Opportunities for Collective Action: Reorienting Our Justice Signposts Toward Restoration, Reclamation, And Reparation

• In Event: Research as Restorative Practice: Reparative and Recognitive Approaches to Critical Participatory Inquiry

Abstract

In this co-learning session, presenters and attendees will share their thoughts and experiences as they review the axiologically-actuated conceptual and methodological framework that foregrounds healing in/through research: restorative validity. In using the critically reflexive questions within the restorative validity agenda as a forum for discussion, attendees will have the opportunity to collectively convene and commune on where we would like the field of research to go. To facilitate this interactive discussion, the Chair and Discussant will draw on the theories and practices within the first three papers and model democratic, participatory practices to explore to engage attendees in dialogue as they explore how their individual and collective praxes can follow a more restorative and healing agenda.

Through the collective actions within the critical participatory inquiry collectives demonstrated in each paper, we invite attendees to discuss how they would like to move their own justice signposts (House, 1980; Hopson, 2014) in ways founded in restoration and healing, which include: (1) moving beyond punitive/carceral logics and utilitarianism by exploring how inquiry seeks to understand the strength and health (i.e., validity) behind our theory and practice; (2) understanding how research considers redistributive and restorative justice, by repairing past injustices and reimagining new futures alongside the communities with whom we partner; and (3) providing researchers with the opportunities to restore and reclaim their own cultures, histories, and identities.

Through discussion, we see an opportunity to create theories and practices rooted in restorative and reparative worldviews. As done through restorative (Zehr, 2015) and reparative justice (Moffett, 2023; Verdeja, 2008; Walker, 2015), we invite attendees to outline (1) harms and needs, (2) obligations, and (3) engagement related to research– as well as what may work in their contexts, and how to make things right if harms have been done. By presenting the restorative validity agenda and these reflexive questions – which seek to foreground the importance of recognition, repair, and restoration in methodological theory and practice – we aim to provide a space where attendees can learn and share experiences of how research can amplify and emancipate; in turn, further serving as a community of care.

In a sense, this not only becomes a way to reorient individual and collective reimagining toward healing and restoration in/through research; it requires restoring validity for the benefit and health of all. By critically reflecting on practice and imagining collective actions, participants in this roundtable can create a movement: One that talks back to typically unjust views of validity that may wound communities, researchers, funders, and practitioners. A movement that sees validity as, first and foremost, a question of working towards relationships, justice, and liberation that become stronger and healthier because of our research.

This session ends the symposium with a call to action: That researchers, funders, and practitioners create forms of inquiry that seek to heal and restore, rather than simply prove a point.

Authors

• Giovanni P. Dazzo, University of Georgia

• Meagan Call-Cummings, Johns Hopkins University

• Barbara Dennis, Indiana University