This book comes together at a moment of deep crisis. As we write the sky in State College, Pennsylvania is an eerie colour, and the sun has taken on an otherworldly hue driven by climate change induced wildfires thousands of miles away rendering the air quality dangerous. In many Western nations nationalism and white supremacy are resurgent and threaten fragile political coalitions and, in the case of the United States, democratic governance at various political scales. More broadly, anthropogenic climate change and increased global competition sharpens already uneven distributions of resource scarcity, and reliance on militarism and neocolonialist processes of structural abandonment make vulnerable lives more precarious. These challenges render hope in the context of the present political realities difficult and hard to sustain. The reality is, the world and its places and peoples are being made more vulnerable by the day, and as a result the struggle to imagine alternatives has never been more important.

Within this context it is necessary to engage in broad conversations around justice and, more specifically, how and in what ways we practice justice in our work and through our lives. This edited book is meant to challenge existing paradigms that render researchers and our practices somehow separate from the work we do and the communities we engage with. Through these interventions we have perspectives that are grounded in a range of paradigms, which push the discussion of practising justice in new directions and challenge all of us to render justice more visible in both our work and our everyday lives. The concept of justice itself is slippery, it is often much easier to name injustices and human wrongs than it is to define what justice is and how it looks in operation. On the one hand, we often define justice geographically and the idea is mediated through the kinds of societies in which the concept emerges. Lisa Lowe (2015), for example, in her book The Intimacies of Four Continents describes the ways Western notions of freedom, democracy and justice, among other examples, emerged through the subordination of Black and Brown labour through enslavement and colonization as well as Indigenous genocides.

For the three chapters in this section, written by Jen Dickinson and Natasha Uwimanzi, Jennifer Balint and Deepti Chatti, justice is about action. They acknowledge the structural but also mundane, everydayness of injustice and seek to enable spaces for learning and reflection, for all participants to ‘be otherwise’ in an effort to disrupt and decentre Western knowledge in the academy and beyond. The projects discussed work towards a decolonizing praxis, seeking to partner with the historically marginalized and silenced to give voice to their narratives, histories and futures. Their work emphasizes the necessity for accountability and dialogical reflexivity within these partnerships in order to rebalance research spaces and relations, while acknowledging the ongoing challenges in grounding these in local and contextual understandings and interpretations.

Justice here is grounded in unsettling epistemic silencing, both through enabling spaces for testimony, collaboration and situated experiences, and in processing how you do research within – and beyond – the constraints of colonial constructions of ‘fields of study’ alongside the contemporary, neoliberal university context.

Understanding justice for many academics, practitioners and policy makers begins with questions of injustice – the way particular social, economic, political or cultural structures come to undergird exploitative conditions (Dorling, 2010; Barnett, 2017). Yet, as Sandel (2010: 10) reminds us, ‘thinking about justice seems inescapably to engage us in thinking about the best way to live’, which in turn requires us to consider how we engage with our day- to- day lives. As academics, spaces and practices of (in)justice may be the focus of our research although questions of the ‘what’, ‘who’ and ‘how’ of justice (Fraser, 2008) also shape both our working practices and everyday lives more broadly. From activist- scholars to theoreticians, ideals of justice shape how we understand and engage with our research questions and stakeholders; reflect on and practice research methodologies; and share and disseminate findings even if we are not always explicit about the reflective processes behind these approaches. Additionally, the nature and demands placed on contemporary academic outputs means that they are often focused on advancing theoretical or empirical understandings of justice or, when they are methodologically centred, reflecting on the challenges, negotiations and contradictions of doing ethical, participatory and emancipatory research. Although there have long been calls to explore how the research process itself can be a socially just endeavour (DePalma, 2010), responses have often been more critical, how- to guides rather than reflections on the role justice does, and should, play in our research praxis.

Quite simply, if we are serious about engaging in justice work, how we centralize justice within this is of vital importance to living out the broader realities of why we do what we do and the kinds of worlds we envision through our research engagements. Gaining insights into how others conceptualize, and use, justice in their work is important in encouraging discussion around contemporary research practices, opening up the ‘black box’ of how academics understand their own work. Furthermore, it offers a reflexive lens to engage with the variety of perspectives, ideologies, articulations, materialities and communities that connect into, and ground, justice research.

The three chapters in this section, written by Kate Derickson, Elizabeth Mavroudi and Barbora Adlerova and Ana Moragues Faus, reflect on, and reject, the relations of power that govern the extractive and directive neoliberal model of ‘community- engaged’ research that continues to hold sway within the academy. Instead, they focus on the ‘more than research’ nature of academic investigations, and offer frank and telling insights into the messy, contradictory and sometimes uncomfortable encounters that have shaped their research practices, relations and spaces. They call for the centring of participant voice, not just in project outcomes but throughout the everyday doing of a project, and reflect on the challenges that this can bring especially in terms of tensions between different priorities and expectations.

