Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

In the UK, a succession of incidents of police violence and sexual abuse, institutional racism, and corruption have brought to the fore calls for alternative responses to harm than those offered by the state. Communities are increasingly suspicious of the criminal justice system and need different approaches that involves local, culturally informed stakeholders and which moves toward equity and liberation. Transformative Justice theory and practice is built on the premise that state responses to violence reproduce violence and traumatize people, especially communities who are otherwise oppressed, marginalised or dispossessed (Mingus, 2015). Transformative Justice seeks to develop community accountability and engagement to challenge unequal and intersecting power relationships and promotes a bottom-up understanding of the lives and needs of populations (Gready and Robins, 2020) without relying on the state. This paper shares emerging findings from ‘Transformative justice, women with convictions and uniting communities’, a two year arts-based research project exploring the potential of creative writing, performance and audio workshops to explore transformative justice practices with communities. Based in Stoke on Trent (UK), the project specifically works with women with experience of the criminal justice system and local residents with an interest in reimagining what justice might look like in their own communities. As one of the lead facilitators, in this paper I reflect on the emerging findings from our first year of workshops with a particular focus on how creative practice enables us to both sit with differences in perspective on justice and interrogate imaginaries of justice in our local communities.