Listening with recognition for social justice

Abstract

Although recognition has been the dominant framework for understanding the struggles of social movements over the past two decades, the concept of listening addresses a significant gap in this framework. Across its many different formulations, conceptions of recognition fail to address the question of how recognition claims get heard. The tacit assumption is that the moral force of demands will somehow produce the outcome of recognition without careful analysis of the process between claims and outcomes. This chapter demonstrates that the framework of recognition is affirmative and assimilationist rather than transformative. Engaging with critiques of recognition articulated by Dene political theorist Glean Sean Coulthard (Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), it argues that social justice-oriented listening opens the possibility of more transformative responses to the politics of Indigenous resurgence.