Reparations: theorising just futures of education

ABSTRACT

This conceptual paper examines reparations as a vital yet under-researched orientation to justice in education. The idea of reparations requires us to understand the interconnections between past, present and future in both the formation of injustice and its repair. It implies that until injustices are actively addressed they can endure in social institutions – like education – which also shape lives-to-come. The paper explores material, epistemic, and pedagogic approaches to reparations in education. It argues that attention to reparations can upturn conventional scholarly and political approaches which frame education either as a force of social reproduction or as a track to upward social mobility. Instead, models of reparative justice ask: what sorts of futures of education can emerge from taking seriously the righting of past and present educational wrongs? Injustice is not an inevitability in reparative futures of education: these are new, if challenging, horizons of theory and practice for the field.

KEYWORDS:

• Reparative justice
• structural injustice
• racism
• coloniality
• futures
• repair

Introduction

Responding to persisting inequalities in education systems across the world, UNESCO’s (2021) International Commission on the Futures of Education recently declared: ‘we need a new social contract for education that can repair injustices while transforming the future’. Of course, this is not the first time that an appeal to recast the civic promise for education has been made, whether by an international agency or within national political discourse (see, for example, Guterres, 2020; Myers, Sriprakash, & Sutoris, 2021). However, such perennially stated ‘new’ social contracts seem to inevitably run into trouble as not only are their specificities not easily filled in but also their ideals are far from universally agreed (Mills, 2014a). Nevertheless, UNESCO’s invocation of repair suggests a fruitful line of inquiry for studies in the cultural politics of education, one that has had much less scholarly attention than we may think: the importance of attending to past and present injustices of education in configuring its possible futures.

The field of education has long been grappling with the persisting problems of school systems across the world. A significant body of research has shown, for example, how the marketisation of schooling as well as widespread resource constraints in public education have produced systemic inequalities which disproportionately impact the most disadvantaged children (Ball, Bowe, & Gewirtz, 1996; Granoulhac, 2017; Ortiz & Cummins, 2013; Reimers, 1994; Sattin-Bajaj & Roda, 2020; Verger, Lubienski, & Steiner-Khamsi, 2016). Similarly, long-standing inquiries into the ways schools are structured around racial, classed, gendered and ableist interests have shown how curriculum, pedagogy and institutional arrangements operate as powerful forces of social reproduction (Annamma, 2017; Apple, 2012/1982; Arnot, 2002; Leonardo, 2009; Reay, 2017). While morally-neutral terms such as ‘disparities’ or ‘gaps’ are often used to describe inequalities in education, it is clear from critical scholarship across the field that these inequalities are, in fact, injustices. Indeed, as Gloria Ladson-Billings (2006) powerfully argued over a decade ago, educational achievement ‘gaps’ between different demographics of students are produced not through ‘natural’ variations in ability or aspiration but through the structurally unjust features of schooling and society. Writing specifically on structural racism in the US context, Ladson-Billings argued that disparities in school achievement for disadvantaged Black and ethnic minority students should therefore be cast not as ‘gaps’ but as ‘education debts’.

What is highlighted by Ladson-Billings, along with other scholars who have taken this line of thinking, is that the existence and perpetuation of structural injustice in education raises a kind of moral debt (Rudolph, 2019; Vavrus, 2017). As this article argues, it follows, then, that reparations offer vital ways of addressing the moral debts of educational injustice. The idea of reparative justice can be brought to a central question of intergenerational justice – what do we ‘owe’ tomorrow’s children – allowing us to radically revision educational futures (see, for example, the reparative model of intergenerational justice proposed by Almassi, 2017, to address environmental injustice). In the field of education, such an approach leads to the question: given education’s many past and present injustices, what forms of reparative redress are needed to make future systems of schooling just? This is what we might explore as ‘reparative futures’ of education (Sriprakash, Nally, Myers, & Pinto, 2020). It is a question that requires us to reimagine just futures for education, departing from common assumptive frameworks that position education either as a force of social reproduction or as a track to upward social mobility.

