Title: Explanations of Systemic Disadvantage: Discrimination and Social Formation

Abstract: How should we understand “structural” or “systemic” injustice, such as structural racism or class exploitation? And why is this injustice so durable? One problem is that it isn’t clear how to understand what social structures are, and how agents are situated in them.  Of course, some forms of oppression arise from discrimination in the formation and maintenance of institutions and associations. However, in this talk, I will offer a different picture, relying on the idea that societies are complex dynamic systems affected by material and semiotic dynamics. My broad aim is to provide evidence that although discrimination is part of the story of structural injustice, taking that to be the whole story leaves us without the resources we need to analyze what’s going wrong in structurally unjust societies and how to change them.