Nancy Fraser

Fraser is a leading critical theorist and socialist feminist whose work over the past forty years has addressed issues of power, identity, emancipation, capital, justice, and oppression, especially in relation to the limits of liberalism. Working with the broad tradition of Foucault, Habermas, and the Frankfurt School, Fraser has focused on structural injustice, with attention to the conceptual and ideological underpinnings that sustain it. She has been extensively engaged in debate with Axel Honneth, and others, over the relative significance of a politics of recognition as opposed to a politics of redistribution, calling attention to the failure of contemporary social justice to attend adequately to economic injustice issues. Her recent focus is the critique o capitalism, which she conceives broadly, not as an economic system, but as an institutionalized social order, which harbors multiple forms of oppression and crisis tendencies.