How to analyze political responsibility for structural injustice: A Youngian toolbox for social scientists

Iris Marion Young’s conception of political responsibility broke new ground in thinking relationally about structural injustice. Young departs from the need to conceptualize responsibility for harms that have no identifiable perpetrator and emerge from many reproducing injustice unintentionally through daily action in a globally networked world. Following her untimely demise, her thoughts on taking responsibility for such structural harm have been contested and refined in two decades of intense debate. In social sciences, these in-depth philosophical debates have frequently remained unnoticed. Based on a review of the most common objections and advancements of the SCM, this paper offers a translation of these debates into an analytical framework – a toolbox of questions that intends to support social scientists’ analysis of responsibility that we dub The Political Responsibility Mapper. We employ the hypothetical case that Young introduced to explain structural injustice to exemplify the application of that tool: the case of Sandy, a single mother in risk of homelessness. That case inspires thinking through key concerns about who, for what, and how actors should assume which kind of responsibility, particularly in the field of housing studies.