Emily Cichocki

This thesis focuses on structural injustice and political solidarity in resistance to structural injustice. The first article grapples with the tension between complicity in structural injustice and political solidarity in resistance to injustice. I explore how complicity in structural injustice can inhibit the conditions needed for a meaningful sense of political solidarity. However, given that it is not realistic to eliminate all complicity in structural injustice, I argue that solidarity requires that we reckon with complicity and offer an account of what this involves. The second article focuses on Iris Marion Young’s practical concern that interpreting our responsibility for structural injustice as backward-looking blameworthiness tends to produce defensiveness, thus pushing individuals away from joining in collective movements towards justice. I argue that tendencies towards defensiveness are, in part, caused by the fact that we have conflated backward-looking responsibility with punishment. Drawing on insights from restorative and transformative justice movements, I argue that we can disentangle backward-looking responsibility from punishment in order to begin addressing the cultural problem of defensiveness in discussions about responsibility for injustice. The third article explores solidarity-building in the context of the contemporary “digital age”. I clarify the connection between María Lugones’ concept of “world”-travelling and solidarity-building, develop an account of “whole-hearted solidarity”, and discuss two worries about the use of social media for “world”-travelling and solidarity-building. I close by discussing some hopeful possibilities about how social media can, despite these worries, be used as a helpful tool for finding opportunities for “world”-traveling and building solidarity.

Over the past decade, feminist philosophers have gone a long way toward identifying and explaining the phenomenon that has come to be known as epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice is injustice occurring within the domain of knowledge (e.g., knowledge production and transmission), which typically impacts structurally marginalized social groups. In this paper, we argue that, as they currently work, algorithms on social media exacerbate the problem of epistemic injustice and related problems of social distrust. In other words, we argue that algorithms on social media recreate and reify the conditions that lead to some groups being systematically denied the full status of knowers, thereby corrupting the epistemic terrain and, with it, systems of social trust and cooperation. We argue that algorithms do this in two ways—namely, via what we are calling algorithmic targeting and algorithmic sorting.