This article surveys some of the conceptual and political affordances of reparations in education. Reparations compel us to consider the interconnections between past, present and future in both the formation of injustice and its repair. Associated more commonly with addressing the atrocities of state violence (colonialism, conflict, slavery, etc.), the lens of reparation in education urges recognition of the afterlives of such violence (the systematising of racial and class dispossession through schooling, for example) and how some children’s lives are rendered ‘expendable’ by a state’s de facto (if not de jure) abrogation of responsibility to provide equitable education for all. The temporal politics here is that reparative frameworks recognise that until injustices are actively addressed they can endure in social institutions – such as education – which also shape lives-to-come. However, this is not to be read-off as either a temporal or social determinism. While reparation might be seen as ‘backwards looking’ in its attention to past and present injustice, it can also be understood as a reconstructive ‘future-facing’ agenda (Táíwò, 2022).

Indeed, being action-oriented, a reparative politics recognises the potential for transformation of existing systems, even if that involves dismantling or abolishing norms, practices or institutions, or in the words of Machado de Oliveira (2021), ‘hospicing’ the harmful ways of education under colonial-modernity. There is a growing body of scholarship in the social sciences and humanities that is grappling with the reconstructive potential of reparative frameworks (Bhabha, Matache, & Elkins, 2021; Bhambra, 2021; Hall, 2018; Inwood, Brand, Quinn, & A, 2021; Scott, 2017; Táíwò, 2022). Much of this work offers a counter to political liberalism’s ‘chronic injustice’: its ignorance of past and present injustice owing to its attachment to ‘ideal theory’. Liberalism’s idealised assumptions of ‘progress’ or ‘development’, for example, elides actually existing social conditions of structural injustice (Mills, 2014b). One only has to look at the histories of colonialism to see how racial thinking and its dehumanising consequences (slavery, occupation, dispossession) have been comfortably encompassed within, rather than challenged by, liberal ideals of rights, progress and freedom (Bell, 2016; Ince, 2018; Mehta, 1999; Mills, 2017; Mishra, 2020). To date, however, such critiques in political theory have not dealt much with the institution of education – despite education being frequently invoked in public discourse as a natural site for the instantiation of ‘rights’, ‘freedom’ and ‘progress’.

Therefore, a key motivation of this article is to stimulate greater debate on how the field of education can foster future-oriented concepts and politics for educational justice that attend squarely to our ‘non-ideal’ world, troubling the chronic injustices of liberal political response. It does so by considering different forms of reparative redress in education. Discussions primarily focus on formal systems of schooling, but in recognising that education takes many forms – including non-institutional relations and public pedagogies – it is hoped that the analysis offered here can be critically engaged with and expanded by scholars working across different sectors of education. This is also to recognise that reparations come in different forms. Take, for example, material reparations: the redistribution of educational resources or opportunities where these have been hoarded or withheld; the creation of educational systems that refuse political economies of educational exclusion; and the restitution of resources, including land and labour, that have been exploited in past and present systems of education (Gerrard, Sriprakash, & Rudolph, 2022). Reparations in education can also be pedagogic, epistemic and relational. For example, it might involve curricular interventions that can create new forms of shared understanding of past and present injustice, as well as pedagogic relationships that foster a political responsibility for its redress (Todd, 2001; Zembylas, 2017). In particular, these two educational forms of reparation shine a light on the sociality at the heart of reparative justice, one that scholars have captured through the concept of ‘repair’, as examined in the pages that follow.

The article begins with a discussion of the philosophical and historical identification of structural injustices in education in order to explore how we might understand the possible bases of reparative redress. This requires us to consider simultaneously two types of wrong: injustices in schooling, and the wrong of failing to rectify these injustices for future models of education (Dumitru, 2019). The article then turns to examine material, epistemic, pedagogic and relational modes of reparative redress in education – identifying their affordances for making just futures of education. The article concludes by reflecting on the significance of the reconstructive potential of reparative justice for education research and policy. Despite UNESCO’s call for a new social contract, the political investment in repair and reparative redress in education remains elusive. The maintenance of such injustice is not, however, an inevitability for reparative futures of education; the future is open, its repair an ongoing politics.

