Restorative justice: a radical commitment to social and individual healing, with Fania E. Davis
| Target audience: | General public |
| Duration: | 1 hour 30 minutes |
| Price: | 0€ |
| Location: | Auditorio |
In a world of increasingly punitive societies and solutions, which only focus on punishing offenders without considering the needs of victims, restorative justice is reimagining justice as a collective responsibility and system of reparation.
Inspired by indigenous ideas, restorative justice seeks to repair broken relationships, addressing the irregularities and finding solutions that involve all stakeholders and members of the community. When someone in the community is harmed, everyone is harmed in some way. There is never only one victim of a crime: every member of the community is harmed when a crime is committed because the bonds of unity have been damaged.
Fania E. Davis (Birmingham, Alabama) is a leading international voice at the intersection of racial and restorative justice. She is a long-time social justice activist, civil rights trial lawyer and educator with a PhD in indigenous knowledge. A writer and international speaker on restorative justice, racial justice, truth processes and indigeneity, she is also a mother, grandmother, dancer, meditator and practitioner of yoga, qigong and African spirituality.
Davis came of age in Birmingham, Alabama, during the birth of the civil rights era. Those formative years, particularly the murder of two close childhood friends in the 1963 Sunday School bombing, crystallised an enduring commitment to social transformation. In the following decades, she was active in the civil rights movements in the United States, advocating for Black liberation, women’s rights, prisoners’ rights, peace, economic justice, and the cessation of violence to racialised people and apartheid. Learning with African indigenous healers catalysed Davis’s search for healing justice and ultimately led her to found and run the Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth Foundation. She is also a co-founding board member of the National Association of Community and Restorative Justice.
Her numerous honours include the Lifetime Achievement award for excellence in restorative justice, the Black Feminist Shapeshifters’ and Waymakers’ award, the Tikkun (Repair the World) award, the Ella Jo Baker Human Rights award, and the Ebony Power 100 award. The Los Angeles Times named her a New Civil Rights Leader of the 21st Century. She was recently the recipient of a Justice Rising award from Open Society Foundations, which acknowledge and support 16 Black leaders who work for racial justice in the United States. Among Davis’s publications is The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice: Black Lives, Justice, and U.S. Social Transformation.
Moderator and commentator: Adilia de las Mercedes (Guatemala–Spain), a jurist specialising in human rights and director of the Asociación de Mujeres de Guatemala AMG.
Organisers: La Casa Encendida and the Asociación de Mujeres de Guatemala AMG.
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