Oppression

This note is about oppression and oppression theory, especially on distributed oppression, more-than-human implications, 4E cognition, oppression in design, etc.

Definitions

Oppression is...

“[...] the vast and deep injustices some groups suffer as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions, media and cultural stereotypes, and structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms [...]”

"all oppressed people suffer some inhibition of their ability to develop and exercise their capacities and express their needs, thoughts, and feelings. In that abstract sense all oppressed people face a common condition."

Five 'faces' of oppression:

exploitation
marginalization
powerlessness
cultural imperialism
violence

Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Examples and Dimensions of Oppression

A preliminary grouping.1 2 3

Material and Spatial Oppression

Dispossession of habitat: Taking or enclosing lands, waters, nesting sites, migration corridors, and feeding grounds that communities need to live and reproduce. Example in this note: protected-area logics that displace local lifeworlds while claiming universal conservation categories.6
Forced displacement: Driving beings away from long-inhabited territories through extraction, conservation enclosure, urbanisation, militarisation, or climate disruption.6
Ecological fragmentation: Breaking connected ecologies into isolated patches, which reduces movement, gene flow, social learning, and resilience.

Epistemic and Ontological Oppression

Epistemological violence: Dismissing or overriding situated knowledges, including Indigenous ecological knowledge and embodied animal ways of sensing and learning.4 7 8
Cultural erasure: Destroying or discrediting practices, memory, language, ritual, and intergenerational teaching that sustain collective identity. Example in this note: Yellowstone as a model of historical erasure and sanitised landscape narratives.
Ontological reduction: Treating living beings as resources, data points, pests, or scenery rather than as agents with their own worlds and relations.4 5
Representational capture: Speaking for others while filtering out their own priorities, then using those representations to justify further control.9 10

Political, Institutional, and Economic Oppression

Denial of participation: Excluding affected beings and communities from decisions about land, infrastructure, policy, and design that shape their lives.12 13 14
Denial of innovation: Blocking local experimentation, adaptation, and care practices by imposing rigid categories, standards, or external management models.
Labour extraction without return: Taking work, care, ecological services, or value from communities while withholding security, recognition, and reciprocity.
Conservation dispossession: Protecting biodiversity by excluding local and Indigenous communities, producing justice harms in the name of ecological care.6 9
Commodification of identity: Turning cultures, species, landscapes, or relations into market assets for tourism, branding, offsets, or speculative finance. Example in this note: ecotourism logics that package local cultures as products.

Temporal and Developmental Oppression

Temporal oppression (slow violence): Producing long-duration harms that accumulate across years and generations, often remaining hard to see in short policy cycles.11 15
Denial of futures: Making it difficult or impossible for communities to persist, regenerate, or pass on capacities to future generations.
Capability suppression: Limiting opportunities to develop species-specific and community-specific capacities, including play, exploration, learning, sociality, and tool use.2 3
Reproductive injustice: Disrupting conditions for reproduction and care through toxicity, stress, captivity, or destruction of breeding and nursery environments.
Affective oppression: Structuring chronic fear, stress, dependency, and insecurity that narrow behaviour, agency, and wellbeing.

Infrastructural and Informational Oppression

Infrastructural domination: Designing roads, fences, platforms, supply chains, and bureaucracies that systematically privilege some lifeways while disabling others.4
Algorithmic and classification oppression: Using categories, metrics, and optimisation systems that simplify complex lives and enforce damaging interventions.9 10
Cumulative diminishment of potential: Layering small constraints that, over time, reduce adaptive range, creativity, and the ability to contribute to shared worlds.5

In Application to Nonhuman Beings

Dubeau, Mathieu. “Species-Being for Whom? The Five Faces of Interspecies Oppression.” Contemporary Political Theory 19, no. 4 (2020): 596–620. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-019-00363-7.

Gruen, Lori. “The Faces of Animal Oppression.” In Dancing with Iris: The Philosophy of Iris Marion Young, edited by Ann Ferguson and Mechthild Nagel, 161–72. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Wage Slavery

"It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm laborers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him. . . . What effective gain has the suppression of slavery brought him? . . . He is free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune. The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him. But the handicraftsman costs nothing to the rich voluptuary who employs him. . . . These men, it is said, have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence."

1767, Simon Linguet

Dispossession, Exclusion, Eviction, and Displacement

Treat dispossession, exclusion, eviction, and displacement as forms of oppression. These are not only human issues. They apply to other animals, plants, and living beings. Consider them in the context of multiple frames of justice, including environmental, ecological, and planetary justice.

Protected areas can become cosmologies that then inform actions by IUCN, NGOs, and other agents imposing one kind of order on the world.

Dispossession does not only apply to various kinds of humans but also to other animals, plants, and living beings.

The analysis/approach should be to look at concepts such as justice, parks, labour, construction, etc. from the points of view of the affected beings without prejudice, human or nonhuman. Then the concepts become arenas of negotiation and contestation or collaborative innovation rather than unifying dispositions.

Niche construction is by all life so if protected areas are constructed by humans, then they are also constructed by other life forms. The question is how to make the construction of protected areas more inclusive and participatory.

Structure the narrative from environmental to ecological to planetary justice and from one world to many worlds

Creation of rules for protected areas can be a form of the "generification" (Errington & Gewertz 2001, West& Carrier 2004).16 17 For example, what the IUCN takes an externally imagined set of categories and restructures the world to fit these categories with limited regard for national or local categories.