Structural injustice, reparations and education

To examine reparations in education, we first need to understand the bases of redress; that is, education’s injustices. Positional differences in society are not an outcome of bad luck, nor are they produced by ‘mental attitudes, free-floating discourses and interpersonal psychology’ (Dahl, Stoltz, & Willig, 2004). Rather, positional differences are the result of institutional systems that put certain groups of people under threat of domination or oppression. This is what philosopher Iris Marion Young calls structural injustice: a moral wrong that occurs as a consequence of social, political and economic processes and one which is a feature of the institutional arrangements and social norms that surround us (Young, 2011). Therefore, and as will be familiar to the critical sociologist, problems that individuals may face – such as homelessness, forced displacement, racism, sexism, or labour exploitation – need to be understood as structurally generated injustices (McKeown, 2021b).

In education, this perspective draws our attention to how the structural arrangements of school systems deprive or constrain opportunities for some groups while expand and accumulate opportunities for others (Gewirtz, 2006; Young, 2006). Structural injustices in education (or what this article calls ‘educational injustices’, for short) alert us to the problem of unfair resource distribution in school systems; the material conditions and political economies of education that put groups of children under the systemic threat of educational deprivation. It also requires us to understand education’s recognitional and representational problems: how hierarchies of human value (e.g. along lines of race, class, gender, etc.) are normalised within schools; how some groups’ claims to education are heard and others are not given equal standing (Fraser, 1995; Keddie, 2012; Lodge & Lynch, 2002; Novelli, Lopes Cardozo, & Smith, 2019). As sociologists of education have long argued, the arrangements of schools systems have been both an outcome of structural injustice and a mechanism for perpetuating it. And of course, educational injustices are experienced differently by different groups; contingent meanings of injustice create challenges for its collective recognition and therefore for its processes of repair.

A structural account of injustice in education remains important not least because it is the very thing that is overlooked in conventional policy discourse in education. Gaps in school attainment or outcome are often attributed to student motivation, teacher expectations, or ‘cultural’ or behavioural attributes of groups (Chowdry, Crawford, & Goodman, 2011; Marsh & Martin, 2011; Strand, 2012; Yeager et al., 2019). While the investment in individual agency that underpins such research is not dismissed within reparative frameworks, models of reparative justice maintain that we cannot explain disparities in the outcomes of schooling without attending fully to the constitutive mechanisms of injustice in education systems. Doing so legitimises ‘thin’ policy responses: constructing disadvantaged groups in deficit terms (at-risk, underperforming, culturally deprived, etc.); targeting those students through piece-meal interventions; leaving in place the structural injustices of education that produce unequal opportunities, practices, and outcomes. Moreover, not attending to the structural features of schooling creates its own injustice: it misrecognises and normalises disparities between groups as variations in ability or aspiration, denying the effects of structural forces like racism and class dispossession. As a case in point, the UK government recently drew on selected education research to claim that structural racism did not exist in schools, attempting to foreclose policy futures that recognise the very conditions of injustice in school systems (Tikly, 2022).

In contrast, the lens of reparations not only asks us to actively recognise forms of injustice, it also asks what such injustice requires of us: how we should address it. This is an action-oriented question. And it is one that diverges from the central focus of moral philosophy which has instead been asking who is to blame for structural injustice (Goodin & Barry, 2021; Lu, 2011; Reiman, 2012). For example, philosophers have explored the difficulties of attributing liability for wrongs, particularly when wrongs are cumulative and not easily pinned to the actions of individuals. This is certainly a difficulty in education, for example, if we consider the systematising of injustices in school access and opportunities over generations by successive state and non-state actors. Collective, political responsibility offers an alternative perspective; however, this also raises questions about the burden placed on oppressed groups to organise against structural injustice and the assumption that advantaged groups will respond to moral suasion (Hayward, 2017). For example, research on school choice reveals the need for political responsibility to be structural and systemic, rather than tied only to individual actions. Studies of middle-class parents ‘going against the grain’ of school choice policies in England (which might be interpreted as a political-moral act against the injustice of such policies) found that parents are doing so less for ‘communitarian commitments’ and more for instrumental, self-advantaging reasons (James et al., 2010; Reay, Crozier, & James, 2011).

