Nancy Fraser is currently the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science at the Graduate Faculty of New School University in New York City. A noted feminist thinker concerned with conceptions of justice, she argues that justice is a complex concept which must be understood from the standpoint of three separate yet interrelated dimensions: distribution (of resources), recognition (of the varying contributions of different groups), and representation (linguistic). In keeping with her quest to avoid reductive conceptions of issues such as justice and democratic participation, she also argues that social theorists should synthesize elements of critical theory and post-structuralism, overcoming the "false antithesis" between the two, in order to gain a fuller understanding of the social and political issues with which both approaches are concerned. However, Fraser is not advocating for a vague confusion of the two, but rather for a neo-pragmatic approach in which each school of thought is rigorously interrogated to separate its useful elements from what is not useful, or even detrimental, to a democratic analysis of societal institutions and social movements. Thus Fraser is squarely in the tradition of liberal democratic values while modifying this tradition with the more recent insights of feminist theories, critical theory, and post-structuralism. In addition to her many publications and lectures, Fraser is also the editor of Constellations, an international journal of critical and democratic theory. New School University is an institute of higher learning in New York City. ... Midtown Manhattan, looking north from the Empire State Building, 2005 New York City (officially named the City of New York) is the most populous city in the United States, and is at the center of international finance, politics, communications, music, fashion, and culture. ... Feminism is a social theory and political movement primarily informed and motivated by the experience of women. ... Justice is a concept involving the fair, moral, and impartial treatment of all persons, especially in law. ... In the humanities and social sciences, critical theory is a general term for new theoretical developments (roughly since the 1960s) in a variety of fields, informed by structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, Marxist theory, and several other areas of thought. ... Post-structuralism is a term used to describe mostly French language scholarship that emerged in the mid- to late 1960s to challenge the primacy of structuralism in the human sciences: anthropology, psychoanalysis, history, literary criticism, and philosophy. ...

Bibliography

• Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (1989)
• Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency, and Culture (co-edited with Sandra Bartky, 1992)
• Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (with Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, and Drucilla Cornwall, 1994)
• Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist" Condition (1997)
• The Radical Imagination: Between Redistribution and Recognition (2003)
• Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (co-authored with Axel Honneth, 2003)