Repair as Praxis in Educational Research: Methodological Implications

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

Abstract

This paper makes the case for reparations and repair to be guiding frameworks in educational research. The attention to the entanglements between past, present and future in these frameworks has profound methodological implications. In this paper, we share methodological reflections and empirical insights from an ongoing, five year project in the city of Bristol, England, that centers reparation as a theoretical lens. The research examines past and present conditions of racial and class injustices in education, in a city long shaped by what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) calls ‘organised abandonment’, in order to explore possibilities for reparative redress. Focusing particularly on the primary (elementary) school sector, the project’s methodology is consciously action-oriented. It not only documents injustice but seeks to disrupt it too.

Guiding this work, we draw on Stuart Hall’s (2001) notion of the ‘living archive’ which recognises that the past is not ‘over’ and therefore our repositories of knowledge - or, archives - are not inert. Rather, archives ‘always stand in an active, dialogic, relation to the questions which the present puts to the past…’ (Hall, 2001, p.92). Therefore, our project develops ‘living archival’ approaches - mutable, multi-modal, participatory and politically-engaged research processes that cultivate spaces to remember, explore and discuss injustices, and foster dialogue about the possibilities of solidarity, imagination, and redress. In this paper we share empirical findings and perspectives of how we construct this living archive through our ongoing research with teachers, school leaders, children, parents, and community organisations across ten wards (districts) in the city of Bristol. Such methodological orientations, we argue, can help trace what Rothberg (2019) calls our ‘complex implication’ in injustice as well as surface the interconnectedness of past, present and future to support reparative action.

We share analysis of findings from ten interviews with head teachers of primary (elementary) education in ten city districts to retrace how spatial injustice contributes and becomes (re)assembled for the city’s children and the extent to which they are afforded their ‘rights to the city’ (Lefebvre, 1967). Focusing specifically on racial and class injustices and the city’s history of anti-blackness, the interviews focus on how these injustices play out in everyday life in schools and explore the necessary negotiations required to prevent further inequities through schooling. These complex implications are examined in concert across school districts that experience uneven access to resources and opportunities. Through this process we consider what it means to ‘make ready for repair’ in a city. Exploring the perspectives of past students, interviews and ethnographic studies of schools, helps trace the racialised and classed consequences for future children and generates opportunities to disrupt and collectively recognise structural injustices.

Authors

• Annabel Wilson, University of Oxford

• Claire Neaves, University of Oxford

• Alice Willatt, University of Oxford