Reparative Universities

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023

Reviews

The Reparative University provides a sorely needed argument for looking beyond DEI programs. It is positioned to address the fundamental issue of wealth inequality and structural racism rooted in our nation's founding. González Stokas provides an insightful response to the current questions in universities, legislatures, and courts, reminding us that we are living with a genocidal and willfully color-blind history. This thoughtful and necessary book joins the rising chorus of those piercing the veil to name American academia's complicity in the ongoing violence that built this nation.

— David J. Ragland, Director, Grassroots Reparations Campaign; Co-founder and Co-executive Director, Truth Telling Project

González Stokas shows how the university inherits and recreates epistemic injustice and why a managerial politics of diversity is not an adequate response. Her alternative—a reparative politics for the contemporary critical university—draws on decolonial Indigenous, Black, and Latinx contributions to contemporary critical theory while also finely distinguishing them. Reparative Universities is ambitious in its vision of a university education's capacity to disrupt and recreate social imaginaries. The author's approach is also a practical pursuit of how this translates into the implementable and the transformative.

— Penelope Deutscher, Northwestern University

An epistemic guide, an invitation to think with and think again, Reparative Universities argues, beautifully, for a 'movement into the unknown as the first undoing' of the university as a space of inequity—despite and sometimes because of 'diversity work.' This book exemplifies the 'reparative knowing' that it explores, ultimately arguing not for specific policies and procedures, but rather a radically different, imaginatively alive approach to thinking about antiracism and decoloniality in higher education.

— Monica L. Miller, Professor of English and Africana Studies, formerly Dean for Faculty Diversity and Development, Barnard College, Columbia University

A timely investigation of why diversity alone is insufficient in higher education and how universities can use reparative actions to become anti-racist institutions.

Engaging with a broad range of theories from decolonial philosophy to organizational psychology, González Stokas offers a pathway—guided by reparative activities—for institutional workers frustrated by what often feels, as Sara Ahmed describes, like "banging one's head against a brick wall." Reparative Universities offers insight into why DEI efforts have been disconnected from past injustices and why unsettling diversity and engaging meaningful repair are critical for the future of higher education.