PHAIS Seminar Series Week 18: Professor Joel Krueger

The PHAIS Seminar Series meets weekly in term time to discuss a paper by a visiting Philosopher, Historian, Art Historian or a member of our academic staff.

An ecological approach to affective injustice

Prof Joel Krueger, University of Exeter

There is growing philosophical interest in “affective injustice”: injustice faced by individuals specifically in their capacity as affective beings. Current debates tend to focus on affective injustice at the psychological level. In this paper, I argue that the built environment can be a vehicle for affective injustice — specifically, what Wildman et al. (2022) term “affective powerlessness”. I use resources from ecological psychology to develop this claim. I consider two cases where certain kinds of bodies are, either intentionally or unintentionally, deprived of access to goods affording the development and maintenance of their subjective well-being: hostile architecture and masking practices in autism. This deprivation, I argue further, leads to a significant weakening and diminishment of their spatial agency, hinders their well-being, and in so doing gives rise to a pervasive experience of affective powerlessness. By drawing attention to these themes, I show that an ecological approach helpfully supplements existing approaches. It highlights how affective injustice can emerge via the way bodies are positioned in space, and the central role that built environments play in determining this positioning.

Biography

Joel Krueger is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Exeter. He works in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of cognitive science: specifically, issues in 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) cognition, including emotions, social cognition, loneliness, and psychopathology. He also writes about comparative philosophy and philosophy of music.

The seminar will be in person, but if you would prefer to join via Zoom, please email phaispg@essex.ac.uk to request the Zoom link.