Reparative Histories of Education? From Practice to Principles (DOMUS Seminar)

DOMUS Seminar Series 2024-2025

Dr Mati Keynes, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne

In a recent manifesto written amidst unfolding global pandemic and ecological crises, historian Karin Priem laid down some directives for the future of thehistory of education. She urged historians to expose the role of education in “justifying human exceptionalism” and to radically re-historicise educationalpasts from entangled, post-anthropocentric perspectives (2022, 12). Around the same time, a UNESCO report on the ‘Futures of Education’ declared theneed for ‘a new social contract for education that can repair injustices while transforming the future’ (UNESCO 2021). A sustained attention to redress andrepair punctuates that report, endorsing the idea that repairing the past should be a basis for social transformation, and announcing its arrival in thedomain of global education governance (Miles & Keynes 2024).

This paper takes up these intersecting imperatives for repair and the revaluation ofhistorical research in education. It explores how histories of education might contribute to the project recently theorised as ‘reparative futures ofeducation’ (Sriprakash, 2022), which asks: what sorts of futures of education can emerge from taking seriously the righting of past and present educationalwrongs? This paper elaborates how historical understanding, including modes of historical thinking, practice, and meaning making might contribute to, orcomplicate, reparative futures of education. I discuss examples where historical knowledge and practice have been explicitly connected with thereparation of educational injustices e.g. truth-telling inquiries, repatriation, and institutional history, and explore their reparative dimensions andcomplexities. The paper aims to provoke discussion of how we might develop reparative dimensions in our work.. 

Biography

Dr Mati Keynes is McKenzie Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne. The current focus of Mati’s researchis the history and global governance of transitional justice and education, and the implications of historical justice movements for contemporaryeducation. Mati’s monograph Education and Historical Justice: Redress, Reparations and Reconciliation in the Classroom, written with Dr James Miles, willbe published by Bloomsbury in 2024. Their scholarly articles have appeared in leading journals e.g. Journal of Curriculum Studies, International Journal ofTransitional Justice, Rethinking History, History of Education Review. Mati’s edited book Historical Justice and History Education was published withPalgrave in 2021.

This event is free and open to the public, staff and students.

This is a hybrid event. Registration is essential to receive the link to ZOOM. 

Please note, this seminar is not being recorded.