From Exploitation Through Justice Towards Exploiting Justice

Conceptions of Justice in the Closing of a Suburb School in Sweden

Abstract

This article argues that current iterations of solutions for preventing school segregation are constrained by an overreliance on particular representations of justice, in which the other is perceived as the responsible other. Studying the grounds for a decision to close a suburb school in Sweden, this article engages partly in an analysis on what implicit conception of justice that manifests itself, partly in exploring a conception of justice open towards a multiple and open-ended spatiality. It is argued that in order to imagine and construct such a spatiality, a majoritarian approach to justice must be abandoned in favour of a minoritarian one. Doing so, justice further needs to abandon a distribution of blame and responsibility and instead seek to pluralize forces flowing through different spatialities. A minoritarian approach to justice, I argue, can be envisioned by applying the concept of segmentarity as developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.