ABSTRACT
Arguably, amidst the spectrum of conservative through radical approaches to educational labors, those who teach, learn, provide familial and community structures of support, administrate and research, are joined by attachments, albeit often fiercely divergent, to ideas and ideals about the responsibility of the educational enterprise to the realization of justice as variously expressed in individual dispositions and agencies, institutional forms and broader societal power relations. The terms that should frame and name the meanings and modes of justice and their thresholds, especially those designating what counts as the foundational categories, represent a matter of crucial concern as “[a]ll political power presents itself to the world within a framework of ideas,” says C. L. R. James (1974, pp. 33-34, italics in original), and such “ideas,” notes Patricia Hill Collins (1998, p. x), are “culpab[le] … in [the] hierarchical power relations” (p. x) that fraught and form considerations of justice. In critical educational work, spotlighting the issue of justice is important because of the continued role it plays as a major hub for rationalizing, routing and relating critical agendas of probing and positioning disciplinary knowledge in relation to broader social problematics, dynamics and visions. It is notable that these kinds of politicized and justiceinspired agendasmark a shared investment of the critical educational terrain despite the philosophically and ideologically differential conceptual lenses, including critical race theory, (dis)ability studies, feminism,
multiculturalism, neo-Marxism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, postpositivist realism, postructuralism and queer theory, which constitute its modes of inquiry and inflections of justice.
