Reparative Futures: exploring justice, reparations and education

Professor Noah W. Sobe, Chief of Section for Higher Education at UNESCO

We're delighted to be joined by discussant Professor Noah W. Sobe, Chief of Section for Higher Education at UNESCO headquarters in Paris and previously lead of the flagship UNESCO project Futures of Education (2019-20222). Professor Sobe will be reflecting on themes of reparative futures in education and their global significance. Their remarks will set the stage for a live discussion exploring how education can help societies reckon with historical harms; what reparative pedagogies might look like in schools, universities, and communities; how justice and reparations connect across racial, transitional, socio-ecological, and psychic domains.

Reparative Futures: Special Issue Launch
Exploring Justice, Education and World-Making Possibilities

This event launches the Futures Special Issue Reparative Futures, exploring how ideas of redress, repair and justice shape the ways we imagine and create futures. The issue brings together scholars and practitioners working across education, policy, and community practice to rethink how past-present relationships inform possibilities for transformation.

Reparative futures engage with four interlinked domains:

• Racial justice: addressing legacies of enslavement, colonialism, and racial capitalism
• Transitional justice: reckoning with state violence, conflict, and truth-telling
• Socio-ecological justice: responding to planetary crises and environmental repair
• Psychic justice: recognising embodied, affective, and intergenerational impacts of harm

Across these domains, education is central. Education shapes memory, can enable dialogue, and has the potential to open spaces for more just, inclusive, and sustainable futures.

Indicative Topics:

• How does education help us work with historical wounds, redress and repair?
• What pedagogies support collective imagining of alternative, just futures?
• How might reparative frameworks inform policy and practice globally?

This will be a generative conversation bringing together scholars, practitioners, and policymakers interested in the role of education in shaping more just and sustainable futures.

Biography

Noah W. Sobe is Chief of Section for Higher Education at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. He was formerly professor at Loyola University Chicago and led a flagship futures of education initiative at UNESCO (2019-2022). Noah is past president of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) and former co-editor of the journal European Education.

• This is an online event and registration is essential to receive the link to zoom.
• This event is free and open to the public, university staff and students .
• Please note, this event is being recorded.