Forms Of Misrecognition Research Articles

Agentic misrecognition in world politics

The phenomenon of misrecognition has been analysed under various angles by philosophy, political theory, sociology and lately also by international relations (IR). In IR, (mis)recognition is mainly understood as either status denial (i.e. denial of legal state recognition), inflated honor pretentions (including positive self-images, mythical narratives of the past, Great Power projections and so on), or as a denial of vital conditions necessary for identity, individuality, and freedom. There has been much theoretical work on the problem of inclusion/exclusion or the insider/outsider problem in IR and various empirical studies have shown that misrecognition can contribute to international conflict, international inequalities, (neo)colonialism, masculine domination, and limit the overall rationality of decision-making. However, what has been generally overlooked is the question of agency, the ‘who’ that is seeking and/or entitled to be an object and subject of recognition and how such exclusions and related pathologies result from forms of misrecognition. This introduction to Agentic Misrecognition in World Politics engages with some of the problems related to the question of (mis)recognition and agency in IR, the patterns of excluded recognition, and the normative conditions that pertain to these processes of (mis)recognition. It closes with a summation of the research articles and forum contributions to this volume.

The struggle for recognition in the age of facial recognition technology

Facial recognition is a promising emerging technology, but it sometimes fails to recognize people adequately. Facial recognition applications have been found to regularly misidentify certain demographics, misinterpret traits like gender, age, beliefs, or emotions, and categorize individuals in ways that do not resonate with their own sense of identity. In this paper, I argue that in each of these cases, the person who has their face analyzed is not merely misidentified or misunderstood, but misrecognized in an ethically relevant sense. Following Charles Taylor’s The Politics of Recognition (1992) and Axel Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition (1996), I describe how those subjected to facial recognition systems on the one hand struggle to obtain adequate recognition on a universal level, as being equally important to others, and lack recognition for their individual uniqueness, on the other hand. These forms of misrecognition are of ethical concern, because they can harm a person’s identity formation. So, ironically, facial recognition technology can give rise to a struggle for recognition.

Ghosts of Dominican Past, Ghosts of Dominican Present

This essay examines important contributions made by Dixa Ramírez’s book Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present (2018) to Dominican, Caribbean, and African diaspora literary and cultural studies. It argues for amplifying the study of imperial and nationalist forms of misrecognition, which Ramírez calls “ghosting.” It also argues that a focus on past and present exercises of power as ghosting may permit a greater understanding of stealthy—if often ambivalent—forms of resistance to empire and nationalism.

Unfolding recognition: an empirical-theoretical contribution to the concept

ABSTRACTThe past decades have witnessed growing interest in the concept of recognition, in social movements as well as in social theory. While the ‘recognition turn’ has made recognition a cornerstone in social and political philosophy, empirical interest – in sociology, anthropology and business studies – remains limited and has mainly focused on misrecognition and disrespect. As a result, recognition as a theoretical ideal remains largely divorced from the lived and messy realities of people’s everyday search for recognition. This article addresses this lacuna. Based on long-term participant observation and interviews with professionals and young men with mild intellectual disabilities working in sheltered employment projects in the Netherlands, it examines everyday practices of claiming and receiving recognition, how recognition is shaped by the institutional environment of sheltered work, and how it is achieved or subverted in everyday interactions between young men and professionals. Our contribution to the literature lies in our empirical finding that misrecognition is often enfolded in recognition. By stating that misrecognition is enfolded in recognition, we mean that an instance of recognition coincides with, and likely depends on, some form of misrecognition. While focusing on the messiness and ambivalence of recognition in everyday life may dilute it as an ideal, acknowledging its dark side opens the path to a more nuanced understanding of the dynamic in which misrecognition, rather than being its opposite, is enfolded within recognition.

Identità e riconoscimento: un possibile approccio teorico per la comprensione del fenomeno dell'homelessness?

Identity and recognition: A possible theoretical key to understanding the phenomenon of homelessness? Homelessness is one of the most extreme forms of poverty. Recent literature explains this event using an approach that combines individual characteristics and structural forces. However, in the homelessness’s study few attention has been given to human dimension and the role of crisis of identity and recognition. The need to be socially recognized is not simply a need among many others, to which we can possibly give up: it is a basic condition of our being human persons. Becoming homeless is definitely a very traumatic event, but these persons suffer before they begin this transition and continue even after that. In both phases, homeless people might be victims of various forms of misrecognition: physical and psychological maltreatment, rights’ deprivation and social exclusion that affect the validation of their social identity. Homelessness is certainly an expression of material and economic poverty, but it might also reflect other human and social problems. The aim of this paper is to explore how identity and recognition concepts can be used as a framework to understand homelessness experience more deeply and design effective and innovative public policies.

