On the limits of liberalism: teaching Iris Marion Young in Scotland

In this short essay, I reflect on my experience teaching Iris Marion Young in Scotland and how Justice and Politics of Difference helped both my students and me think more carefully about oppression, particularly at a time and in a context in which race, gender and sexuality took a backseat to debates about class and capitalism. Young helped me feel less alone in a discipline that works hard to obscure, deprioritise and devalue empirical and theoretical work on race, gender and sexuality. However, Young’s work illuminates not only political science’s limited understandings of oppression and inequality, it also demonstrates the limitations of her own normative position about liberal democracy’s (in)ability to realise social justice.