The second JustTalks event was held on the second floor of Restaurant Telakka on October 10, 2024. The event gathered thirty scholars and students from different disciplines. The event was designed to be relaxed and informal, focusing on discussions. The main speaker was Professor Don Mitchell from the department of Human Geography, Uppsala University, Sweden. Professor Mitchell has studied urban public spaces and right to the city, focusing especially on law, policies, protests and homelessness, historical geography, and landscapes. Before moving to Sweden in 2017, he studied and taught in various parts of the United States, most recently at Syracuse University.
At the beginning, the chair of the event, Postdoctoral Researcher Virve Repo said a few welcoming words. After that, Professor Päivi Kymäläinen, who has collaborated with Professor Mitchell for 20 years, introduced him. The title of Mitchell’s presentation was “The Basic Structure of Justice.” At the beginning of the lecture, Mitchell evoked the audience with philosophical questions, such as “What is justice?”, “What is equality?” and “Can unequal distribution sometimes be justice?”. He pointed out that, for example, in early Western philosophy, gender equality has been intertwined with the questions “Who is man?” and “What is a woman for?” which indicates the inequality between genders. As a geographer, Mitchell also talked about the justice of built environments and landscapes and asked if we can justify how cities are built. For him, at least in the United States, it was not justifiable.
We had two commentators in the event. Doctoral researcher Anna Kobierska commented on the justice of public spaces in relation to the Gaza crises. Project manager and postdoctoral researcher Riina Lundman contested the concept of structure and asked if justice can be relational rather than an “either-or” type of concept. She also highlighted the importance of the concept of care and if that is more important than justice. The members of the audience brought out climate rights and justice. These questions and comments provoked vivid conversations and showed that justice is a complicated concept that might need to be re-thought. The discussions continued afterwards at the informal cocktail reception and at the dinner, which were open to all the participants.
The event was funded by STUE action grant.