Across much of the philosophical work on structural injustice, reparative redress has either not figured or been actively argued against, particularly for being ‘backward looking’. Alasia Nuti (2019) convincingly attributes that line of thinking within philosophy to an insufficient understanding of history in its accounts of injustice (see also McKeown, 2021a). Indeed, looking to other disciplinary fields, including education, we know that contemporary structural injustice is history’s present. The ‘afterlives’ of historical injustice shape interests and action within today’s institutions; systems of deprivation and advantage can be inherited as history traces across generations; historical structures of injustice are an ‘enduring’ formation, even if they now work in different ways (Hartman, 2007; Rudolph, 2016; Stoler, McGranahan, & Perdue, 2007). Indeed, US critical race scholar Garrett Albert Duncan (2005) noted how education policy and research are saturated by ‘allochronic discourses’; the denial of coevalness which positions Black children as ‘behind’ or ‘lacking’ and, in doing so, which overlooks the historical structures of racial oppression that produce education deprivations. In other words, an ahistorical understanding of what education is and how it acts upon groups gives way to a temporal and social determinism. And, as Sophie Rudolph (2016) argues in her analysis of structural injustices and Indigenous education policy in Australia, the past is not ‘over’ nor is history ‘a singular presence’. Importantly, she cautions against a restorative gloss that relegates history to ‘an explanatory role about the past that consequently produces the present as a fresh slate’ (p. 447).

An historical-structural approach to both injustice and its redress is therefore crucial for theorising just futures of education. Education’s present cannot be cleaved from its past, nor from its possible futures.

Reparative futures of education

Given the structural injustices of education, past and present, what are our moral obligations to the education of future generations of children? Education is repeatedly framed in policy and public discourse as preparation for a prefigured future, usually in relation to becoming workers/citizens (Facer, 2021). However, a political/policy/research response that is oriented towards a reparative future of education not only troubles this kind of prefiguring of the future but also recognises the importance of addressing and repairing intergenerational ethical failure. Such a response, if taking a systemic approach, would not necessarily or solely involve juridical steps to individual reparation (e.g. the resolution of individual cases of harm via proportional compensation). Instead, following the work of critical theorists and transitional justice scholars, reparative futures of education would approach reparations as a broader political agenda for collective justice (Aslam, 2022; de Greiff, 2006; Rabaka, 2017). This would allow for exploration of reparations along multiple interactive dimensions across education systems – material, symbolic, pedagogic, relational and epistemic, for example. But also, importantly, it would underscore the forward-looking, reconstructive, significance of reparative models of justice in education at a systemic level: it proceeds with an assumption that our ideas, institutions and practices of education can be transformed through an ongoing politics that takes seriously the repair of educational injustices for future generations. The following sections briefly point to possible directions for this politics, suggesting that reparative futures of education would need to attend to each and their co-constitutive interactions.

Material reparations

In its most general form, a programme of reparations aims to create justice for those who have been directly harmed, but the historical-structural nature of educational injustice complicates this. Should material reparations be directed to past children; today’s adults who have been oppressed through systemic educational deprivation? Arguably, reparations to individuals for prior educational harms do not address harms in present and future systems of schooling. A reparative future of education might, therefore, seeks to work with the moral debts of past and present injustices to consider material reparations at a systemic level; that is, to reconstruct education’s futures to ensure nonrecurrence of such educational injustice.

