Fifth session of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent

Reparations From Below: A Reparations Simulation Workshop
Date: Wednesday 15 April

Time: 1:00pm – 2:30pm CET

Sponsoring organizations: The Amendment Project and the Thurgood Marshall Center for Civil Rights at Howard Law School

Language: English

Description: This workshop will begin with a short lecture on Reparations from Below, utilizing participatory action research from a land restitution case in Burundi by author Theodore Mbazumutima to examine the limitations of top-down, government helmed reparations mechanisms, and explore localized, community-led reparations epistemologies. Guided by facilitators from TAP, participants will select case studies within which to devise reparations plans utilizing Action Cards to represent mechanisms like Truth Commissions, debt cancellations, or foreign asset seizure, putting them in conversation with reparations from below mechanisms that we will develop collectively. We’ll conclude with concrete reparations trajectories and expanded imaginations for repair.

Extended Description: This workshop we will introduce a framework for youth-led reparations developed by reparations scholar Sydni Scott at the University of Oxford: Reparations From Below challenges popular ideas about reparative justice understood as a sequential checklist: cessation of harm, guarantees of non-repetition, restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, and satisfaction. Instead, we explore reparations as two intercommunicating streams of action with different loci of power and agency - reparations from above and from Below - This is not a panel, this is a simulation exercise in co-production of revolutionary imagination with the goal of concretizing reparations tools and mechanisms in context. Join us to put the wisdom and lessons from the conference into concrete strategy within the reparations ecosystem

Location: Le Centre International de Conférences (CIGC) 17 rue de Varembe, Genf, CH 1211, Room 9

Lead organizer: Sydni Scott – [email protected] permission to share contact details

Co-organizers: Rute Ayalew and Alexis Rich

RSVP Link: https://forms.gle/8h6x8K5GaE4Rvc9b7