Iris Marion Young Quotes (1949-2006)

“Social movements for global democracy and justice should try not only to build on and create global legal and regulatory institutions, but also to expand possibilities for transnational association and public spheres.”

“A developer has bought the central-city apartment building where Sandy, a single mother, has been living with her two children; he plans to convert it into condominiums. … She looks in the newspaper and online for apartment rental advertisements, and she is shocked at the rents for one- and two-bedroom apartments. … Sandy searches for two months, with the eviction deadline looming over her. Finally she settles for a one-bedroom apartment a forty-five-minute drive from her job. … Sandy sees no other option but to take the apartment, and then faces one final hurdle: she needs to deposit three months' rent to secure the apartment. She has used all her savings for a down payment on the car, however. So she cannot rent the apartment, and having learned that this is a typical landlord policy, she now faces the prospect of homelessness. This mundane story can be repeated with minor variations for hundreds of thousands of people in the United States. … She is largely a victim of circumstances beyond her control—the landlord’s decision to sell the apartment building, a sex-segregated labor market that makes low-wage service jobs the primary work opportunity for women without college or technical training, the "spatial mismatch" that locates those jobs far from most affordable housing, and so on. … Most people react to a situation like Sandy's with the intuition that something is wrong. But what is the wrong, and who is responsible for it? The wrong is structural injustice.”