What’s RECIND?

Blog Number #1:

Welcome to the blog for RECIND: Recognising Injustice in the Digital Public Sphere.

More and more often, people first come to understand an experience as an injustice online. Before anything is acknowledged by a a government, a newspaper, or some other established institution, it may already have been named on social media, in a forum, in a comment thread, or through a hashtag. That is true of very different kinds of experience: sexual harassment, racism, ableism, exclusion, everyday humiliation, forms of neglect that are hard to make visible in ordinary political language. In cases like these, digital space does not simply transmit a complaint that already existed in a finished form. It can be part of the very process by which that complaint becomes intelligible, shareable, and public.

There has been no shortage of commentary on the internet and social media over the last number of years. We are told that these spaces are polarising, addictive, manipulative, hostile to attention, corrosive of democracy. Often, those criticisms are justified. But they do not tell the whole story. They also make it harder to see something else that is happening there, namely that digital platforms have become one of the main places where people try to describe what is wrong in the world and where others begin to recognise those wrongs as real.

That matters philosophically as well as politically. If injustice is now so often articulated in digital space, then this is not just a change in communications technology. It suggests that the forms through which suffering, exclusion, and misrecognition become visible are shifting. And if that is right, then some of the concepts we rely on to describe public and political life may need to be reconsidered.

One of those concepts is the public sphere. The public sphere is usually understood as the space in which matters of common concern are brought into view and debated. Very often, it is imagined as a space of reasoned exchange, argument, judgment, and participation. That picture still has value. But it does not fully capture what happens online. Digital publics are rarely calm spaces of deliberation. They are emotional, fast-moving, fractured, sometimes anonymous, often transnational. They are shaped as much by testimony, repetition, mood, and images as by formal argument. They are also structured by private platforms whose interests are not identical with democratic ones. So when I speak about the digital public sphere, I do not mean a simple online version of an older public sphere. I mean that the conditions under which something becomes publicly sayable, visible, and recognisable have changed.

More specifically, the project asks how the digital public sphere shapes the recognition of injustice. Recognition is important here because injustice is not just something that happens. It also has to be apprehended as injustice. It has to be named, received, interpreted, and taken up by others. Many forms of wrong remain politically weak for long periods not because they are unreal, but because they do not easily fit the available languages of public life. They remain private, isolated, or dismissed. One reason digital spaces matter is that they sometimes allow dispersed experiences to gather, and in gathering to acquire a different kind of force. A person sees that what happened to them has happened to others. An experience that felt singular begins to appear structural. A form of suffering that had seemed unspeakable becomes easier to articulate once it is heard elsewhere.

That does not mean that social media simply solves the problem. Far from it. Digital spaces can make injustice visible, but they can also flatten experience, reward simplification, encourage aggression, and expose vulnerable people to new forms of hostility. They can create solidarity, but also performance. They can widen participation, but they can also reproduce hierarchies in new forms. I am not interested in treating the internet as either emancipatory by nature or hopelessly corrupt. Neither view is especially helpful. What matters is that digital life has become one of the places where political experience is being formed and contested, and that we need better ways of thinking about that fact.

This is why RECIND brings together work from several areas: political philosophy, feminist thought, philosophy of technology, and digital sociology. I am especially interested in how feminist philosophies of vulnerability can help us rethink public space, community, and injustice under digital conditions. Questions of injury, exposure, dependency, and recognition seem to me central here. So too does the issue of community: not only who speaks, but how people come to feel connected through shared experience, and what kind of political form that connection takes.

This blog will be a place to think through those questions in a more open and provisional way than formal academic writing usually allows. Some posts will introduce concepts that are central to the project. Others will reflect on the broader stakes of the research, or on tensions that have emerged as the work has developed. I want the blog to be part of the project rather than simply a record of it afterwards.

The next posts will look at some of the main ideas that shape RECIND: the public sphere beyond rationality, epistemic injustice, community, the limits of social media activism, hashtags, and the continued importance of European philosophy for understanding our present. Underlying all of them is the same broad concern. If the recognition of injustice is being transformed in and through digital space, then philosophy needs to be able to describe that transformation properly. It also needs to ask what is gained there, what is lost, and what kinds of political life are now emerging through these platforms.

*Please note: this blog has been dictated, with AI-enabled writing technology used in the process. All notes have been reviewed by the author. This part of an effort to try to find productive and responsible ways to use generative AI.