The social dynamics of devaluation in an aged care context

This article examines the way that aged care workers and clients are devalued. It is argued that they share a stigmatised and marginalised position, not experiencing recognition at individual, rights or societal levels. The research draws on a qualitative, ethnographic study of aged care and disability support, with Honneth’s recognition theory used to analyse the intersection of practice and meaning in this work. The study reveals that workers’ and clients’ presentations of a competent self are compromised by external signals of mistrust and devaluing, forms of misrecognition. These include low wages and status for workers, public and policy discourses that position them and their clients as mendicant or undeserving, and demeaning treatment from organisations. In turn, those participants who lacked a sense of themselves as uniquely valuable, as deserving of rights, and as contributing to the shared project of society, displayed practices and perspectives that were disabling of themselves and one another. Their interactions were characterised by distrust, resistance and mutual disabling. Boomageddon and silver tsunami scenarios are part of the problem; such discourses of misrecognition must be contested.

Recognition, ideology, and the case of “invisible suffering”

AbstractThe purpose of this paper is to expose, and provide a possible solution to, an internal inconsistency in Axel Honneth's critical theory of recognition. Honneth requires a way of making his claim that misrecognition causes subjective suffering, with the potential to cognitively disclose injustice, consistent with his account of ideological recognition as a form of misrecognition that engenders compliance with an oppressive social order. Only by reconciling these claims—that is, by showing how ideological recognition can engender an acceptance of domination whilst at the same time causing subjective suffering—can Honneth's theory of recognition retain the kind of critical capacities he desires. As a means of achieving this reconciliation, I propose the notion of “invisible suffering.” In the case of ideological recognition, I suggest that the suffering caused by misrecognition has its disclosive power blocked by the faux‐affirmation that the ideology discursively accords, and this renders the experience of suffering, qua painful indicator of social injustice, invisible to the subject. Drawing on insights from medical sociology, I show how the need to supplement Honneth's theory of recognition with the idea of invisible suffering is revelatory of the kind of critical theoretical stance demanded by his ontological commitments.

Bourdieu’s habitus and field: implications on the practice and theory of critical action learning

ABSTRACTThis paper considers the logic of practice of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in relation to critical action learning: in particular habitus which is co-created with field and the interplay amongst the two in the form of misrecognition and risk. We draw on interviews with participants who have experienced action learning as part of an NHS leadership programme. We argue that Bourdieu provides helpful ways of understanding and explaining the complex processes of social interactions which are centre stage in action learning – especially the ‘social friction’ through which action learners gain new insights and new prompts to action in their workplace from learning set members. These insights can support action learning practitioners keen to explore their own practice.

Reforming and Performing the Informal Economy: Constitutive Effects of the World Bank's Anti-informality Practices in Kosovo

ABSTRACTThe World Bank has for over a decade tried to formalize the informal economy in Kosovo. However, local journalists and businessmen among others provide an alternative understanding of informality that problematizes the World Bank’s view and actions. Against this backdrop, the article analyses the constitution and the constitutive effects of the World Bank’s anti-informality operations in Kosovo between 1999 and 2014. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s power analytics, the article claims that the Bank’s agenda, and the economic ideas enacted through it, does structure and shape informal economic practices on the ground. Yet this structuring involves two forms of misrecognition. As a result, informality is paradoxically constituted (in novel ways) and reconstituted through the World Bank’s imposed anti-informality agenda. The article concludes with a discussion of how this underlines the need for policy solutions that depart from liberal peacebuilding’s subject–object distinction to form instead around an acknowledgement of informality as emergent and transforming throughout international interventions.

