Representing
A tool of liberation and empowerment, or of oppression and exclusion, depending on its use. In failing to pay attention to what and who is represented and how, we come to understand the world only through the perspective of those privileged enough to have their experiences amplified. The process of representing brings with it the chance to change the position from which the narrative is told, to shape whose experience matters. Sometimes representation impoverishes and must be refused.
Storytelling
Telling stories and mobilizing story-making allows us to communicate ideas and experiences through a process of shared imagination, but also to open possibilities for imagining new narratives. Stories are carried through generations, infused and adapted across times and contexts. The choices the storyteller makes shape which moments and characters are emphasized, and how they are framed. The listener understands and interprets the story through the lens of their own world. We continue to harness the art of storytelling—to create fleeting moments of connection through shared stories—to teach, inspire, and to invite reflection and response.
Multimodal Representation
Identifying, communicating, and responding to different kinds of injustices that occur and reoccur across different societal levels requires engagement across a variety of modes. Widening the boundaries of the types of media that are expected or accepted enables us to reach beyond our own direct experiences and networks, into the worlds of others who might otherwise be left isolated from justice movements.
Collecting Evidence / Archiving
An act of incremental gathering and arranging objects and testimony to illuminate how an event is experienced. Over time, archives accumulate great storytelling potential. Through the process of archiving, artifacts are arranged in specific constellations, where the meaning of each piece is shaped through its connection to others and to the collective whole. Archives are power.
Justice Imagination
“The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary”. (Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind, 2004). Imagination is the human faculty that has the greatest capacity to show that things can be different. It enlarges the field of social possibility and moral understanding by helping us imagine a different reality in place of the one that exists. The link between justice and imagination must be strengthened. Because it is inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned, we need to claim unabashedly our right, duty, and power to imagine a different justice.
Healing
A term often used in reference to an individual’s journey towards the restoration of physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual health. Healing is important, and we are all built to heal. But society’s over-emphasis on personal healing shifts the responsibility for transformation away from institutions, towards individuals, serving to obscure structural injustices. Envisioning healing not only as a personal journey, but as a collective act empowers communities to seek answers to systemic issues that cause experiences of suffering at the individual level. As we create braver relationships and visions of liberation, we must stay committed to healing together.
Building
Building infrastructures, both physical and intangible, is an integral part of any justice movement. What is built rarely remains static, so avoiding over-emphasis on outcome is important, as is an acceptance that outcome may not always be in alignment with what was originally envisioned. Embracing imperfection and compromise helps to avoid the pitfalls of building in ways that are exclusionary. Focusing on the process allows us to maintain awareness of when we are in danger of recreating pervasive structures and where the opportunities lie for cultivating change.
Repairing
We spend most of our social and intimate existence repairing because the world we live in and the objects and relationships we create are things that break, decay, unravel, and fall to pieces. “Whether it is natural, cultural, physical, or immaterial, injury is forever linked to repair, and repair is forever linked to injury.” (Kader Attia, Repair, 2014) To be moved to repair requires us to first identify, and then to accept, what has been broken. This may not always be obvious. It may require seeking help from others to understand the harm that has been done and how it has manifested. The act of repair requires intentional engagement with pain, accountability, acknowledgment, and imagination.
Remembering
A collective responsibility to keep the experiences and teachings of the past alive and present in the social consciousness. The act of remembering, in itself, can become an act of resistance. “The State commemorates the struggles it can assimilate, take advantage of, or use to its favor, while the scars and the cracks we were able to inflict on it, the State passes off as anomalies and covers up with cosmetics.” (Anonymous anarchist, quoted in Gelderloos, 2024).
Instituting
The process of embedding an idea, tactic, practice, or movement within an emergent or pre-existing infrastructure. Institutionalisation can appropriate, dilute, or neuter the power of collective practices, rendering them tepid and non-subversive. Instituting reimagines this through an intentional and consensual act, where practices are allowed to grow and interact in symbiosis with structures, resisting co-optation and maintaining their transformative potency.
Documenting
Documenting produces evidence of being and of historical struggles. A deliberate process of giving a material, situated shape to ideas, words, and testimony to strengthen their resistance against manipulation, denial, or erasure. “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” (Malcolm X, 1965) Documenting is justice-making.
Restitution
An act of return containing symbolic and emotional meaning that extends beyond the physical act. Restitution cannot undo the harm caused by the original loss or restore something or someone to a previously unoccupied or unexploited condition. The power of restitution lies instead in the sincerity of the acknowledgement of the appropriation or exploitation that has taken place, in the meaning that is created during the process of return. “The restitutive effort realizes itself only when it does not refrain from accepting and embracing destitution.” (Idelber Avelar, The Untimely Present, 1999)
Rituals
Rituals aid in finding and sculpting meaning through the deliberate, repeated embodiment of a practice, often in a distinct space. Rituals endow practice and action with symbolic meaning that can be linked to tradition, ancestors, narratives, or even to prefigurative futures and lineage building. They hold more weight than what is said and done outside the ritual. Rituals of justice are like bridges; they can carry people across uncertain and difficult waters. Rituals can also create liminal, ambiguous space, which can be subversive of the normal social order, creating radical equality.
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- References
Attia, K. Repair. Black Jack Editions, 2014.
Avelar, I. The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning. Duke University Press, 1999.
Gelderloos, P. They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us: Forcing Nonviolence on Forgetful Movements. Pluto Press, 2024.
Le Guin, U. The Wave in the Mind. Shambhala, 2004.
Liu, C. Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering. Verso, 2026.
Pointer, L. The Restorative Justice Ritual. Routledge, 2021.
Walker, M.U. Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Schechner, R. The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. Routledge, 1993.
Zolkos, M. Restitution and the Politics of Repair: Tropes, Imaginaries, Theory. Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
Cover Image:
TAWNA Collective, Allpamanda (video still), 2022. ©️and courtesy of the artists
