About The Workshop
SW 20 Sensory Justice and the Right to Public Space: Sensory Standards, Harm, and Structural Exclusion
Convenor: Elena Prats (Stockholm University)
Contact: elena.prats@juridicum.su.se
Workshop description
A significant portion of the population—commonly estimated at 15–20%—has a more reactive nervous system, particularly with respect to sensory stimuli such as noise, artificial light, visual motion, crowd density, and continuous digital input. This heightened sensory reactivity is not a pathology, nor an exceptional condition, but a stable human variation. Nevertheless, it remains largely invisible within legal and political theory.
Contemporary public spaces are increasingly organized according to sensory standards that presuppose high thresholds of tolerance and rapid habituation. Loud background music, constant screens, intense artificial lighting, visual saturation, and uninterrupted sensory stimulation have become normalized features of everyday public environments, including transport systems, healthcare facilities, commercial spaces, educational institutions, and sites of civic participation.
For individuals with heightened sensory reactivity, prolonged exposure to such environments is not merely uncomfortable. It can result in measurable harm, including sensory overload, chronic stress, exhaustion, and burnout. Over time, continued participation in ordinary social, civic, and institutional settings may become physically and psychologically unsustainable. As a consequence, many individuals are effectively forced into patterns of self-exclusion from public space—not as a matter of preference, but as a strategy of self-preservation.
This workshop introduces sensory justice as a normative and legal framework for understanding this phenomenon. Sensory justice addresses how dominant sensory standards function as implicit norms that regulate access to public space, determine who can remain visible and active within it, and who is gradually pushed out. Rather than treating sensory overload as an individual problem to be managed through personal adaptations—earplugs, avoidance strategies, withdrawal—the workshop frames it as a structural issue of justice.
The core question is whether public sensory standards can be considered just when they systematically harm and exclude a large and identifiable segment of the population. Sensory justice thus shifts attention from individualized coping to collective responsibility, asking who defines the sensory baseline of public life, how that baseline is legally and institutionally maintained, and why the burden of adaptation consistently falls on those who deviate from it.
The workshop is explicitly research-initiating. Its aim is not to present completed empirical or doctrinal research, but to establish a shared conceptual vocabulary and to identify key philosophical and legal questions raised by sensory exclusion that have so far remained undertheorized.
Dr. Elena Prats Stockholm University
Objectives and relevance
The workshop pursues four main objectives:
- To conceptualize sensory justice as a matter of legal and political justice grounded in population-level sensory variation, rather than individual pathology or preference.
- To analyze dominant sensory standards as implicit normative structures governing access to public space and public life.
- To examine the asymmetry between legally recognized accommodations for certain forms of difference and the near-total neglect of sensory exclusion affecting a significant minority.
- To explore the implications of sensory justice for legal concepts such as equality, participation, access to public services, and reasonable accommodation.
The topic directly engages IVR’s core concerns with normativity, justice, legal subjectivity, and the conditions of inclusion and exclusion produced by law, while opening a new field of inquiry into the sensory conditions under which public life becomes possible or impossible.
Format and structure
The workshop is designed as a 90–120 minute interactive session focused on conceptual clarification and forward-looking dialogue.
Proposed structure:
– Introductory framing by the convenor (10 minutes), outlining the problem of sensory standards and the concept of sensory justice. – Three to four short interventions (10–15 minutes each), addressing distinct dimensions of sensory justice (conceptual, legal, comparative, or critical). – Moderated collective discussion (30–40 minutes), focused on normative tensions, legal implications, and open research questions. – Concluding synthesis (5 minutes), identifying shared lines of inquiry and future research directions.
Interventions are intentionally brief and exploratory, prioritizing dialogue over the presentation of finalized results.
Participants
The workshop will be convened by Elena Prats, Stockholm University. Three to five participants working in philosophy of law, legal theory, political philosophy, or related fields will be invited. Participants will be selected to ensure conceptual diversity and international representation.
Expected outcomes
The workshop aims to produce a clear conceptual articulation of sensory justice within philosophy of law, identify core legal problems related to sensory exclusion, and lay the foundation for future collaborative research on sensory normativity and public space.
