Toward a Critical Restorative Justice Praxis

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Recent calls to remove police from schools present an opportunity to reimagine safety and justice in education. Restorative justice is one approach to building relationships rooted in repairing harm and engaging students, educators, and community members in the process. Yet, in practice, even restorative justice can both challenge or reproduce the social order. In this symposium, we: 1) explicate a critical restorative justice praxis, 2) empirically examine restorative justice in schools that take explicit critical restorative justice stances and those that take assimilationist stances, 3) highlight the interplay between local context and macro-level structures that shape restorative justice enactment, and 4) surface challenges and ways forward for a critical restorative justice praxis and abolition of the school-to-jail nexus.

Sub Unit

• Division L - Educational Policies and Politics / Division L - Section 7: Social Context and Structural Inequalities

Chair

• Maisha T. Winn, University of California - Davis

Papers

• Caring in the Context of Discipline Reform: A Critical Feminist Framework for Researchers and Policy Makers - Abigail J Beneke, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Moving Toward Transformation: Youth Participatory Action Research as Restorative Justice - Dani O'Brien, Northland College

• Constructions of Justice: Key Actors Speak Out on Critical Restorative Justice Implementation - Hilary Lustick, University of Massachusetts - Lowell

• Reform/Abolition Tensions in School-Based Restorative Justice - Eleanor Anderson, University of Pittsburgh

Discussant

• Thalia González, Occidental College