Department to Welcome Dr Isar Godreau as CaribOx Visiting Fellow to Advance Reparative Education Research

The initiative is a visiting fellowship and travel grant programme designed to stimulate purposeful and long-lasting collaboration between researchers from institutions in the Caribbean and the University of Oxford.

The year-long fellowship will provide Isar an opportunity to develop her research on Visualising Afrodignity: An editorial guide for reparative education about afro-descendency in Puerto Rico, collaborating with Professor Arathi Sriprakash, Professor of Sociology and Education at the Department.

Isar’s project will seek to develop an anti-racist guide on how to represent slavery and Afro-descendancy in Puerto Rican school textbooks in ways that repair, not reproduce, colonial frameworks of anti-blackness.

Professor Arathi Sriprakash said: “I am excited to collaborate with Dr Godreau whose work on Afro-dignity in education in Puerto Rico will make important contributions to the Department’s research on reparations and repair in education.”

Arathi works on Reparative Futures of Education (Repair-Ed), a research project which examines past and present structural inequalities in school systems.

Speaking on the collaboration, Isar said: “When I began searching for an Oxford Collaborator, I had no idea I would find such a perfect fit in Dr Arathi Sriprakash. Her scholarship addresses the combined effects of capitalism, racism, and coloniality in education. She analyzes systemic impacts, but she also collaborates with primary school practitioners to explore how reparative justice may look like.

“I am so excited to have the opportunity to collaborate with Arathi and others at Oxford who have worked on reparative justice in educational systems globally.

“The exchange will allow me to think strategically about how to integrate my research into a publication that is pertinent and accessible, while also broadening my horizons to consider similar colonial after-effects beyond Puerto Rico.”