Reparative Futures of Education

It is almost a truism to say that school systems are structurally unjust. Understanding the mechanisms of persisting inequities in

schooling as well as their forces of social reproduction has been a long-standing focus of research in the field of education. This

project retains that central concern, but it departs from conventional approaches by interrogating the possibility of reparation in

systems of schooling. The idea of reparation 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 -

such as education - which also shape lives-to-come. REPAIR-ED begins, therefore, with the hypothesis that reparative frameworks can

create different futures of education. By integrating sociological, historical, philosophical, and participatory methods, the project will

establish a novel inquiry into the conditions and normative challenges of reparation in education. It asks: what does reparation in

school systems look like? The research explores the empirical bases of redress through the case study of systems of primary schooling

in Bristol, England. Detailed ethnographies and histories of schooling across the city's geographies of deprivation and advantage will

examine educational injustices, taking a particular focus on their racial and classed dynamics. Using narrative and dialogic

approaches, the project will investigate not only the contingent experiences of schooling among different groups, but also how

contested meanings of educational injustice can condition its collective recognition and its processes of repair. Injustice is not an

inevitability in reparative futures of education: these are new, if challenging, theoretical and methodological horizons for the field of education.