

Ariana González Stokas
A timely investigation of why diversity alone is insufficient in higher education and how universities can use reparative actions to become anti-racist institutions.
As institutions increasingly reckon with histories entangled with slavery and Indigenous dispossession, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts occupy a central role in the strategy and resources of higher education. Yet reparation is rarely offered as a viable strategy for institutional transformation. In Reparative Universities, Ariana González Stokas undertakes a critical and decolonial analysis of DEI work, linking...
A timely investigation of why diversity alone is insufficient in higher education and how universities can use reparative actions to become anti-racist institutions.
As institutions increasingly reckon with histories entangled with slavery and Indigenous dispossession, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts occupy a central role in the strategy and resources of higher education. Yet reparation is rarely offered as a viable strategy for institutional transformation. In Reparative Universities, Ariana González Stokas undertakes a critical and decolonial analysis of DEI work, linking contemporary practices of diversity to longer colonial histories. González Stokas argues that diversity is an insufficient concept for efforts concerned with anti-oppression, anti-racism, equity, and decolonization. Given its historical ties to colonialism, can higher education foster reconciliation and healing?
Reparation is offered as a pathway toward untangling higher education from its colonial roots. González Stokas develops the term "epistemic reparation" to describe a mode of social-historical accountability that can already be seen at work in historical examples, as well as current events in the United States, South Africa, and Canada. Recent legal decisions by Georgetown University and the Princeton Theological seminary to enact economic recompense for buying and selling human beings are evidence of attempts to redress higher education's violent histories and the colonial structures they reproduce every day on college campuses.
Engaging with a broad range of theories from decolonial philosophy to organizational psychology, González Stokas offers a pathway—guided by reparative activities—for institutional workers frustrated by what often feels, as Sara Ahmed describes, like "banging one's head against a brick wall." Reparative Universities offers insight into why DEI efforts have been disconnected from past injustices and why unsettling diversity and engaging meaningful repair are critical for the future of higher education.
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.
Diversity work as it is practiced today in higher education won't abolish systemic racial and socioeconomic inequalities, Ariana González Stokas convincingly argues. We need to stop integrating students into a burning house. Reparative Universities will inspire an abolitionist reparative undoing of our current higher education systems, and poetic-political making of the liberatory institutions to come.
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.
Prelude
Introduction
Part I: A Cabinet of Diversity
1. Object 1: Diversity Doesn't Work?
2. Object 2: Dominance
3. Object 3: From Wunderkammner to the Majors
4. Object 4: Patrol/Willy
5. Object 5
Prelude
Introduction
Part I: A Cabinet of Diversity
1. Object 1: Diversity Doesn't Work?
2. Object 2: Dominance
3. Object 3: From Wunderkammner to the Majors
4. Object 4: Patrol/Willy
5. Object 5: Accumulation/Difference that Makes No Difference
6. Object 6: Colorblindness/Federalist Paper no.6
7. Object 7: Partition/No. 76-811: A Grievance Not of Their Making
8. Object 8: The Morrill Acts: "The Land Grab University"
9. Afterthoughts
Part II: The Constellation of Reparation
10. Star 1: Attempted Remedies
11. Star 2: Outlines of Epistemic Reparation
12. Star 3: How is a University like a Light Switch?
13. Afterthoughts
Part III: Reparative Endeavors
14. Thread 1: Why Poetics?
15. Thread 2: Breath-Taking Landscapes: Place based interventions
16. Thread 3: Counter-space as the dramatization of a poetics of refusal
17. Thread 4: Gates/Gatekeeping
18. Thread 5: Unraveling Patrol
19. Thread 6: From Rank to Rhizome
20. Afterthoughts
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Notes
Index
with Hopkins Press Books