Teaching Healing Justice

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: Franciscan B

Floor: Ballroom Level

Healing justice is a framework focused on responses to collective and personal experiences of intergenerational trauma, violence, and oppression. While healing and wholeness have been the focus of several Indigenous legal and social systems for thousands of years, a recent healing justice movement has emerged from the work of radical activists in the U.S. South. It has since been embraced by others around the world fighting for decarceration and the dismantling of systems of violence and oppression. Healing justice is a framework that is grounded in a radical vision of hope and one that privileges equity and sustainability. By bringing it into our classrooms, our aim is to connect law students to the understandings and well-being practices that are being recovered and recognized as essential for the survival of progressive movements for social change. The framework has helped students to shift their understanding of trauma and harm from one that is personalized, inflicted primarily by private actors, to one that is more relational, collectivized, and historically-informed, caused by both private and state actors. It has been critical in pushing students to identify alternative ways of thinking about addressing harm, centering processes grounded in community that do not involve the state. In this session, panelists–which include clinical law professors, a movement lawyer with trauma expertise, and a social worker and restorative justice practitioner–will discuss experiences with incorporating healing justice and related frameworks, e.g., transformative or restorative justice, into their training of law students. Our panel reaches across disciplines, helping students understand social justice work as requiring attention not only to the mind, but to the body and spirit. We will discuss how healing justice drives our lawyering work, allowing students and clients to feel more safely tapped in and connected to rather than depleted by the work.