and essays on the themes of freedom and community in modern and contemporary philosophy, on the genealogy of social policies and on African-American feminist thought. She recently published Gli spazi di mezzo. Pratiche e politiche dei corpi (In-Between Spaces. Practices and Politics of the Body), Milan, Mimesis, 2025; La differenza non europea nel pensiero di Audre Lorde (The Non-European Difference in the Thought of Audre Lorde), Meltemi, 2025; The Colour of Experience, Penguin, 2021. Together with Sandro Luce, she edited the volume: Norme governo soggettività. Un percorso tra filosofia e politica (Rules and Subjectivity: A Journey Through Philosophy and Politics), Giappichelli, 2025.
 

• Ingrid Salvatore (University of Salerno, Political Philosophy): “Injustice and oppression: a defense of the distributive paradigm”

Since the 1990s, the concept of oppression — especially structural oppression — has become central to debates on social justice. Authors such as Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, and (in part) Elizabeth Anderson argue that injustice should be understood primarily in terms of social relations of power and the structural constraints affecting social groups, rather than in terms of the distribution of goods. In earlier decades, however, debates on justice were largely dominated by the distributive paradigm, with its focus on equality, fairness, and the allocation of resources and opportunities. The contemporary emphasis on oppression therefore represents not merely a thematic shift but a critical challenge: distributive theories are said to be unable to capture power relations and, by reducing injustice to maldistribution, to render oppression invisible. This talk aims to clarify this critique by analyzing the notion of social oppression and the nature of the social groups to which it refers (such as women, racialized groups, or the elderly). It then argues that the distributive paradigm, properly understood, retains significant explanatory and normative resources for addressing injustice, including oppression.

Suggested reading: Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990) - p. 15-38.
 
Ingrid Salvatore is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Salerno. Her research focuses on distributive justice, moral and political pluralism, political justification and legitimation, feminist theory, and oppression. Her most recent articles include 'Lavoro e proprietà nella teoria della giustizia distributiva. Eguaglianza e reciprocità nella redistribuzione' ('Work and Property in the Theory of Distributive Justice: Equality and Reciprocity in Redistribution'), Iride (forthcoming), and 'The Indeterminacy of the Principles of Justice: The Debate on Property-Owning Democracy Versus the Welfare State and the Ideal of Social Union', Res Publica (2024, online first). In 2024 she co-edited the special issue 'Structural Injustice: Reflections on Social Groups, Identity and Intersectionality', Phenomenology and Mind, 27. She is the author of Giustizia sociale. Aspetti teorici e assetti istituzionali (Social Justice: Theoretical Aspects and Institutional Structures), Milan: AlboVersorio, 2023. Previous versions of this talk were discussed at Ruhr University Bochum, the University of Rome Tor Vergata, and the Centre for Ethics, Politics, and Society (CEPS) at the University of Minho, Portugal.