Justice here is grounded in the encounter, in the processes of care we should enact for our participants, colleagues and selves. These support us in negotiating the innate stresses and stressors within a project, and the academy more broadly, and remind us that words and actions matter at all points and scales. To do just research, we therefore need to practice and be enveloped within a compassionate culture of care.

With the escalation of various food inequalities in the UK and globally, there has been a growing interest among food scholars and practitioners in working with the concept of food justice, defining it, operationalizing it (Cadieux and Slocum, 2015; Herman et al, 2018; Coulson and Milbourne, 2020) and exploring how social justice can contribute to creating more sustainable and just food systems (Moragues Faus, 2017; Maughan et al, 2020; Smaal et al, 2021). However, not all interventions include an actual commitment to the concept through performing justice in academic and more- than- research work. In this contribution we argue that to follow (food) justice scholarship, we need to go beyond using justice as a lens in our empirical and theoretical work and explore how justice is enacted (or not) in our research, in academia and beyond. To do that, we introduce our care- full participatory justice framework, mobilizing Nancy Fraser's (2009) economic, socio- cultural and political dimensions of justice, and – following Miriam Williams’ (2017) concept of care- full justice – taking ethics of care as a building block of our reflection to interrogate the micro- dimension of our messy, everyday more- than- research activities. Blazek et al (2015) coined the term ‘more than research’ to highlight the ambivalence and in- becoming- ness of academic and non- academic outcomes to research projects, especially participatory ones. Building on this, Evans (2016) describe relationships developed with her research participants as ‘more than research’, motivated by ethics of care. Our use aims to extend its focus from outcomes and relationships with people in the field to capturing the complexities and relationships with other people in academia and beyond academia (colleagues, supervisors, students, practitioners, activists) as well as ourselves. Understanding our research activities are always already ‘more than research’ also helps to paradoxically decenter the spectacular in our research and create a space to navigate justice in all its dimensions in our more- than- research lives (and those of others) where our research is necessarily embedded. We do not endeavour to come up with a set of fool- proof techniques to achieve (food) justice in research, instead we will turn the gaze in and scrutinize our own ambiguous practices, uncomfortable contradictions and troublesome dilemmas that spill out from grant writing, interviews and analysis into our more- than- research life in the UK and beyond.

What is the relationship between scholarly knowledge and social justice? I used to believe, mistakenly, I now think, that to promote social justice I needed to develop an intimate knowledge of radical frameworks and diligently apply those frameworks to observed injustices, in order to chart their manifestations, their impacts and their entanglements. What made a framework ‘radical’, I thought, was the object of its critique. I used to think that knowing more in a scholarly register about racialized dispossession, for example, and publishing that knowledge in scholarly journals was a way to disrupt the processes that produced it. Much has been written about the obvious inadequacies of the ‘ivory tower’ and its paywalls for bringing about meaningful change that need not be rehearsed here. I am not really interested in that anti- intellectual argument (though my positions and work are sometimes interpreted that way). Instead, I want to argue that the intellectual enterprise itself is a site for the realization of justice, but just not, perhaps, in the way that it is often assumed.

I used to love to debate. I grew up north of Boston in a loud extended Irish family of teachers and lawyers for whom teasing, storytelling and comedic timing are an art form. If you want to hang, you had better come armed with a thick skin, a solid point and a fast- moving story. To be effective, you have to fully commit to the argument; hesitate and you create space for your entire argument to be toppled. The point is not to persuade or be persuaded, the point is to hold the spotlight, to entertain, to show off, to win. I came to the kitchen island (and later, to social interactions and intellectual inquiry) ready to press my case, think on my feet, not take things personally (at least in public) and never back down.

This training served me well enough for a while. I came of age in the early 1990s, when the neoliberal consensus was so strong that the political space left of centre was spacious terrain. To be a middle- class white woman against racism, patriarchy and homophobia felt rather uncomplicated and morally righteous in my racially and socially homogeneous New England town.

How do academics know what justice means? You need to ask. And sometimes, you need to experience injustice. This is probably my main takeaway from a few decades of researching state crime. I come to this from my own lived experience, as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. I know this has always fueled me and my work. My father's parents were Jewish refugees from Budapest, and my mother's parents were Jewish refugees from Vienna. While this meant that we had excellent cake growing up, it also meant that there were many absences, silences and griefs. What to do when graves exist on the other side of the world, or there are no graves, just names of those taken. When close family members are murdered. When they experience isolation and discrimination in their new country. This is not unique to me or my family, or the Jewish community. But I do know that it is the reason I do what I do. I also know that because the state crime of the Holocaust has been acknowledged, and made visible, this makes a difference. There are many state crimes, past and ongoing, which have not been. Like many people, justice, and injustice, has always had an immediacy to me. How justice can be understood, and achieved, and its different meanings and shapes, is something I carry with me, and that shapes and is central to my research and work practices.

