Restorative Justice: A Relational, Healing, and Radical Practice

Fania Davis will discuss Restorative Justice origins, principles, practices, and critical issues, with a focus on the ongoing project in Oakland, California. She will address RJ’s origins in indigenous cosmology as well as its kinship with feminist and relational theory. The talk will also explore RJ’s intersections with abolitionism, #BlackLivesMatter, and movements to end sexual violence.

Baskin Ethics Lecture with Fania Davis: Restorative Justice: A Relational, Healing, and Radical Practice 12.1.16 from IHR on Vimeo.

Event Photos: by Steve Kurtz

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About Fania: Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY) Executive Director, Fania Davis, is an African-American woman, long-time social justice activist, a restorative justice scholar and professor, and a civil rights attorney with a Ph.D. in indigenous knowledge. Coming of age in Birmingham, Alabama during the social ferment of the civil rights era, the murder of two close childhood friends in the 1963 Sunday School bombing crystallized within Fania’s passionate commitment to social transformation. For the next decades, she was active in the civil rights, Black liberation, women’s, prisoners’, peace, socialist, anti-imperialist, anti-racial violence and anti-apartheid movements. After receiving her law degree from University of California, Berkeley in 1979, Fania practiced almost 27 years as a civil rights trial lawyer. During the late 1990’s, she entered a Ph.D. program in indigenous studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and apprenticed with traditional healers around the globe, particularly in Africa. Fania has since taught Restorative Justice and Indigenous Peacemaking at graduate and undergraduate levels.  Founding Director of RJOY, Fania has also served as counsel to the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers. Honors include the Ubuntu Service to Humanity award, the Maloney award recognizing exceptional contributions in youth-based restorative justice, World Trust’s Healing Justice award. She was recently named by the Los Angeles Times as a New Civil Rights Leader of the 21st Century. Fania is also a mother, grandmother, dancer, and practitioner of yoga.

About the Peggy Downes Baskin Endowed Lecture in Ethics:

Peggy Downes Baskin, PhD is an author, university professor, photograph and philanthropist. She graduated from Vassar Magna cum laude in 1953. Thirty years later she earned a doctoral degree in politics from the Claremont Graduate school of Government. She went on to infuse her professional career at Santa Clara University and The University of California, Santa Cruz with her core interests, originating courses on The Politics of Aging, Women & Power, and Presidential Management Styles.

Peggy and her husband Jack Baskin generously endowed a humanities fund in honor of her longtime interest in ethical issues across the disciplines, the Peggy Downes Baskin Humanities Endowment for Interdisciplinary Ethics. “There are so many areas in which ethical problems arise—in journalism, politics, medicine—and the endowment emphasizes the need to address these issues in a cross-disciplinary context,” Peggy said.