Reparative Futures of Education

• In Event: Reparative Education: The Politics and Practice of Repair

Abstract

The notion of reparation calls on us to surface the interconnections between the past, present and futures in both the formation of injustice and its repair. It takes as a starting point the idea that until we address the injustices embedded in social structures, including our education systems, they will continue to detrimentally impact the lives of future children. The task of examining what reparations of education might look like, requires us to understand the bases of redress, to deepen our collective understanding and consciousness of educational injustices. It is also a profoundly imaginative process: envisaging systems beyond these injustices, hospicing harmful practices and structures, and creating new praxes of repair in the present. Such reparative commitments to imagining otherwise have long been part of abolitionist, racial justice and anti-colonial movements (Aslam 2023; Givens 2001; Kelley 2002).

The opening paper of the symposium will set out a reparative framework that reflects on such important, ongoing histories of resistance, bringing together ideas of material reparations, epistemic repair, and reparative pedagogies for the field of education (Sriprakash 2022). Taking a structural view, material reparations would involve the transformation of the very political-economic systems that create and sustain injustices in education (Táíwò 2022). Epistemic repair would involve addressing persistent structural injustices in education by creating new epistemic relations – decolonising the curriculum, pro-Black teaching, or both-ways learning, to name just a few (Camangian, 2021; Ober, 2009). And reparative pedagogies are oriented towards fostering new relations, understandings, and moral orientations to address structural injustices (Paulson 2023).

This theoretical exploration of the material, epistemic and pedagogic dimensions of reparation offers a grounding from which to explore and connect the politics and practices of repair that are set out in the panel’s empirical and methodological papers which follow.

Author

• Arathi Sriprakash, University of Oxford