Whether Indigenous peoples are imagined, or project themselves as inside or outside nature, the imposition of nature/culture dichotomy has had significant material and social impacts, either by excluding humans from their land or holding them to discursive standards of noble savages that are impossible to live up to in practice.19

In such settings, natives may also become commodities, as their culture becomes part of the selling point for conservation or ecotourism.18

Case: In our practice, innovative artificial habitat structures provide opportunities to extends the care for Country practices Indigenous ranges are already interested in or working on developing. Such projects provide opportunities to support local animals, learn about the local living communities, increase capacity by linking to emerging technologies, broaden collaborative networks and provide financial support and employment opportunities for local communities through ranger programs, for example. Activities include: brainstorming workshops with design prototypes and making, sites reinterpretation, installation and monitoring, and the development of educational resources.

West, Paige, James Igoe, and Dan Brockington. “Parks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected Areas.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35, no. 2006 (2006): 251–77. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123308.

References

Aagaard, Jesper. “4E Cognition and the Dogma of Harmony.” Philosophical Psychology 34, no. 2 (2021): 165–81. https://doi.org/10/g83w9g.

Fabry, Regina E. “Self-Narration in the Oppressive Niche.” Topoi, 2024. https://doi.org/10/g83tvk.

Liao, Shen-yi, and Bryce Huebner. “Oppressive Things.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103, no. 1 (2021): 92–113. https://doi.org/10/g83w9q.

Notes

Footnotes

Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.˄
Dubeau, Mathieu. “Species-Being for Whom? The Five Faces of Interspecies Oppression.” Contemporary Political Theory 19, no. 4 (2020): 596–620. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-019-00363-7.˄
Gruen, Lori. “The Faces of Animal Oppression.” In Dancing with Iris: The Philosophy of Iris Marion Young, edited by Ann Ferguson and Mechthild Nagel, 161–72. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.˄
West, Paige, James Igoe, and Dan Brockington. “Parks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected Areas.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (2006): 251–77.˄
Liao, Shen-yi, and Bryce Huebner. “Oppressive Things.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103, no. 1 (2021): 92–113. https://doi.org/10/g83w9q.˄
Lopez, Andrew. “Nonhuman Animals and Epistemic Injustice.” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 25, no. 1 (2023): 136–63. https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v25i1.2201.˄
Gosselin, Laure, and Mathilde Gauquelin. “Rethinking Knowledge Cumulation: Foregrounding Epistemic Justice in Environmental Governance Research.” Environmental Policy and Governance, 2025. https://doi.org/10/g9rvb4.˄
Fabry, Regina E. “Self-Narration in the Oppressive Niche.” Topoi, 2024. https://doi.org/10/g83tvk.˄
Goldstein, Jenny E., Dan Brockington, Chris Sandbrook, Patrick Meyfroidt, Jonas Geldmann, Tobias Kuemmerle, Marion Pfeifer, et al. “Environmental Data Justice Is Key for Developing More Effective Area-Based Conservation Approaches.” Nature Reviews Biodiversity 2, no. 2 (2026): 116–26. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44358-025-00126-w.˄
Maliao, Ronald, and Béla Tóthmérész. “Beyond Conditional Visibility: Operationalizing Epistemic Justice in Conservation Science.” Environmental Conservation 53, no. 2 (2026): 57–61. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0376892926100381.˄
van Dijk, Jiska, Juliette Young, Marie Vandewalle, Allan Watt, and Karla Locher. “Transformative Change for Biodiversity Requires More Inclusive and Participatory Framing of Research Agendas.” Biodiversity and Conservation 32, no. 11 (2023): 3669–79. https://doi.org/10/gwkn56.˄
Roudavski, Stanislav. “The Ladder of More-than-Human Participation: A Framework for Inclusive Design.” Cultural Science 14, no. 1 (2024): 110–19. https://doi.org/10.2478/csj-2024-0015.˄
Youn, Hoyoung, and Joon Sang Baek. “Assemblage-Based Stakeholder Analysis in Design: A Conceptual Framework through the Lenses of Post-Anthropocentrism.” CoDesign 20, no. 4 (2024): 585–606. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2024.2358966.˄
Arcari, Paula. “Slow Violence Against Animals: Unseen Spectacles in Racing and at Zoos.” Geoforum 144 (2023): 103820. https://doi.org/10/g83xpc.˄
Davies, Thom. “Slow Violence and Toxic Geographies: ‘Out of Sight’ to Whom?” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 40, no. 2 (2022): 409–27. https://doi.org/10/gg3q4k.˄
Errington, Frederick, and Deborah Gewertz. “On the Generification of Culture: From Blow Fish to Melanesian.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7, no. 3 (2001): 509–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.00075.˄
West, Paige, and James G. Carrier. Ecotourism and Authenticity: Getting Away from It All? 45, no. 4 (2004): 483–98. https://doi.org/10.7916/D88W3BD4.˄
West, Paige. “Environmental Non Governmental Organizations and the Nature of Ethnographic Inquiry.” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 45, no. 2 (2001): 55–77.˄
Igoe, Jim. “Global Indigenism and Spaceship Earth: Convergence, Space, and Re-Entry Friction.” Globalizations 2, no. 3 (2005): 377–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747730500367975.˄

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