Alice Willatt, Arathi Sriprakash, Claire Stewart-Hall
If we are to address the injustices embedded in social and educational systems, we must deepen our collective understanding and consciousness of their intertwined geographies and histories. This paper explores geographical arguments for reparative justice in education drawing on early findings from the Reparative Futures of Education (Repair-Ed) project, based in the city of Bristol in the Southwest of England. Focusing on one of Bristol’s municipal wards, we trace the formation of classed and racialized historical injustices across the intersections of place and time. We offer a spatial-reparative conceptual framework that has three interconnected dimensions, with a fourth dimension that moves us from theory to praxis. We show how spatial-reparative approaches deepen understandings of the ‘afterlives’ of historical injustice and how they play out in the present through the spatial infrastructures of the neighbourhood, wider city, and contemporary education system. We highlight the mutual affordances of spatial and reparative justice for not only deepening understandings of the basis of redress but also for activating a praxis towards the doing and making of just educational futures.