Gender on board: deconstructing the “legitimate” female director

Purpose– Drawing on Bourdieu’s (2001) concept of symbolic violence in his work on Masculine Domination, the purpose of this paper is to examine how perceptions of legitimacy surrounding the presence of female directors are constructed in the boardroom, and the role of symbolic violence in the process.Design/methodology/approach– The authors carried out the investigation through a series of 32 interviews, mostly with board members in government-owned, commercially focussed companies in Québec. The study was conducted in the aftermath of the adoption of a legislative measure aiming to institute parity in the boardroom of government-owned companies.Findings– The analysis suggests that perceptions of legitimacy are predicated on two main discourses, as conveyed through board members when interpreting the presence of female directors. In the first discursive representation, feminine gender is naturalized and mobilized by participants to support (quite oftentimes in a rather apparent positive way) the distinctive contributions that femininity can make, or cannot make, to the functioning of boards. In the second discourse (degenderizing), the question of gender disappears from the sense-making process. Women’s presence is then justified and normalized, not because of their feminine qualities, but rather and uniquely for their competencies.Research limitations/implications– While, from a first level of analysis, the main discourses the authors unveiled may be considered as potentially enhancing women’s role and legitimacy within boards, from a deeper perspective such discourses may also be viewed as channels for symbolic violence to operate discreetly, promoting certain forms of misrecognition that continue to marginalize certain individuals or groups of people. For example, the degenderizing discourse misrecognizes that a focus on individual competency contests overlooks the social conditions under which the contesters developed their competencies.Practical implications– Provides awareness and a basis for directors to understand and how symbolic power covertly operates in apparently rationalized structures of corporate governance and challenge assumptions.Social implications– Implications in terms of policy making to promote board diversity are discussed. This is particularly relevant since many countries around the world are considering affirmative-action-type regulation to accelerate an otherwise dawdling trend in the nomination of women on boards.Originality/value– The research is the first to empirically address the notion of gendering in the boardroom, focussing on the construction of meanings surrounding the “legitimate” female director. The study is also one of few giving access to a field where a critical mass is attained, allowing the authors to investigate perceptions regarding the extent to which the order of things is altered in the boardroom once formal parity is established. Finally, the study sensitizes the authors further to the pertinence of investigating how symbolic power covertly operates in today’s society, including within apparently rationalized structures of corporate governance.

Infrahumanisation: the nurse versus the guard phenomenon in forensic psychiatric practice in Zimbabwe

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explicate the lived experiences of nurses involved in rehabilitation of forensic psychiatric patients in special institutions in Zimbabwe.Design/methodology/approach– The study used the grounded theory approach utilising a mixed sequential dominant status design (QUAL/Quant). Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual canon of field, habitus and capital was used as a theoretical point of departure by the research study. Confirmatory retrospective document review of 119 patients’ files was also done to substantiate the nurses’ experiences. Theoretical sampling of relatives was also done.Findings– Findings and results revealed that nurses seemed to experience infrahumanisation, a subtler form of dehumanisation. The infrahumanisation was embodied in the unpleasant context in which nurses were expected to perform their mandate of championing rehabilitation of forensic psychiatric patients. The guards who represented the prison system seemed to possess all forms of capital in the prison system (where special institutions are housed): the prison cultural capital, social capital and economic capital. This capital seemed to represent symbolic power over the disillusioned and voiceless nurses. Guards attended to and discussed patients and relatives issues instead of nurses. This form of misrecognition of the nurses culminated in dominance and reproduction of the interests of the prison system which underlined the established order of realities in the rehabilitation of forensic psychiatric patients in special institutions at the time of the study. The nurses’ lived experience was confirmed by theoretically sampled by relatives of forensic psychiatric patients who also participated in the research study. Nurses’ powerlessness was also reflected in the patients’ files in which in which care was largely not documented.Research limitations/implications– The study focused on the nurses experiences related to rehabilitation of male forensic psychiatric patients and not on female forensic psychiatric patients because there were important variables in the two groups that were not homogenous. For the little documentation that was done, there was also a tendency nurses to document negative rather than positive events and trends. The documents/files of patients had therefore a negative bias which was a major limitation to this study.Practical implications– There is a need for major revision of the revision of the role of the nurse in the forensic psychiatric setting. Collaboration as academia, practice, professional organisations and regulatory bodies would foster a nurse led therapeutic jurisprudence in the future of rehabilitation of forensic psychiatric patients in Zimbabwe.Social implications– There is a need for major revision of the revision of the role of the nurse in the forensic psychiatric setting.Originality/value– This is the first description of the position of nurses’ seconded to special institutions in Zimbabwe and will go a long way in realigning conflictual policy documents guiding care of forensic psychiatric patients in special institutions.

