Antonio F. Maldonado Rico
Autonomous University of Madrid, España
Representations of Social Justice: empirical validation and implementation of a conceptualization of political philosophy and welfare.
Participants: Edgardo Etchezahar; Talia Gómez Yepes; Miguel Ángel Albalá Genol; Elisabet López Vázquez.
In this symposium we want to present the results of a set of works developed within the research group GICE of the UAM, within the line of Human Development for Social Justice. Four contributions developed under a common framework related to Fraser's (2008) model of Social Justice are presented and empirically contrasted around four contributions dealing with a) the development and validation of instruments designed to assess the representations of social justice and its three underlying dimensions: Redistribution, Recognition and Representation, according to Fraser's model (Etchezahar, Albalá, Gómez-Yepes and Maldonado).
b) The application of instruments designed to study the change in the social representations of social justice in teachers during their training, both at undergraduate (future teachers) and postgraduate (future secondary and high school teachers) levels (Albalá, Gómez-Yepes, Etchezahar and López-Vazquez).
c) A study on the relationships between representations of social justice and other psychosocial variables linked to influence teaching practice and personal well-being: Social Well-Being, Belief in a Just World (BSW), Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and Socio-Political Participation (Gómez-Yepes, Albalá, Etchezahar and Maldonado).
d) An ongoing study on the analysis of the relationships between formal and non-formal educational contexts for the achievement of full inclusion and social justice (López-Vazquez, Gómez-Yepes, Albalá and Maldonado).
The participants belong to the Research Group on Educational Change for Social Justice of the UAM and are professors and/or researchers from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Universidad Internacional de Valencia. The team has participated in the publication of more than a dozen articles and contributions, including 4 doctoral theses, all of them oriented to the objective of finding empirical validation of Nancy Fraser's Social Justice model, under the hypothesis of both psychometric and conceptual differentiation of its three components: Redistribution, Recognition and Representation. In addition to designing and validating instruments to assess these three dimensions, the relationships of Social Justice with other psychosocial variables with a long tradition in psychosocial studies, such as belief in the just world (BJW), social dominance, sociopolitical participation, and empathy, among others, are analyzed and studied, all of them with the purpose of conceptually framing the concept of Social Justice and its dimensions. Studies with a general population are presented, as well as specific works in the educational context and especially in relation to the conceptions of practicing teachers and teachers in training.