Of course material redress in education systems would take shape differently, contingent on the specific historical-structural forms of educational injustice in different contexts. To take just one example: as activists and scholars of anti-Roma racism have shown, the active histories of educational segregation levied upon Roma people across Europe have not only remained unaddressed, but continue to be perpetuated through contemporary forms of educational exclusion and racial segregation (Trehan & Matache, 2021). What kinds of redistributive measures or systemic restructuring might ensure the nonrecurrence of such educational injustice for Roma children tomorrow? What political conversations and new forms of recognition and solidarity might this demand? What would education policy and research look like if it faced fully into such a challenge? We can ask similar questions of the many forms of structural injustice in education across the world. This would mark a departure from ‘compensatory’ education, a common policy response that constructs the problem to be with particular groups of students and therefore undertakes a project of ‘uplift’ (Beatty, 2012; Power, 2018). Rather, in recognising the problem to be structural injustice, material reparations would involve the transformation of the very political-economic systems that create and sustain injustices in education. To be sure, the scale being suggested here is immense – undoing what Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (2022) has explored as the ‘global racial empire’ and its forces of racial capitalism. But this is not to say that action oriented towards reparative justice is impossible; indeed, it is already being carried out in many different ways. Take, for example, the Movement For Black Lives (M4BL) in the US and their policy platform ‘Reparations Now’ which includes a ‘toolkit’ for reparations – a clear-sighted investment in collective agency, action, and intervention for reparative justice (M4BL, 2019).

A focus on material redress requires us to also understand that education systems have been themselves built upon stolen land and labour (Gerrard et al., 2022). While less has been written on this relating to the school education sector, there is growing attention to the ways in which universities, particularly in colonial metropoles and settler colonies, have been built from the wealth extracted from the dispossession of Indigenous people and the enslavement of people through colonial-capitalism, not least through the specific histories of transatlantic slavery (Mullen, 2021; Stein, 2020). In the contemporary operation of universities, these systems of racial domination not only remain materially undisturbed, they are also recalibrated and take up new forms (Bunda, Zipin, & Brennan, 2012; Dancy, Edwards, & Earl Davis, 2018). Similar attention to the historical entanglements of school systems with colonialism, the active reworkings of these histories today, and the material investments institutions and systems have in maintaining their exploitative structures, is arguably long overdue. We are thus far from seeing the kind of systemic, material redress that is required to attend fully to the ‘thick presents’ of history (Sandford, 2019). Reparative futures of education would seek to create new political economies for education which refuse to carry into tomorrow the logics of dehumanisation and exploitation that have been at the foundation of the institutionalisation of education.

Epistemic reparations

Education is often thought of as the making and giving of knowledge. But it is also important to recognise that education is bound up with ongoing histories of violence and the persisting legitimisation of structural injustice. The knowledge-politics of educational projects – that which is learned through formal and hidden curricula in and beyond institutions – have bolstered racial hierarchies and racial thinking across the world (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018; Rudolph, Sriprakash, & Gerrard, 2018). Epistemic relations – how we are taught to think about ourselves and others, which histories, languages, perspectives we are taught to value and which we are permitted to ignore or dismiss – have profound material effects. The creation of such epistemic hierarchies stretches globally, as de Sousa Santos’ (2014) work on ‘epistemicide’ – or the devaluing, silencing or annihilation of knowledge – has shown. It is useful to consider how such epistemic hierarchies are structural. Charles Mills (2007) powerfully illustrates this through the idea that ignorance, specifically white ignorance, entails a ‘cognitive economy’ that is created and sustained to bolster the political economy of racial domination – namely the structural injustices of the global system of white supremacy. Through this cognitive economy, racial categories and orderings are made and remade. That is, claims to racial domination, expulsion, dispossession – and foundationally, the occupation of land and denial of Indigenous sovereignty – are rendered intelligible and perpetuated into the future (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; see also Sriprakash, Rudolph, & Gerrard, 2022). Here we see how the moral wrong of epistemic injustice makes and destroys worlds.

