Giving groups a proper say

Social groups of various kinds have the capacity to perform speech acts: they can speak with one voice, or rally behind a unified message. The company spokesperson says, We are proud to announce; the protest group chants its demands for Equal pay for all; the team of co-authors asserts that Recycling practices increased by 5%, and so on. In such cases the speech acts of announcing, demanding, and asserting are made in the name of the group itself, and as such are understood as representing and normatively committing the whole group, not simply the individuals involved in their production. It is the company that needs to follow through on its announcement; the protest group that needs to demonstrate entitlement to its demands; the research team that needs to justify its assertion, and so on. Moreover, just as groups of various kinds are capable of performing speech acts, so too can this capacity can be impeded: group speech can silenced or not given due consideration. For example, a protest group might be prevented from protesting through threats and intimidation, or the assertions of the research team might be dismissed out of hand, because of the ethnicity of the teams members. Such cases are apt to be described as genuine collective injusticesthey are ways in which a failure to give group speech the uptake it deserves both wrongs and harms the group. The primary goal of this project is to develop an account of the empowerment and disempowerment of group speechof what it takes for a group to speak, and how group speech can be unjustly silenced or not taken seriously. The project will offer a novel social normativist account of group speech, and will use this account to illuminate practices of group silencing and collective epistemic injusticethat is, ways in which groups efforts to perform certain speech acts can be, in certain circumstances, unjustly disabled or dismissed. A second goal of the project is to apply the social normativist framework to a real-world practice of considerable political and legal significancenamely, the practice of legally-required consultation with indigenous and traditional communities that are threatened by extractive industries and other forms of industrial development on their traditional land. This part of the project connects work on silencing and epistemic injustice with research on community consultation and consent within international environmental law. The goal is to show how, despite that fact that a right to consultation is widely recognised in international and domestic law, the speech of indigenous and traditional communities is routinely silenced or dismissed without due consideration.

The project had two main aims: one theoretical, and one applied. The theoretical aim was to develop an account of the empowerment and disempowerment of group speech - of what it takes for social groups to speak, and how group speech can be unjustly silenced or not given its due. The applied aim was to use the theoretical account to explore practices of group speech and group silencing in a the context of legally-required consultation processes between States and Indigenous and rural communities, and in this way to shed light on what genuinely meaningful consultation requires. The project was interdisciplinary in character, and made scholarly contributions both to philosophy (specifically, speech act theory and social epistemology) and legal studies (specifically, environmental human rights law). In addition, research findings from the project were shared with both policy makers (specifically, the United Nations Environmental Programme), and organisations working with communities affected by unjust consultation practices.