Returning to Our Pasts, Engaging Difficult Knowledge, and Transforming Social Justice

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Acknowledgment

We would like to thank Professor Dennis Thiessen for his valuable feedback on an earlier version of this editorial essay.

Notes

Notes

1 Throughout this editorial essay, we use the terms justice and social justice interchangeably. Our dilemma of representing concepts through the use of these words emerges as a result of the expansion and contestation of meanings and manifestations of the concept due to inevitable subjectivity of human understanding and the spread of discourses about justice. We are aware that justice is a social construct that reflects a basic human instinct or ideal of fair treatment and access to rights and opportunities. At the same time, we recognize that the use of the term social justice might reduce the application and benefit of the concept to human species in social domain only, leaving out the non‐human aspects, such as ecological as well as the non‐social dimensions of justice that may embrace individuals at both psychic and emotional levels. As a basic human aspiration, justice or social justice has been a perennial promise for and challenge to education, and one of the most contested ideas in the human intellectual and political history. All human societies, whether democratic or dictatorial, old or young, of different genders and various colours, tend to employ the concept, albeit with different and conflicting notions, purposes, and practices of justice. Despite the failures of justice‐oriented narratives, cynicism around the topic, and its practical “abuses” across the world, the idea of justice has remained alive and appealing.

2 The “Other” in Judith Butler's works (e.g., , , ) is a complex concept that draws from political science, sociology, psychoanalysis, critical effect, and cultural studies. At one level, this term refers to sexual and cultural minorities within the United States and the Western world. At another level, the other is Muslims, Arabs, Afghans, Palestinians, or individuals from other nations who have been subject to dehumanization and violence before and after September 11 and whose lives and losses are portrayed as non‐grieveable. The “Other” is also a relational and existential concept, in which Butler proposes the existence and undoing, the interconnectedness and confoundedness of the self and other and subsequently the need for ethical, egalitarian, and deeper affective relations between the self and other.

3 Sa'adi Shirazi, also known as Muslihuddin Sa'adi from Shiraz, was a Persian poet who lived in the time of Mongol invasion and dominance in Central Asia (1210–1291). Famous far beyond the Persian‐speaking world, Sa'adi is recognized for his social and moral thoughts.

4 Translation by Sarfaroz Niyozov.