In recent years the debate over the role of justice-work in schools has grown increasingly tumultuous. Complicating this question even more is the lack of consensus about what the term justice means. In both educational research and popular culture, multiple conceptualizations of justice circulate simultaneously, sometimes standing in contradiction to one another. The purpose of this dissertation is to disrupt the current research on justice-oriented teacher education by exploring how newly inducted teachers who are immersed in political, ideological, and social discourses respond to various conceptions of justice they encounter. I conducted interviews using elicitation vignettes as well as monthly focus groups with a group of six first-year teachers who graduated from the same justice-oriented teacher education program. These conversations took place over the course of the 2020-2021 school year, a period that encompassed the COVID-19 pandemic, the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, the 2020 Presidential election, and numerous other events. In my analysis I draw on poststructural conceptions of discourse (Bakhtin, 1981; Foucault, 1978) to trace how discursive forces of language and power emanating from teacher education programs, school and district policies, and news and social media function in ways that enable and constrain how participants conceptualize justice in their first year of teaching. My findings suggest that the participants do not conceptualize justice in a single clear way. Instead, their talk about justice is laden with both contradictions and connections to both established theories of justice and current events. Further, while the participants seem to suggest that they aspire to enact justice-oriented teaching in particular ways, they describe powerful discourses of community backlash and the primacy of curricular pacing as limiting what seems possible in their current settings. In concluding, I explore the ways that these findings stand to complicate justice-oriented teacher education. I suggest a need to view teacher education not as an intervention that can drastically alter the practices of teachers, but rather as one discourse among many that are acting upon teachers as they seek to make sense of what justice-oriented teaching looks like in their context. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]