Articulating aspirational justice: Social policy, capability and the lived futures of migrant women

The article introduces the concept of aspirational justice as a critical lens for analysing how social policies shape people's capability to imagine and pursue desirable futures. We conceptualise aspirational justice through three interdependent dimensions – distributive, procedural and epistemic justice – and develop a multi-layered framework for its analysis. Drawing on qualitative research on language and training policies for migrant women in Paris, we advance two main results. First, the capability-enhancing potential of social programmes must be analysed in light of institutional interdependencies. While migrants’ agency is sustained through third-sector organisations, state institutions retain distributive and regulatory powers that shape what futures can be envisioned. Second, aspirational justice cannot be reduced to institutional arrangements alone, it ultimately unfolds within individuals’ lived experience. For migrant women, institutional resources and constraints intersect with gendered care responsibilities and racialised labour-market stratification, narrowing both the range of futures they can envisage and their sense of entitlement to pursue them.