This major reference work serves as the definitive source on social justice for students of and experts on social justice alike. This handbook presents a comprehensive and robust conceptual treatment of social justice, covering social justice theories and definitions, movements, issues, methods and epistemologies, systems of thinking, challenges and practical possibilities. It opens up the ways that social justice is thought about and conceptualised in different disciplines, from different world views and from different geographical and cultural contexts. It takes a critical and decolonialist approach throughout by adopting a view of social justice that situates it within global power relationships from the outset. It considers global and enduring issues relating to the Sustainable Development Goals viewed through a social justice lens. Representation from both the global north and global south is evidenced throughout. This book provides the broadest and most inclusive coverage of social justice, including both theoretical and conceptual analyses of social justice itself as well as its application to a wide range of topics and issues relevant to the contemporary social world. 

Deborah H. Drake is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at The Open University, UK, where social justice is at the core of its mission. She is also co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Ethnography (2015) and co-commissioning editor of Palgrave’s Critical Criminological Perspectives book series.

Lynne Copson is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at The Open University, UK.

Daniel McCulloch is a Lecturer in Criminology and Social Policy and The Open University, UK.