I grew up bordering the bush of Garigal country of the Eora Nation in Sydney. I now live and work on Wurundjeri land in Naarm/ Melbourne, and did my PhD on Nunnawor land in Canberra. The importance of the land on which I grew up, and the land I live and work on now, have become more evident to me in recent years. Growing up though, and through much of my earlier academic life, it was the land of East- Central Europe, that land my family had been forced to leave, and that was and continues to be a site of injustice, that was my centre. This is starting to shift.

A great swathe of the rapidly expanding fields of critical animal geographies and vegan geographies (Hodge et al, 2022) are driven by a desire to better articulate, conceptualize and respond to a range of complex themes and questions rooted in multispecies justice (MSJ). In contrast, when considering broader (inter)disciplinary ‘critical’ geographies narratives of social justice, the appeal for multispecies accounts of justice to come to the fore is still seen to be a deeply contentious and ‘radical’ or extreme position to take. Yet, if there is one thing that the ongoing crises and injustice evident within our world(s) might teach us – from climate catastrophe, species extinction and zoonotic diseases, to the normalized (racist, casteist, colonial, classist, capitalist) geographies of the meat, egg and dairy industries – it is that anthropocentric narratives of justice ‘for us’ are not fit for purpose. In this sense we stand in complete agreement with Celermajer et al's arguments as to why a MSJ politics is so important now, more so than ever:

While acknowledging and welcoming a multispecies praxes that is diverse, contingent and ephemeral in nature, this chapter considers what ‘justice for all’ means in the context of our experiences across a variety of settings and roles: as ‘scholars’, as ‘activists’, as ‘parents’ and so on. One of the common threads that link these experiences together is the question of ‘How can we more justly share [and help shape] space?’

Justice refers to a broad concern with fairness, equity, equality and respect. Just from the daily news, it is readily apparent how questions of justice or, in fact, the more obvious experiences of injustice shape our everyday lives. From global trade to our own personal consumption; living or dying through war and peace; access to education; relations in the workplace or home; how we experience life through a spectrum of identities; or the more-than- human entanglements that contextualize our environments, we need to conceptualize and analyse the intersections between spaces and practices of justice in order to formulate innovative and grounded interventions. The Spaces and Practices of Justice book series aims to do so through cutting across scales to explore power, relations and society from the local through to international levels, recognizing that space is fundamental to understanding how (in)justice is relationally produced in, and through, different temporal and geographical contexts. It is also always practised, and a conceptual focus on these ‘doings and sayings’ (Shove, 2014) brings a sense of the everydayness of (in)justice but also allows for analysis of the broader contexts, logics and structures within which such experiences and relations are embedded (Jaeger- Erben and Offenberger, 2014; Herman, 2018).

‘Perspectives from the top’ is inferred as a double, or perhaps even a triple, entendre. Questions of justice in my research (to date) focus on the international politics of the Arctic and the political processes that shape the spatial and ideational structures and, in turn, how these structures influence the international politics of and in this space. To begin the contextualization of the Arctic from the top, we can begin with the placement of the region in most cartographies, both worldly and otherworldly, at the top of planet earth. Second, the Arctic features at the top – or at least the start – of many global processes; it is the weather kitchen of the world, the seeds of the food web where phytoplankton and sea algae begin the nutrient chain that sustains top predators, and even as a laboratory for norms of governance or as a frontier for the just transition. Finally, it is a commentary on the top-down character of international politics where decisions on the distribution of harms or resources, access to procedures, decision- making and the recognition of legitimate inclusion are often ultimately decided through hierarchies of power.

Conversations of justice and injustice do not come easily to discussions of International Relations theory, although they do exist within some circles, especially within discussions of global governance. While Rawls suggested that ‘justice is the first virtue of international institutions’ (1999: 3), this virtue does not extend to the international system as a socially constructed institution that exists only in principle. Justice appears so infrequently within the discipline, it has even been suggested that ‘International Relations is insensitive to the question of justice’ (Ray, 1999: 1368). Ethics, liberal values and their focus on norm- shaping interactions that create semblances of order appear more frequently than the emphasis on justice and the consequences on structures and political processes. However, within political geography – which focuses more clearly on the relationship between the people and place, there is more evaluation of geographies of injustice, such as those evident in the environmental justice discourse or, as emerges in the work of Dikec, in looking at ‘the processes that produce space, and, at the same time, the implications of these produced spaces on the dynamic processes of social, economic, and political relations’ (2001: 1793).