Miami Law's Race & Social Justice Law Review's 2022 symposium "Re-Imagining the Movement to End Gender Violence" seeks to re-imagine responses to gender violence, including how the state intervenes and alternatives to state intervention, legally and community-based.
The virtual conference will include a keynote address by attorney and restorative justice practitioner sujatha baliga, after an introduction by Miami Law's Professor Donna Coker, a Dean's Distinguished Scholar and social justice/public interest concentration affiliated faculty.
baliga, who won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019, is on sabbatical as a senior fellow at Impact Justice's Restorative Justice Project. Impact Justice is the only national technical assistance and training project that partners with communities across the nation to address harm using pre-charge restorative justice diversion programs. Impact Justice was founded in 2015 on an idea: to create an organization that would imagine, innovate, and accept absolutely nothing about the status quo of the current justice system.
The conference's panel discussions have a dual focus on problems unique to the LGBTQ and Black communities and any overlap with the potential for a coordinated effort.
The first panel, 'Building Resiliency & Community for Youth," will explore how restorative practices can build community and resiliency and respond to systemic racialized gender oppression for youth of color and prevent causing sexual harms. Speakers are Thalia González, professor of politics at OXY Occidental College; C. Quince Hopkins, director of the Erin Levitas Initiative for Sexual Violence Prevention-University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law; and Wakumi Douglas, founder of S.O.U.L Sisters Leadership Collective.
Panel two, "Restorative Justice Responses to Harm," will share how restorative justice responds to interpersonal and institutional gender violence harms. Speakers Professor Jennifer Llewellyn, chair in Restorative Justice and director of the Restorative Research, Innovation and Education Lab; Aparna Polavarapu, associate professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and executive director and founder of the South Carolina Restorative Justice Initiative; and Aparna Polavarapu, associate professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and executive director and founder of the South Carolina Restorative Justice Initiative; and Charisa Kiyô Smith, associate professor at CUNY School of Law, co-director of the Family Law Practice Clinic, will include discussing healing mechanisms to cope after gender-based violence has occurred.
Founded in 2007, the University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review, formerly known as the Black Law Review, is a student journal committed to the promotion and publication of scholarly articles that address the legal, social, economic, and psychological issues that affect communities of color, with a particular emphasis on the global Black community.
For more information, contact Farah Barquero, director of Law Reviews & Moot Court Programs, at fbarquero@law.miami.edu.
