Procedural justice scholars have suggested studying different aspects of procedural justice, including recognition as the ‘processes of disrespect, insult and degradation that devalue some people and some place identities in comparison to others’ (Walker, 2009:615) or, in other words the lack of recognition about group difference in a society where some groups are privileged while others are oppressed (Schlosberg, 2003). Recognition or lack thereof, is embedded in cultural norms and in discourses that frame the ways in which problems and their solutions are conceived by both groups in power and those who are less so.
How does the embedding of misrecognition in cultural norm occur? In her research across the U.S., Pulido (2017) theorized the linkage between capitalism and race, where differential value has been reproduced in struggles over appropriation and access to land as well as labor system, and capital when, for instance, industry and manufactures create sinks, places where pollution can be disposed of, in the form of air, water and land but also racially devaluating bodies, as well as the neighborhoods where they reside. Place stigmatization arises from such institutionalized understandings of misrecognition, where “marked people in marked places become expected to live with incivilities and blamed for not looking after their environment” (Walker, 2009:627). Importantly, when disasters strike, these sites can become entangled with ongoing processes of organized abandonment in already racialized or marginal sites (Allen, 2007).