Anticolonial thinkers and activists have long called for interventions in such epistemic politics – to disrupt the forces which ‘colonise the mind’ (Fanon, 1969/1961; wa Thiong’o, 1986). More recently we have seen growing movements to ‘decolonise education’, seeking to address the coloniality and racial erasures within school and university curricula, including within the formations of academic disciplines. Given the perhaps predictable institutional co-option of the intentions of such movements (Shain, Yıldız, Poku, & Gokay, 2021), the lens of reparations can offer an important rearticulation of the justice that is at stake. It calls upon us to recognise that epistemic injustices are produced by structural injustices, past and present. People’s humanity and histories have been epistemically erased, distorted or denied by structural systems of racial, classed, gendered, ableist, and other forms of domination. It also requires us to understand that the failure to attend to such epistemic injustices will sustain structural injustices into the future with very real consequences for individuals, groups, and societies. Following from its recognition of the structural character of epistemic injustice, the lens of reparation centres action: what needs to be done to right epistemic wrongs. This is in contradistinction to the empty statements and slogans now commonly used by institutions who have sought to co-opt decolonising education movements and render powerless their potential for active reconstruction.

There are of course numerous educational projects that are seeking to address persistent structural injustices by creating new epistemic relations – decolonising the curriculum, pro-Black teaching, or both-ways learning, to name just a few (Camangian, 2021; Ober, 2009). It is perhaps not a surprise that many examples of such action are led by communities, activists and collectives who are operating outside of formal schooling systems. They offer models for epistemic justice which carry the potential to open up new futures for institutionalised forms of education. Take, for example, the National Indigenous Youth Education Coalition (NIYEC) in Australia, whose #LearnOurTruth campaign calls on schools and educators to ‘take the pledge to teach First Nations histories in school’ (NIYEC, n.d.). NIYEC’s vision is explicitly intergenerational; recognising the way in which settler colonial education has been used to erase Indigenous history, culture and language, it seeks to build ‘an equitable educational ecosystem’ for future generations. Though the language of reparations is not always taken up by education activists or organisations working in this vein, nor should it be imposed, such educational projects might be imagined as forms of epistemic reparation. They foster processes of listening, learning, thinking, remembering, and archiving, expanding our guides and sources and approaches for social and historical understanding (Keynes, 2019; Sriprakash et al., 2020). Processes of epistemic redress in education would be oriented towards interrogating past and present epistemic injustices, refusing to carry forward their erasures, denials and distortions, precisely by attending to them through educational systems, institutions and practices. Education is, after all, an epistemic project. Epistemic reparations, then, are central to just futures of education.

Reparative pedagogies and relation of repair

At the heart of reparative redress is what could be arguably conceived as the very essence of education itself: the fostering of dialogue, the creation of meaning and understanding, and the imagination of new social possibilities. As Janna Thompson (2001) observes, the justification for reparation is based not on direct ‘causal’ relationships but rather on shared ‘meanings’ of what injustice and its repair entails. What reparations look like in education is, therefore, also a question about what role education can take in relationships of repair.

Repair does not assume there is a prior good state that is to be ‘recovered’. It also does not assume that things can and should be ‘fixed’: some arrangements are ‘beyond repair’ and therefore their death must be announced (Machado de Oliveira, 2021). Absolution or reconciliation is neither an aim nor a precondition of redress – as political struggles for reparative justice have shown (Mamdani, 2002; Simon, 2005; Stanton, 2011). Instead, the repair of injustice can be thought of as a praxis through which new norms, relations and institutions can be made; creating with others an expanded political imagination (Aslam, 2022). Ali Aslam reflects on the repair praxis of abolitionist political organising, and quotes Angela Davis to suggest that repair generates ‘new ideas, new issues, and new terrains on which we engage in the quest for freedom’ (Davis, 2016; cited in Aslam, 2022). In this sense, it is a process of ‘making ready’ for what justice in education could be (Aslam, 2022).