How Bourdieu bites back: recognising misrecognition in education and educational research

Having noted that some use of Bourdieusian concepts in educational research is superficial, this paper offers a view of the distinctiveness of Bourdieu’s concepts via the example of misrecognition, which is differentiated from the concept with the same name in Fraser’s work. An account is given of a recent research project on white middle-class identity and school choice, which suggests that whilst parents avoided a common misrecognition (regarding school quality), they were nevertheless reliant on other forms of misrecognition (regarding the qualities of their children) that are equally important in the relationship between social class and educational inequalities. Finally, the paper suggests that educational understandings, including some educational research, are predisposed to misrecognise Bourdieusian concepts, and four areas of tension are identified. The paper argues against ‘light usage’ of Bourdieu whilst acknowledging that the approach can produce a pessimistic account that is at odds with some educational values.

Australian Housing Policy, Misrecognition and Indigenous Population Mobility

Policy initiatives in remote Indigenous Australia aim to improve Indigenous health and well-being, and reduce homelessness. But they have raised controversy because they impinge on Indigenous aspirations to remain on homeland communities, require mainstreaming of Indigenous housing and transfer Indigenous land to the state. This paper uses recognition theory to argue that if policies of normalization are imposed on remote living Indigenous people in ways that take insufficient account of their cultural realities they may be experienced as a form of misrecognition and have detrimental policy effects. The paper examines the responses of remote living Indigenous people to the National Partnerships at the time of their introduction in 2009–2010. Drawing on interview and administrative data from a national study on Indigenous population mobility, the paper argues although the policies have been welcomed, they have also been a source of anxiety and anger. These feelings are associated with a sense of violated justice arising from experiences of misrecognition. The paper argues this can lead tenants to depart their homes as a culturally sanctioned form of resistance to state control. This population mobility is associated with homelessness because it takes place in the context of housing exclusion. Policy implications include developing new models of intercultural professional practice and employing a capacity-building approach to local Indigenous organisations.

Taylor and the problem of recognizing cultural groups

Recognition of cultural groups is an issue that puzzles those involved in the discussions around multiculturalism. Charles Taylor (1994) has done important groundwork in his ‘The politics of recognition’ where different possibilities of multicultural policy-making are discussed. This article concentrates on one social ontological problem that can be found in Taylor’s widely recognized theory. This article proceeds as follows. At first, Taylor's view on recognition is briefly introduced. This view potentially faces the reification problem, which states that recognizing a group that is not really an agent might result in misrecognition and disrespect of individual members of the group. The forms of misrecognition and disrespect range from homogenizing sets of individuals to forced identities anddissonance between individual and collective identities. After the problems of cultural recognition have been made clear, insights from the field of social ontology are brought into the picture. The agency of cultural groups is not self-evident, and in this paper it is argued that Taylor faces a problem when he grants agency to certain kinds of groups that are not really agents. This can be shown using the tools provided by contemporary analytical social ontology. Finally, a tentative way of conceptualizing cultural recognition is offered. The suggestion is that, despite its vagueness, Taylor's position includes elements that enable incorporating a robust social ontological theory into it. If this is done, many of the worries stated in the reification problem might be avoided.

Statelessness and the Politics of Misrecognition

This article focuses on the account of disrespect found in Honneth’s theory of recognition. In it, I am particularly interested in the form of misrecognition or disrespect which is the negation of respect, and which is clearly represented by statelessness. Respect, for Honneth, is closely connected to legal recognition. Guided by Honneth’s view of critical theory as ‘not entirely without a foundation in social reality’, the article puts together an analysis of the political dynamics of his model of disrespect. This analysis is used to challenge certain aspects of Honneth’s political theory and in particular the implications of his conception of the state. The article argues that the way in which the state is used has the effect of obscuring significant political obstacles to recognition, and in particular, the way in which the state limits respect.

Unequal recognition, misrecognition and injustice: The case of religious minorities in Denmark

Euro-multiculturalism is (1) concerned with religiously defined immigrant minorities; (2) sees policies of recognition as a means to secure multicultural equality between groups; (3) endorses the moderate secularism of European states; and (4) adopts a contextualist approach to answering the normative question. Proponents of ‘Euro-multiculturalism’ want to ask when unequal recognition by the state of religious communities is a form of misrecognition and when it is unjust (or wrong). The article discusses the question by way of an examination of the Danish case of unequal recognition by the state of religious minorities. It argues that state–religion relations can be analysed as relations of recognition, which are not only unequal but also multi-dimensional, and that it is difficult to answer the question whether multi-dimensional recognitive inequalities are unjust or wrong if one endorses moderate secularism and contextualism.