Paths Towards Transformative Justice

We will seek to unpack our understandings of conflict, harm and abuse, with a view to explore various frameworks for navigating towards justice and accountability in a UK context. We will focus on engaging with writings and materials on topics such as abolition, transformative justice, community accountability, restorative justice and alternatives to carceral and prison systems for addressing harm and violence.

The course will use a reading and discussion circle format to enable participants to explore and unpack topics from an intersectional and critical lens. Reading material will be shared on Moodle, and participants will meet with the course leader and other speakers with lived experience of these issues to explore what they have read in a live session every week.

We will seek to develop a critical understanding of these frameworks and their application, particularly in relation to your specific contexts. We recognise that caste, race, gender, indigeneity, and religious identities have often been the basis of over-criminalisation of bodies. And that, in order to counter the disparate and disproportionate harm that the carceral state can inflict upon them, social movements led by those who are most marginalised have endeavoured to develop mechanisms to address that harm without resorting to the police or other violent institutions.

Through this reading and discussion group, we will explore alternatives to the carceral state as well as the relationship between social movements and the criminal justice system and the alternatives developed by these movements in imagining community rooted justice systems.

Some of the key objectives will include:
• To understand how existing ideas and systems of justice replicate patterns of harm and oppression.
• To unpack what we mean by conflict, harm and abuse in order to meaningfully explore alternative imaginations of justice and accountability.
• To engage critically with carceral politics and systems and explore together what an anti-carceral politics could look like.
• To create a co-learning space where we can support one another in finding ways to imagine alternative justice frameworks.
• To explore ways to use our learnings to critically engage with wider political and societal change in our respective areas.

There will be some material to look at before the first session. We will email you around one week prior to the course with information about accessing the course, including this material, on our online learning platform (Moodle).