Repair politics are relational, affective processes. How we make sense of the world, our responsibility to others, and our concepts of justice are therefore pedagogic questions that are likely to be familiar to critical educators. As Michalinos Zembylas (2017) suggests, reparative pedagogies are those which ‘attempt to address wound, injury and suffering within a frame that takes into consideration histories of violence, oppression and social injustice, without falling into the trap of sentimentality’ (p. 24). Of course, being relational, reparative pedagogies would take different forms and be open to contestation, revision, and shifting contexts and meanings. Its openness is arguably vital to creating new solidarities and political imaginations; to the process of ‘making ready’. For example, Sharon Todd (2001) has explored the tensions of guilt and responsibility in pedagogic encounters dealing with traumatic histories of injustice. Rather than dismissing the feeling of guilt as petty and as not leading to moral action, Todd explores such affective responses within pedagogic interactions as ‘symptoms of emotional struggle to learn across differences’ (p. 363). It is precisely this capacity of pedagogy to open up new relations, understandings, and moral orientations that signal its reparative possibilities.

This is reflected in recent work by Carla Rice and colleagues (2022) who explore how dismantling the cognitive economies of ignorance (specifically, settler ignorance, in their analysis of educational relationships in Canada) involves much more than ‘correcting faulty thinking’: knowledge and ignorance, they argue, is ‘tethered to emotion’ (p. 16). To bring the lens of reparation to their analysis, reparative pedagogies might ‘engage with and unsettle white settlers’ emotional attachments to dominant narratives of Canada and to their own kinship stories of origins, and call into question their assumed right to material benefits accrued from colonization’ (p. 16), precisely because such affective reckonings offer openings to revise existing and future relationships to injustice. Of course, reparative pedagogies can and do take many different forms. Julia Paulson (Forthcoming, Spring 2023) has fruitfully explored some of these by encouraging an understanding of repair not as prescriptive, bounded or ‘complete’, but instead as open and contingent relations. She describes ‘dignity, truth-telling, multiplicity, responsibility and creativity’ as possible aspects of reparative pedagogies, offering reflections on each in practice. This attention to practice and process is also echoed in the work by Burgess, Bishop, and Lowe (2022) who explore how a project of Indigenous-led cultural mentoring of non-Indigenous educators in Australia involved relations of respect, reciprocity, and collaboration to intentionally create a learning space that centred Indigenous sovereignty, futurity, self-determination, and Country-centred relationality. This, as the authors explore through the work of Nikki Moodie (2018), is an expression too of ‘reparative activism’: the impossibility of disinterested pedagogic relations; the acknowledgment that Indigenous pedagogies like Indigenous research is ‘an inherently political activity, influenced by and disrupting historical formations of power’ (p. 42).

Arguably, reparative pedagogies and relations of repair must be central to policy visions of just futures of education. And yet, global and national policy discourse remains preoccupied with concepts of learning which largely deny such orientations, driven instead by standardisation, commensurability, and competition (Gorur, 2014) as well as by systems of social domination (Sriprakash et al., 2022). A reparative lens, then, could offer a vital rearticulation of what the very process of education involves and the relations that are at stake. It calls upon pedagogies that ‘make ready’ just futures of education.

Concluding thoughts

This article has offered an outline of some of the political and conceptual affordances of reparative frameworks of justice in education. Across the material, epistemic, and pedagogic/relational dimensions discussed, education has been implicated in creating and perpetuating structural injustices. These injustices are education’s moral wrongs, but we must also be alive to the moral wrong of failing to address these in tomorrow’s educational systems and practices. The discussions of reparations across each dimension, though partial and necessarily broad, point to the reconstructive project of reparative futures of education. This would certainly take different forms in different settings, responding to the specificities of past and present structural injustices. The purpose of this discussion, however, has not been to offer a template of reform, but to make an argument for reparations to be developed as a political, ethical, and methodological commitment in education research and policy – vital as it is for the making of just educational futures. Reparations trouble the idea that we have to go on as we have.

Acknowledgements

This paper builds on and has been inspired by multiple collaborations and conversations. No work is undertaken alone. Particular thanks go to: Julia Paulson, Sophie Rudolph, Kevin Myers, David Nally, Jessica Gerrard, as well as the Memory, History and Reparative Futures Group, the Race, Empire and Education Research Collective, and the Norrag Senior Fellowship. Thanks also to the reviewers for their insightful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).