Reparative Universities

In clear, accessible, and often poetic language, González Stokas makes a significant contribution to discussions about decolonization and abolition in higher education and outlines a proposal for reparation as a path toward redressing the colonial violence of the university. Reparative Universities offers a critique of what many of us working in higher education sense: that often institutional actions made under the banner of diversity operate to reproduce the status quo rather than to interrupt or transform it.

An epistemic guide, an invitation to think with and think again, Reparative Universities argues, beautifully, for a 'movement into the unknown as the first undoing' of the university as a space of inequity—despite and sometimes because of 'diversity work.' This book exemplifies the 'reparative knowing' that it explores, ultimately arguing not for specific policies and procedures, but rather a radically different, imaginatively alive approach to thinking about antiracism and decoloniality in higher education.

González Stokas shows how the university inherits and recreates epistemic injustice and why a managerial politics of diversity is not an adequate response. Her alternative—a reparative politics for the contemporary critical university—draws on decolonial Indigenous, Black, and Latinx contributions to contemporary critical theory while also finely distinguishing them. Reparative Universities is ambitious in its vision of a university education's capacity to disrupt and recreate social imaginaries. The author's approach is also a practical pursuit of how this translates into the implementable and the transformative.

The Reparative University provides a sorely needed argument for looking beyond DEI programs. It is positioned to address the fundamental issue of wealth inequality and structural racism rooted in our nation's founding. González Stokas provides an insightful response to the current questions in universities, legislatures, and courts, reminding us that we are living with a genocidal and willfully color-blind history. This thoughtful and necessary book joins the rising chorus of those piercing the veil to name American academia's complicity in the ongoing violence that built this nation.